I have their Stealth programmer's QWERTY keyboard. It's nice. I got it when my mousing hand was starting get some lovely RSI symptoms.
The gestures make web browsing very pleasant. The gestures they picked for common operations are quite intuitive, and you end up not even having to think about how you're gesturing. It's quite similar to the lack of thought required to hit your favorite hotkey sequence, but it feels a little more natural.
It's also quite nice not having to move my hands at all to switch from typing to mousing. Even without gestures, this features is very helpful, especially if you type with your keyboard on your lap.
But now to the bad part (and the reason why the gestures are essential): it's all a flat surface. There's almost no tactile feedback. There are little bumps on the home row so you can find your place, but that's it. It's extraordinarily easy to get disoriented if you don't watch your hands.
As far as the folks at FingerWorks are aware, people have only gotten up to 60-70 wpm on their keyboards. (Last I checked I had gotten up to 55.) I cruise at 120 on a mechanical keyboard, so for intense typing, I still fall back to my standard keyboard. But for most of the non-coding time in front of the computer, the Stealth is great.
To give you an idea of some of the gestures (and how on earth this thing works):
- A single finger tap is a keypress - Two adjacent fingers down + dragging moves the mouse - Two adjacent fingers tapping is a mouse click - All five fingers down simultaneously is rest position -- this is how you can reorient your hands on home row without typing gobbledygook
Those are the biggies. You can read the full list of their gestures on their web site. I'd link to it, but it appears to be/.ed.
I do have to say that the folks at FingerWorks are incredibly responsive. I complained that their sensitivity to double-keys was too low (it regularly ignored my second "f" on something like "off"), they sent me a firmware update within a day which fixed it.
So they're definitely tweaking things and very helpful.
Oh, and did I mention that it supports Linux, Mac OS, and Windows? And it has gestures for emacs actions and other common Linux activities.
For the communist party's 50th anniversary in 1999, China did the same thing.
Since the Party had decreed that there would be perfect weather for such a momentous occasion, they shut down factories around Beijing for the entire week beforehand. Then a day or two before, they seeded the clouds, so that it would rain the day before the celebration, but be Perfect Weather in Tiananmen Square for the Day.
And indeed, the weather was perfect. The smog had disappeared, and the sky was clear and blue...
Our bodies definitely weren't designed to sit for 8 hours. But perhaps more importantly, they weren't designed to sit still for 8 hours (that's just awful for circulation). That's the design philosophy behind Humanscale's Freedom Chair. It encourages you to move around and change your position. I've had this chair for a year now, and I'm very sad when I have to sit in anything else.
I tried the Aeron, but didn't really like it. Yes, the mesh was nice in terms of support and ventilation, but it took endless tweaking to adjust, and I never could quite get it to fit me properly. (On second thought, the endless tweaking just might endear it to most/. readers...)
I also tried out the Leap (by Steelcase). The flexible back was interesting, but still too hard to adjust.
In contrast, the Freedom is incredibly simple. There are three settings to make it fit your size: seat height, seat depth, and back height. These controls are intuitively placed and easy to reach without looking while seated.
The only other two adjustable bits (back tilt and armrest height) don't have 'controls' per se. They just move with you. Push back a little bit, and the seat back tilts back until you stop pushing. When you stop pushing, it supports you. It's really uncanny. (They did some very clever counterweight thing so that this provides the proper support and control regardless of your weight.) The left and right armrests always adjust to the same height, no thought or effort required. You just pull either armrest (or both) up or down, they both move, and then they stay in position. (They also drop lower than your lap, if you want to get rid of them effectively.)
The ease of adjustability is what makes this chair encourage you to move. You don't have to think at all to change your sitting position. You just move.
I have no affiliation with Humanscale other than being very happy with my chair.
The physical problems with DVDs are scratches. The more capacity there is on the disc the more problems you get.
In the press release, they mention a new "feature" designed to compensate:
Easy to use disc cartridge: An easy to use optical disc cartridge protects the optical disc's recording and playback phase from dust and fingerprints.
This will certainly help the rental stores, but will it consume considerably more space on our shelves?
I really don't have any problem with fingerprints or scratches (we've had CDs for how long? You'd think people would learn to pick them up by the edges...), but the dust protection probably is vital with this data density.
I bet the successor format will have permanently sealed dust-free cartridges using magnetic media on multiple platters. Oh, wait...
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I have their Stealth programmer's QWERTY keyboard. It's nice. I got it when my mousing hand was starting get some lovely RSI symptoms.
/.ed.
The gestures make web browsing very pleasant. The gestures they picked for common operations are quite intuitive, and you end up not even having to think about how you're gesturing. It's quite similar to the lack of thought required to hit your favorite hotkey sequence, but it feels a little more natural.
It's also quite nice not having to move my hands at all to switch from typing to mousing. Even without gestures, this features is very helpful, especially if you type with your keyboard on your lap.
But now to the bad part (and the reason why the gestures are essential): it's all a flat surface. There's almost no tactile feedback. There are little bumps on the home row so you can find your place, but that's it. It's extraordinarily easy to get disoriented if you don't watch your hands.
As far as the folks at FingerWorks are aware, people have only gotten up to 60-70 wpm on their keyboards. (Last I checked I had gotten up to 55.) I cruise at 120 on a mechanical keyboard, so for intense typing, I still fall back to my standard keyboard. But for most of the non-coding time in front of the computer, the Stealth is great.
To give you an idea of some of the gestures (and how on earth this thing works):
- A single finger tap is a keypress
- Two adjacent fingers down + dragging moves the mouse
- Two adjacent fingers tapping is a mouse click
- All five fingers down simultaneously is rest position -- this is how you can reorient your hands on home row without typing gobbledygook
Those are the biggies. You can read the full list of their gestures on their web site. I'd link to it, but it appears to be
I do have to say that the folks at FingerWorks are incredibly responsive. I complained that their sensitivity to double-keys was too low (it regularly ignored my second "f" on something like "off"), they sent me a firmware update within a day which fixed it.
So they're definitely tweaking things and very helpful.
Oh, and did I mention that it supports Linux, Mac OS, and Windows? And it has gestures for emacs actions and other common Linux activities.
For the communist party's 50th anniversary in 1999, China did the same thing.
Since the Party had decreed that there would be perfect weather for such a momentous occasion, they shut down factories around Beijing for the entire week beforehand. Then a day or two before, they seeded the clouds, so that it would rain the day before the celebration, but be Perfect Weather in Tiananmen Square for the Day.
And indeed, the weather was perfect. The smog had disappeared, and the sky was clear and blue...
Our bodies definitely weren't designed to sit for 8 hours. But perhaps more importantly, they weren't designed to sit still for 8 hours (that's just awful for circulation). That's the design philosophy behind Humanscale's Freedom Chair. It encourages you to move around and change your position. I've had this chair for a year now, and I'm very sad when I have to sit in anything else.
/. readers...)
I tried the Aeron, but didn't really like it. Yes, the mesh was nice in terms of support and ventilation, but it took endless tweaking to adjust, and I never could quite get it to fit me properly. (On second thought, the endless tweaking just might endear it to most
I also tried out the Leap (by Steelcase). The flexible back was interesting, but still too hard to adjust.
In contrast, the Freedom is incredibly simple. There are three settings to make it fit your size: seat height, seat depth, and back height. These controls are intuitively placed and easy to reach without looking while seated.
The only other two adjustable bits (back tilt and armrest height) don't have 'controls' per se. They just move with you. Push back a little bit, and the seat back tilts back until you stop pushing. When you stop pushing, it supports you. It's really uncanny. (They did some very clever counterweight thing so that this provides the proper support and control regardless of your weight.) The left and right armrests always adjust to the same height, no thought or effort required. You just pull either armrest (or both) up or down, they both move, and then they stay in position. (They also drop lower than your lap, if you want to get rid of them effectively.)
The ease of adjustability is what makes this chair encourage you to move. You don't have to think at all to change your sitting position. You just move.
I have no affiliation with Humanscale other than being very happy with my chair.
The physical problems with DVDs are scratches. The more capacity there is on the disc the more problems you get.
In the press release, they mention a new "feature" designed to compensate:
Easy to use disc cartridge:
An easy to use optical disc cartridge protects the optical disc's recording and playback phase from dust and fingerprints.
This will certainly help the rental stores, but will it consume considerably more space on our shelves?
I really don't have any problem with fingerprints or scratches (we've had CDs for how long? You'd think people would learn to pick them up by the edges...), but the dust protection probably is vital with this data density.
I bet the successor format will have permanently sealed dust-free cartridges using magnetic media on multiple platters. Oh, wait...