Your post about the Keyboard Model 01 reminded me of a keyboard I saw promoted at the start of the year: I am seriously interested in the TextBlade. Sadly it looks like they ran into some serious glitches that have delayed delivery of the final product, but I still like the look of it. One day…
Over the weekend my wife and I were down in Portland, and we picked up a Corsair Gaming K70 keyboard (black with red backlighting). These are based on the Cherry MX Blue switches. So far, it has a good feel with great tactile response and the sound is still gratifyingly clacky, but less than the Unicomp. However, the sale person at Fry’s told me that the Cherry MX switches have aftermarket O-rings available (each color is a different thickness) that you can use to pop off the keycaps, add onto the stems, and use to prevent the key from bottoming out on each press. This is supposed to help remove the majority of the noise without removing the tactile response of the switch mechanism.
I ordered a package of the Cherry MX Blue O-rings from Amazon (125 for $15, enough to do the entire keyboard plus have a few spares, .4mm thickness – apparently, the thickest available so if these are too big I can step down to thinner rings) and should have them Wednesday. I’ll let you all know how it works out for me.
Whenever I write at a keyboard for a length of time, I will get a Gordian knot in my shoulders. My wife has a heck of a time working the knot out and I can’t sleep because of the pain.
She brought home a Kinesis keyboard from work to try. Split in the middle it allows the user to not roll their shoulders in. I got the Mac Bluetooth version. Best money spent in a long time. Amazon.
Absolute waste of money!!
All you need is two drops of Jameson, The Holy Amber Distillation, diluted with one drop of Guinness The Ebony Ambrosia, gently spread over the affected area and then licked off by your wife.
Hope this helps
Vic
The future of keyboards most likely will be touchscreens. The new MacBooks are supposed to have Oled touch bars for function keys . My suspicion is that in a couple of years, everyone is going to be typing on glass like on Star Trek TNG…
So hold on to your mechanical keyboards folks cause in a few years you might be able to auction them off for a boatload…
Yeah, I saw that rumour too. Hope it’s a short lived addition to the Mac line-up! At work I use a Lenovo Carbon X1 which has a similar touch strip for the function keys. It’s awful. So awful, in fact, that they dropped it from the next release of the model.
But then, with the general direction Apple is taking with it’s keyboards and OS, I suspect the (very lovely) Mac I use at home now will be the last one I own. Good job they last for a squillion years!
If the keys are app sensitive, that is, they change depending on the app, then I can’t see it being too bad a thing. We’ll have to wait and see.
But certainly, with the new magic keyboard (what a goofy name eh? I mean come on) the keys are getting thinner and thinner, with each iteration requiring less force to type each letter. The final result? A keyboard with no keys…of course, my hope when that happens is that they make it like the MacBook trackpad with haptic feedback, cause typing on glass might be painful.
I wouldn’t mind at all if the function keys became an OLED touchbar; being able to re-label what each function key did in the context of the app that has focus would be really nice, actually. I have to look down at the keyboard to find the right one to tap anyway.
But the idea that we’ll all be typing on glass in the near future is ludicrous. You have to have some tactile feedback to tell that your fingers are still on the home row, and that you tapped the right key. Only a physical keyboard can provide that. The proliferation of tablet keyboard cases is evidence enough, for me, that we’re not headed into a Star Trek TNG interface nightmare.
Haptic feedback dude. That’s the future. Just like on the new MacBook trackpad. Just imagine that for every key. You press it and gives a tap back. If they do switch to Star Trek land, it’ll make keyboards for the first time programmable and catered towards whatever you want.
A few of my classmates have given up on external keyboards and just write on their iPads using the screen keyboard…so I predict the transition will eventually happen.
Sure, dude. Whatever you say. 
Enjoy your fully mobile shoulders, all the feeling you still have in your hands, and being able to turn your head without shooting pains while you can. I give you 10 years at a desk job, max, before you’re in physical therapy for one of the many ergonomic crimes you’re committing against yourself.
Don’t mistake me. When I predict future technologies, that doesn’t particularly mean I actually like it. In fact, for the most part, it’s given me pause. I just report it as I see it. And I’m not particularly happy about this report, as it bodes, as you say, to hand injuries.
I actually struggle with severe hand tremors, so typing on a keyboard is difficult altogether. Shaky hands make both iPads and mechanical keyboards difficult to type for their own reasons. My hope is that, as Apple grows, its concern for people with physical disabilities grows too. But that’s another matter altogether.
My predictions I think still stands. We’re going towards Star Trek. Photon-torpedoes here we come. Let’s hope haptic feedback is there to save us. Or something better.
I’ve seen this prediction coming for decades. Haptic interfaces have resulted in feedback which only tells you that some input has been acknowledged. It can’t (I don’t think ever) tell you that the input was what you intended. “You clicked” is a far cry from “your fingers are resting on the ASDF and JKL; keys on this smooth surface”. It also can’t communicate that you barely hit the very edge of the Y key, almost typing a U or a 7 instead.
There may very well come a time when there exist keyboards that are just a flat LCD with some vibrations as feedback telling you that you’ve tapped on a key somewhere on the surface, but it’s not practical for the vast majority of touch-typists.
I will eat my hat if, in five years, Apple has replaced all the physical keyboards with smooth glass surfaces on their Macintosh computers.
Well, sir, I throw my gauntlet down; if Apple hasn’t completely switched over to touchscreen typing, I’ll eat my hat too (I’ll make sure to add salt).
the future…
http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/tactus/
Here’s one issue I have with a completely touchscreen keyboard: How would it distinguish between a touch and a press? I rest all of my fingers on the keys while I’m not typing. And when I’m typing, the fingers not actively typing a letter are moving to or resting on the next letter. How does a touch keyboard know that the fingers I’m waiting to activate aren’t actually activating until I activate them?
And while I’m typing, I press one key but sometimes I touch another key with the finger that is doing the pressing. It’s not enough pressure to actually press that second key, but there’s a definite tactile response. Again, how does Apple know that I’m not pressing both keys? Square footage (or inchage maybe?) of where my fingers are touching? Will autocorrect be employed in the regular keyboard?
Physical keyboards are necessary for delineating precisely where the fingers are located, so that the precise keys can be pressed. If I touch a wrong key while typing on a physical keyboard, that letter isn’t input into the text. On a touch keyboard, though, it’s a different story. Haptic feedback during button presses doesn’t prevent this from happening.
I’m sure some engineer somewhere is figuring out the various details of these sorts of things.
But the way I understand it, with every headway in technology, there arises a natural accompanying set of problems. No technological advancement is ever perfect nor is ever without consequence. My suspicion and prediction are that the benefits will eventually outweigh the drawbacks, as technology advances and improves, with touchscreen keyboards.
Again, this is just a prediction. I’d honestly be glad if it never really happened. But I’d be blind, to not notice the not-so-subtle trend apple is currently setting with its keyboard design philosophies.
When you think about the future prospects, it will be well to remember that almost no one touch types.*
gr
- I wanted to write ‘almost no one touch types anymore’, but then it seems to me that touch typing was always to specialized purview of a group of folks specially trained for it.
I’d like to know what makes you say this, actually. Unless they’ve been abolished, we’ve had typing classes for decades. I can’t imagine that people take these classes, learn to touch type, and subsequently throw away that knowledge for a less-efficient means of typing.
I don’t know where you are located, but learning to touch type is nowhere near a norm in the U.S. Touch typing is not part of people’s high school training, etc.
“we’ve had typing classes for decades”
I could easily agree with the letter of this assertion, but not with what I take to be its spirit.
So, would you say most computer users touch type? Would you say that most writers+ would-be writers touch type? Is it even fifty-fifty? Would you say that most people who write/edit text for a living (more or less) touch type. I strongly suspect that a ‘Yes’ answer to any of these would not get the facts right. Do you in fact disagree?
…he said without any source to cite.