KeyMouse on Kickstarter

[dongadoy]

Another "alternative" has appeared. KeyMouse looks interesting. The major reason I started using Touchstream is because constantly reaching for the mouse or trackball caused arm pain. KeyMouse solves the same problem.

I love how the keys are aligned vertically, the keyboard is contoured for easier reach, and the keyboard is split for each hand's comfort.

I like how there are more keys accessible by the thumb; but those thumb keys look way too small.

I worry that the KeyMouse keys will be cheap with poor response. And the other Kickstarter project, Haptix or Touch+, mentioned in Fingerfans failed. And, of course, KeyMouse does not have the wonderful gestures that we Touchstream users love so much.

[ivanw]

That one looks good and even cooler than others, thanks to the participation of a design team, no doubt, like what Kickers Studio contribution to the making of Twiddler 3. I really like it when what has to be done by professionals is not improvised in this kind of project like it seems it has been on this one.

But it takes more than design to build something real great. If Logi's design is often good, their software never. Fingerworks was just an accident in history, and I don't expect anything like it in my current lifetime.

This KeyMouse looks like being the result of some hard and thoughtful work. The only thing I regret at first look is that keys are still too tidily arranged to my taste. I would have preferred no aligned keys at all. I hate straight lines as you can't get any sense of position without referring to a starting point, counting your way up to the desired location. If each key would have a uniquely identifiable situation that a finger could recognize by context, that would be what I am looking for since i first hit a key.

Still, I think I'm going to spend some more money soon.

Thanks for the heads up.

[ivanw]

It did not take long, I'm in!

[The00Dustin]

Apparently I've been checking the forum every day, but not logged in, so not seeing new posts. Oops. Anyway, this looks great, but it doesn't look like it's going to meet the funding deadline, which is too bad. They seem to have come pretty far, though, so maybe they can do it without kickstarter?

[ivanw]

They made it ...ending in 6 hours.

[The00Dustin]

I noticed they had JUST made it on the 28th. That's a lot of money in 24 hours, and then it kept going. Wow. Anyway, I joined their uservoice site (they linked to it from their "vote on your favorite features" post in Ivan's link above) and made a suggestion akin to Xwinder. Any other users here might like and want to vote on that, so I thought I'd mention that it has been made.

[ivanw]

I'm sure that a one to one mapping for each key should be stored into the device to provide a custom mapping. This is what I get from a DX1 Ergodex when I exit the driver (a Win7 customized version). When the driver is not there, I don't expect anything more from the hardware and rely on AutoHotkey to handle the fancy part that include macros, hotstrings and even some kind of mouse-buttons and mouse-pointer synthesized events.

As you can't expect any manufacturer's handler to take care of that or surely not multi-device input events, I wonder where we should set the limits for some on-board features. As my constraints do not include frequent pairing capabilities, I can't say it would make much difference to me as long as AutoHotkey would always be there to monitor focused window in order to decide what to send on a per-application basis. That is clearly beyond the limits of what to expect from any device handler.

I wonder what should be stored on-board in complement to scancode mapping and some device-specific comfort functions like "mouse-freeze", "dpi-switching", "mode-toggle/hold", ... The possibility to choose between a few custom on-board profiles is certainly expected, but it would be interesting to collect a few more suggestions...