ThinkGeek now selling Optimus Maximus Keyboard (113 LCD screen keys) | Hacker News Reader

ThinkGeek now selling Optimus Maximus Keyboard (113 LCD screen keys)

thinkgeek.com

16 pointsJayNeely36 comments

Engadget review: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/22/optimus-maximus-at-long-l...

Take away: "Typing on it, well, sucks."

Interesting. Any word on when they'll add hydraulics?

While I think the Optimus Maximus is a fantastic looking product, I've got to ask who has the money for this? Does anybody here own it yet or plan on purchasing it?

You know you can purchase the whole keyboard at once or purchase it by the key...as demonstrated by Art Lebedev in the video: http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/08/video-optimus-maximus-cau...

I've got to assume that something like this is at the level of a 1980's handheld cell phone with regards to price at the moment (and maybe tech?).

And just like the 80's cell phone, the only people I've heard online (as a group) considering these keyboards have been doctors (specifically radiologists and radiation oncologists). Basically they are people with a) lots of cash and b) a great need for complicated software and c) little time and patience to learn useful things like keyboard shortcuts, they way programmers,etc would.

Now I just wonder if we'll see drug dealers picking these up...

You know I used to want this keyboard a lot, but now I would happily settle for one of those super thin aluminum mac ones. This isn't quite in vogue anymore.

I have a thin mac keyboard. If you want to stare at your keyboard all day, it's mind-blowing awesome. For typing and coding, not so much.

That's interesting. I tested about 30 keyboards before I settled on it. The decision was almost entirely feel and I love it. I type/code ~6 hours a day on it.

It's only 50 bucks. GO BIG HOMIE.

Most geeks don't look at their keyboards.

http://www.daskeyboard.com/

I love mine. I just wish I could have a cut of the purchases from my referrals.

Badass.

Not sure I want to spend $80 though. I wonder if I can bleach the markings from an old keyboard or something.

Just get an old Model M from ebay, and remove the keycaps with characters. You do have to get an oldish one, though, the newer Model Ms don't have two keycaps.

Accept no substitutes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_Keyboard

Thanks for the link! I'd always just called them "clicky keyboards" and wondered why you could never find them anymore...

Just don't spill water on them. I destroyed my last one with a wayward cup of water and have been using a crap logitech one since.

i couldn't live without http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productde...

split is like 500x more comfortable than joined

And ZERO geeks look at their keyboards while playing games (gamers being the probable target audience for this).

The shape and the size of the keys is more important that what is displayed on them.

Not if you're a design student. Nobody uses things developed in design school, they're only for being looked at. (According to my friend in design school, they fail if they don't develop something that "looks different". Apparently none of them have ever read Norman.)

See -- there are good reasons to take all that money from venture capitalists! ;-)

The current price is ridiculous. Sell it for $100 and people will actually buy it.

That's right, the current price is ridiculous. But I think given the tremendous advantages to such a technology (my keyboards hardly ever displayed the "right" labels out of the box), we can expect it to become a commodity in the near future (10-15 years?).

Now, I think there's a little problem with this keyboard... looking up at your keys all the time is not the most productive way to use a keyboard. They market it to geeks, yet I think consumers would find it useful the most.

I agree that it's not very useful for normal typing, but I'd love to have had it when I played World of Warcraft!

I prefer to think in 10-15 years we won't use keyboards (but I guess I wouldn't bet on it - they've been surprisingly hard to replace).

What would we be using instead?

hand tracking, eye tracking and speech recognition are coming on strong with all the power todays computers have.

I don't think the keyboard will ever go away, but a lot of things will be way faster just with hand signals, and subvocalization dictation.

I think I disagree. I can't imagine writing code or a book with voice recognition, even assuming 100% accuracy. The initial dictation isn't the hard part, it's editing that's hard. What commands will we use? "Change that last foo to bar?" That still seems pretty tedious.

I could do without the mouse, though. I would rather press a link with my finger than move my hand all the way over to the mouse, then point, then click.

clearly we need some sort of voice versions of vim and emacs

Even then, it's still faster to press the keys for moving around. But maybe your editor could be in command mode by default, and you could import words by speaking. That might be cool.

That's a pretty limited view of the capacity of computers. I'd bet a good 60% of your editing commands are cursor motion. So one pretty obvious improvement is to just look at foo, then do your edit. heck, it's still called cut and paste, how about pushing words around on the screen? not with the mouse, but with your hand on the screen.

The perfect ui is literally, read my mind and do what I want. I doubt we'll see fmri-at-a-distance in my lifetime, but I can indicate my wishes many many ways.

Also, there's some evidence that moving your hands to the mouse is faster, you just notice it, because it's effortless, whereas working out the key combination to move the cursor chews up clock cycles. (http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html) And even if you are faster with the keyboard, it probably took you years to get as fast as you are. If programmers can provide a ui to get users to some sizeable fraction of your editing speed in days instead of years... it's worth it. The only real risk is if the fastest of the new ui category can't edit as quickly as the fastest of the traditional. Really, there's no way your hands can compete with looking at what you want.

Rather than having a hundred little tiny LCDs, they should have figured out a way to have one large display and some sort of ingenious key assembly/lens system. Seems it would be more economical.

I'm hard enough on my keyboards that I would be really scared of using this.

Let me know how it works. I can't afford that.

you could use a 7inch touch screen LCD for way less, and have even greater control

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