Hacker News Reader

Comment by mickdarling | Hacker News Reader

I have used a LOT of custom keyboards, looking at an Ergodex DX1 on my shelf now. I wish this is something I could be confident in.

but, them not treating the screen as a display I think significantly limits the utility of this. You have to go through their software to customize the screen, layout, and customizations. Many of us know how hit-and-miss esoteric keyboard software tends to be.

If they stuck to making it an external display managed by the OS, polling the keyboard layout from the OS, and maybe just have their app apply custom functions like emojis and tool graphics I would have some confidence.

They are trying to tie up too much to their software which they will eventually stop supporting, like my DX1 paperweight.

View on HN

I see your point, but I actually had the opposite concern when I was first looking at the product page.

I'd actually rather not have to worry about how my OS treats the extra "display" - plus I don't want running my keyboard to eat into my computer's resources in any significant way.

For me, this approach is better. Although I do have some concerns about the software eventually going EOL unless they open source it.

> They are trying to tie up too much to their software which they will eventually stop supporting, like my DX1 paperweight.

This is precisely why I probably won't buy one despite it looking honestly very cool.

Hardware manufacturers these days seem to be allergic to telling their customers how to actually talk to their gadgets, in favor of proprietary bundles of software that inevitably go unsupported within a few years.

Here I really don't understand why nobody open-sources their drivers when they end-of-life a product. I know some chips are covered by patent agreements blah blah, but that doesn't cover all cases. And part of a code base is better than none, even if the bits covered by the agreement need to be censored.

I also think software companies should/should have to open-source products when they discontinue them like Dropbox did with Zulip (the only example I can think of offhand), but I understand why the profit motive discourages it. But surely for hardware even that tenuous rationalization goes out the window.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com