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This Keyboard Will Help You Utilize EVERY SINGLE shortcut

by 16 Comments

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Here is a quick quiz for you? how do you trigger the Photoshop Liquify filter? (CTRL+SHIFT+X) and Premiere’s go to previous marker? (CTRL+SHIFT+M), and the rest of the million shortcuts for the  apps you use? You could, of course apply some keyboard stickers for a specific app, but if you wanted all the shortcodes for all the apps, you need something like a keyboard that changes its keys. something like the Sonder keyboard.

Sonder keyboard is a 78 keys keyboard, each attached with a small e-ink screen. Those little screens change the photo on the key depending on which program you run. While Sonder has attracted some major interest from gamers (think a keyboard that has weapons on it), it features a great opportunity for creatives.

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To make things even nicer, the keyboard connects via bluetooth, has a slick design and is backlit when it’s dark.

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Sonder tells cultofmac that they aim to launch a kickstarer, but until then you can pre-order it at $200 (instead of $300 list price). Sadly no word on delivery time yet.

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[Sonder keyboard via cult of mac, h/t Andy Carter]

P.S. can’t wait, make your own with some stickers and tape.

P.P.S. let us leave you with this song for getting all your shortcuts in order:

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  • Looks, like more of a market research, that actual product. Virtually no information and only a few hastily made cg renders, that unlikely represent actual product.

    • Francis Serra-Martins

      G’day, I’m one of the engineers. We made the site when we submitted our grant application, we had never planned for media to publish us until we have finished pilot production. It’s a good problem to have however as it will allow us to refine the design before shipping. Cheers

      • Thanks for clarifying. That explains a lot.
        I like, the use of e-ink, because it it is great in daylight.

        • Francis Serra-Martins

          It’s an incredible display for this application, thin I’m profile, low in power consumption, sharp image and unit cost is affordable. Using a timing controller the slow refresh rate is eliminated too. If you’d like subscribe at our website, we will be making a big announcement shortly.

    • mike

      If they could really make this for under $200 I would be all over it. But my guess it will be more like the $2000 Optimus Maximus.

      I don’t believe for a second they will be able to deliver at the price point they hope for.

      • Francis Serra-Martins

        G’day, I’m one of the engineers, $199 is the early bird discount, however it still includes margins. The reason why the optimus was $2000 was it used cherry switches (lisc costs from lf electronics), oled displays (also extremely expensive). The stored flash and other internals were not optimised for a DfM. Thirdly the volume didn’t render reasonable economies of scale, this means that the COG alone would have exceeded a thousand dollar. Our design approach is far more refined for mass production (less bill of materials) and using EPD and our mechanism, unit cost is far more reasonable. Cheers, if you back any questions shoot me a message.

  • Carsten Schlipf

    How is this different from the Optimus Maximus keyboard? http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/maximus/

    • Francis Serra-Martins

      G’day, I’m one of the engineers engineers. It’s like 10% the cost of an optimus. Also, as an owner of two Art Lebedevs, we have focused on building an intuitive UI and a layout library for users to generate and share. Thanks mate!

      • Carsten Schlipf

        Yes, price is a great differentiator. Thank you for the reply.

        Are you planing a PC version, also? One with Windows and context menu keys (these are not customizable) as well as a Backspace key?

        • Francis Serra-Martins

          Hi Carsten,

          We are indeed establishing pc support, in regards to why we have static keys is because during customer development we found these keys to seldom change in function. Also our manufacturer already had a perfect sized display, we may however pay the further NRE, and allow for these keys to be dynamic also. We are investigating this currently. Keep you posted Carsten

          • Carsten Schlipf

            I am perfectly OK with these keys being static (well TAB and ~ might have different functions in different programs). Just mentioned that because this means that Apple Command can not be converted to Windows key. And of course I do not want to miss Backspace.

            Thank you very much for your reply.

          • Francis Serra-Martins

            No worries Carsten, I’d love to hear how you as a user would use the product, what programs you want included in the library for release, and secondly (I assume you’re a German speaker), what specific local settings you’d prefer to have. p.s I saw your portfolio online at 1x.com, incredible!

      • Eric Jaakkola

        I would really love a android tablet keyboard that is fully programable but controls a computer. (via ip) There are some android keyboards for PCS in the play store, but they don’t have the dynamic philosophy this and maximus have.

  • Michal Rosa

    I seriously doubt it will lead to any productivity improvement. If you have to know a given shortcut, you know it by heart. If there is one you don’t often need, looking for an unknown symbol on the keyboard would take more time than pulling it down from a menu. Nice keyboard I’m sure, but not a cure all solution for everything.

    • Mystic Reality

      I think the speed enhancement comes with being able to program the keyboard yourself. Being able to set your most used shortcuts where they are most comfortable for you, or making them potentially one-clickable could potentially save tons of time for people that do larger volumes of edits.

      Edit: Also being able to switch to different language keyboards is a great feature for those that know or are learning languages with non-latin characters, in my case Japanese.

  • mike

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