This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
As a straight dude, my first internal knee-jerk reaction was "this is such a stupid solution to a stupid problem", but then my mental "Don't be an asshat because not everybody is like you" guard rail kicked in.
Clearly this is a product for a market of people that it works for and I'm happy for them. Enjoy your neat keyboard thing, long nailed peeps.
you're absolutely right. this is a stupid solution for a stupid problem. But you're also right that this is a product for a special subset of people that need this and whom this works for.
Both can be true.
That's the nice thing about capitalism (free market economics actually): You don't have a authority that decides what is useful and useless, what gets produced and what doesn't. Because in the End, everything is useless. I have a robotvac because I'm too lazy to vacuum myself. Stupid and Lazy. I have a Vacuum cleaner because I'm too lazy to use a Broom. Stupid and Lazy.
So yes, it's both. Stupid solution to a stupid problem. But it's also a great product that solves a problem that a subset of our population has and therefore useful.
You don't have a authority that decides what is useful and useless, what gets produced and what doesn't.
Well sort of, the "authority" in the case of a truly free market is The Market (or The People, if you will.) If it sells it sells, if it doesn't it doesn't, The Market will decide.
That said, I agree with the rest of your statement and realize that you meant authority in a truer sense, and I in more of a metaphorical sense.
Good catch!
tippy taps!
Typing with long nails is the embodiment of “beauty is pain.”
The pain is real, but the beauty is subjective.
To me long nails are ick
The longer the more ick
I will never forget when I had to help a coworker with her laptop, she had long nails that had worn grooves in her keyboard keys.
She typed on her nails, the sound it made was terrible.
Ew. Most people I've seen w/ long nails type with the pads of their fingers, with absolutely terrible typing posture.
It' was a status thing. Those with manual labor jobs usually can't have long nails, so long nails means they're above manual labor. So the rich in the past did that, and now everybody wants to do that so and it becomes a beauty thing.
Jesus these comments scream basement dweller. You don't have to like what someone does with their own body to accept it. It doesn't hurt you so don't worry about it. God forbid people have some self expression
I accept that people sometimes keep their nails long. That acceptance comes with a caveat that I will not be eating anything handled by hands with long nails.
I'll snort the blow off their nail, though. I'm not a hater.
God forbid people have some self expression
They do indeed forbid it.
10 "If you go to battle against your enemies, and the LORD your God delivers them into your control, you may take some prisoners captive. 11 If you see among the prisoners a beautiful woman and you desire her, then you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her to your house, but shave her head and trim her nails
Deuteronomy 21
Oh man, religions are batshit crazy.
if the LORD your God delivers them into your control
AKA feel free to murder someone then fuck their wife (assuming you're Jewish, of course)
A chiclet membrane to go over your non-mechanical keyboard, it’s like double hell.
Actually, my giant mechanical Blackwidow keyboard is way easier to use than my laptop when my nails are long.
I'm not a fan of the long nails because it hurts my insides.
Also fecal matter and bacteria are stored in abundance under long nails.
I sometimes have medium length nails (3-5 mm past the fingertip), though I tend to just grow my own out, and I do it entirely for myself. I have a bunch of different kinds of nail polish and stencils for making cool patterns and it satisfies my inner elementary school librarian urge to dress up for even very minor holidays.
People have come up to me and told me that my nails are too long for them to find attractive, which is a bizarre non sequitur imo. I don’t know why the assumption is that any self-decoration is intended as a sexual signal: my ideal nail-based interaction is that a little kid asks about them and I get to tell them about Arbor Day or national soup day or something.
Sometimes they make life more difficult, and then I either find workarounds (opening pull tabs with a spoon, for example) or cut them, depending on how much time I have and how much I like my current nails.
I get that they’re not for everyone, but I like them, so I wear them. It’s okay if others don’t like them, they don’t have to wear them.
It blows my mind when people do that.
"Hey, the way that you styled yourself makes me not want to have sex with you."
"Uhhh... Cool?"
A solution to a self inflicted problem.
And? Nearly everything is a self inflicted problem. You could just lay down and stop bothering, so why don't you do that?
Do I like long nails? Hell no. Does it affect me if somebody buys this keyboard to type and have long nails? Also hell no.
Kinda cool but shit $45 for a piece of silicone those margins are insane.
Yeah but it's for Macs so what do you expect
Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).
Now I know! :)
Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…
I've always wondered about wiping one's ass. Seems like you'd want a nail brush handy to wash up every time.
It's about the angle, you cannot orient it towards your pads as much on a laptop.
My SIL has long nails, and watching her use her phone and laptop is just fascinating. So many problems I just never even considered...
Hmm. That's an interesting problem to have.
On one hand, I can't suggest a great alternative, but man, silicone keys...I guess if they work for the author.
Stenotypists -- people who have to professionally do very high-speed text entry -- do use these dinky specialized keyboards that IIRC from a Japanese-language one -- I think that there were multiple Japanese layouts -- can only have a home row or something. I think that they use chording or something. I don't know if that might address it, but learning one would be a huge change. Also, I have no idea what keys they can output...given that they're highly-optimized for text entry, they might not be able to do weird symbols.
goes looking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
A steno machine, stenotype machine, shorthand machine, stenograph or steno writer is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. In order to pass the United States Registered Professional Reporter test, a trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively.[1] Some stenographers can reach up to 375 words per minute, according to the website of the California Official Court Reporters Association (COCRA).[2]
Hmm.
Looking at the key layout there, and here:
...it looks like English-language stenotype keyboards don't just use a single row, but rather two or more rows. So that's probably out.
There's apparently a second chording layout, the "palantype" layout, but that also doesn't do only one key per finger:
https://www.openstenoproject.org/palantype/tutorial/2016/08/21/learn-palantype.html
There are dedicated chording keyboards that do use only one key per finger, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard
That has some examples of one-key-per-finger keyboards, like the BAT keyboard (well, that has three for the thumb, but given that you hit those with the side of the thumb, I assume that it'd be okay with long nails):
https://www.infogrip.com/bat-keyboard.html
The problem is that (a) the BAT is discontinued and (b) you really don't want a one handed keyboard, which is what the BAT does...it'd be better to have a two handed chorded keyboard, or you're taking half of your fingers out of the picture.
EDIT: Here's an open-source, two-handed chording keyboard, the Ialboard, based on the discontinued DataHand keyboard. I'm not sure that it'd work with very long nails in its current form -- they might collide with the structure of the keyboard -- but it's 3d printed and I'm pretty sure that if the format doesn't work as-is, a tweak to the 3d-printed keys would permit for arbitrarily long nails. Just need to create a space for 'em.
Gonna need some serious keyboard re-learning, though.
EDIT2: Here's another two-handed chording keyboard with one input device per finger, the CharaChorder. It uses an analog D-pad under each finger. I think that it'd have space for long nails as-is. It does have separate arrow key and mouse control sticks, and I'm not sure if those, given the placement, would be an issue for long nails. I'd imagine that if one were determined to work around that with an external mouse device and -- if you use arrow keys enough to need it; I rarely do -- maybe some dedicated arrow key keyboard, though I'd think that having the arrow keys in vim-style hjkl-style layout might be preferable to the inverted-T layout that seems common. I don't know whether the barrel connector's positioning there would be an issue, though the positioning of that is obviously not critical to the keyboard, and I imagine that if it is an issue, with a bit of work, one could relocate it.
EDIT3: It looks like there's another DataHand-based 3D-printed keyboard besides the above-mentioned Ialboard, the Svalboard. Same argument as with the Ialboard -- I'm not sure that it'd be usable with long nails as is, but I'm pretty sure that that design could be modified with approprately-different key shapes to permit long nails to extend through a gap. You can apparently buy the thing in kit form, 3D-print it, so I figure that if someone wants to make a "longnail" variant of a few of the 3D-printed parts, that'd probably be a pretty easy keyboard to start from.
The downside is that I don't think that -- unlike the above CharaChorder -- this comes with a travel carrying case, which might be important if you're a laptop user. I guess it'd probably be possible to craft something with foam and a shell, but that's not off-the-shelf any more.
The Tippy Type is a keyboard cover for MacBooks
I could have predicted that even if the article never mentioned it.
This is awesome. Not really any notes, I'm just glad this exists.
I guess a mechanical keyboard with round ketcaps would do the trick as well. Not the same budget though...
The thing that I can't understand about this product is why they didn't cover the function keys. They are literally functional.
Although using the top row of keys does not cause you to accidentally hit keys above it.
