Currently reading the comments in the below video to get more user insights as to what expectations and notable mentions come up for a peripheral that aims to replace the keyboard.
What commenters were saying
- Accents / other languages
- This understandably comes up a lot, and I specifically saw "spanish" more than once.
- Considering that the original Tetent idea was to chord bigrams and me-in-the-past considered it fast enough to start the project, the idea I've got for all the accents is to dedicate 2 fingers to characters and one to accent modifiers.
- I've also got to look into what is required for non-latin languages like Japanese / Chinese / Korean / Arabic.
- Ambidextrous / one-handed support
- This is one of the reasons I personally decided to start the Tetent project without first trying out Charachorder.
- I looked into their discord after seeing a few of these comments and there is a 1-handed layout but it seems that users would like a foot-pedal so that they can access modifiers on the other side more easily than the current method.
- Unfortunately, the Master Forge seems to only have thumb buttons on one side so it's still not ambidextrous.
- Game compatibility
- I'm hoping that the macropad and Xbox inspired layouts addresses this.
- Learning curve
- Also mentioned quite a bit.
- I also noticed when the creator said "I have chords for every single thing here" when he got to the words section of the online teacher, implying that you manually have to set up chords still. This is the other reason I started the Tetent project.
- Other than moving the user's fingers to exactly where they need to go and applying the haptics they should feel when pressing, I don't think there's more that can physically be done to ease the learning curve. Tetent needs to be able to do this.
- Accessibility
- This ties in with one-handedness, but they also mentioned about missing fingers and poor motor control.
- I don't think Tetent could reasonably do anything about poor motor control, but typing in english should only need one finely-controllable finger and one kinda-ok-controllable finger.
- This also ties in with the learning curve, as users can start off with just 2 fingers and scale up if they feel comfortable.
- Wireless
- I also agree. As I've previously mentioned, I usually don't work at a desk, and so my mouse and keyboard wires are more tedious than I initially expected.
- Younger generation
- I read a quote a few months (maybe years) ago; "get them in when they're young and impressionable".
- It's understandable that users wouldn't want to learn something new that might or might not be better than what they already know. It's a very different calculation when "what they already know" is (near) 0.
- (This is part of the reason why I'm planning on programming Tetent with Rust; I don't know enough about C/C++ to make an entire FW so, from a learning curve point of view, those languages are approximately on equal footing.)
- For this reason, I'm trying for a 16mm wide #Tetrinsic [gd0041] to accomodate for smaller hands.
- It would be even better if I could design some mechanism where a user could turn an allen key to fine-tune the spacing, or perhaps just mount the Tetrinsics onto user-accessible slots,
- Price
- This is probably the main thing that keeps on getting worse the more I engineer a solution.
- I think a Tetent-like device would have to be sub-£60 to have any sort of "mkay, perhaps I should try it" appeal and, due to the prices I've been quoted for #Tetoroidiv [gd0152] motors, Tetent's unfortunately never going to come close.
- I'm designing this for the hypothetical user that are unsatisfied with the keyboard+mouse combo anyway, so maybe £90 instead of buying a £60 keyboard and £30 mouse?
- I'm starting to understand why AliExpress robotics kits with decent motors instead of shaky-and-loud hobby servos cost what they do.
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