Capacitive touchscreen keyboard

Accustomed as I am to typing on the iPad, it's not an experience I'd take over tapping it out on a proper desktop keyboard. And yet the cruel, perfect look of Dr. Kazuo Kawazaki's "Cool Leaf" still invites men of a certain age to ergonomic hell^[1]: the monochrome LED dispay, the slightly pixelated glowy characters, the vague hint that it could be hackable. But a $250 price tag, and Windows-only drivers, make it easy to pass.

[1] The tendons on the back of my hand curdle in anticipation of bullet-point features such as "An adjustable beep sounds upon a successful key press."

Cool Leaf Keyboard [dynamism.com]

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http://inkthink.org DJBentley

Glass is for media consumption, not creation.
Glen Hathaway

The word (in the title) you’re looking for is CAPACITIVE, not Capacitative. As in “a capacitor”, not “a capacitator”. There is no such thing as a capacitator. :D
http://profiles.google.com/bartoncasey Casey Barton

An *actual* touch screen keyboard would be pretty cool. This fake screen-resembling flat keyboard is not.
Jim Robertson

Throw in haptic feedback, and it’s all good.

Seriously, I seem to recall an article a while back about using an alternating-current to ‘shock’ the sensors in your fingertips … the sensation not being a shock, but just a little feeling in the fingertip at that spot on the display.

Ha.
http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker

My 9 pound, 122-key IBM Model F (buckling spring that works better than even the Model M) terminal keyboard, adapted to USB, is disappointed that this is called a “keyboard”.
- http://sarahhayes.is-a-geek.net/ SarahKH
  
  That and in the event of a zombie horde your keyboard can double as a nice mallet to beat them with. I highly doubt this one here will be able to pumel quite as many zombies as yours before it snaps.
digi_owl

Microsoft labs had a system where they overlayed transparent buttons on a lcd screen to give configurability and feedback at the same time. I wonder if something like that, with the option to remove the numpad so that area could work as a optional touch surface, could work here.

hell, now i find myself wondering about strap on buttons for touch screen mobile phones…
- Martijn Rotman
  
  patent it and take my money!
http://twitter.com/acp Andrew Poole

I’m getting visions of TRON style desks… :)
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

fixed title!
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

This is why Dillinger was so frustrated with his professional status.
http://twitter.com/Listicath Adrian Jones

This sounds more useful:

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

and this looks like the one in the article, but better:

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/
Cowicide

This Apple Keyboard makes a helluva lot more sense in the real world…

http://www.geekologie.com/2007/08/15/apple-keyboard.jpg
traalfaz

The fact that it needs drivers at all is a huge fail. One can only assume that it’s leaning heavily on the PC CPU to do its work, otherwise, hey, HID standard USB guys.
Nadreck

See many Star Trek STNG boards for why touch-screen keyboards are the worst thing in ergonomics ever. I think their LCARS interfaces won several awards for dystopian futurism.
http://ryandavidjahn.com Ryan David Jahn

I learned to type — and by learned to type, I mean I learned to bang out 70 words per minute with two fingers and a thumb — on a Remington Letter-Riter De Luxe my parents bought me for my twelfth birthday, and still prefer the depth and clack of a proper keyboard. Though I use them when traveling, I even find shallow laptop keyboards somehow unsatisfying. With this thing, I’d feel like I was sending a text message no matter what I was doing.
CountZero

Mmmm, I like that Tactus keyboard. Looking at the insane price of the other one, I truly shudder to think how much it’ll cost.
cymk

At the risk of some serious carpel tunnel, that keyboards looks sweet.
EH

And still we are forced to make room for a 10-key. Why aren’t there any keyboards without 10-key while retaining the cursor/page keys? Just cut the dang 10key off…someone.
- Palomino
  
  http://www.amazon.com/A4TECH-Multimedia-Keyboard-Profile-Compact/dp/B000F6UUXQ
  And all of my laptops have never had a 10 key.
  - EH
    
    Unfortunately, the “just cut off the 10key” part is the most important to my point. That crappy keyboard you linked not only has a compressed layout where the cursor and page keys get smooshed into the rest of the layout, but the “large enter key” feature means that the backslash is the wrong size and (apparently) in the wrong place entirely. Those are exactly the worst “Happy Hacker” style keyboards that I can do without.
Palomino

The resistance will always be desired. It’s a completion of an action. Typewriter keys are not pressed, they are “depressed”. It’s the act of depressing that sends a message to the brain that an action has been completed. Therefor, no need to look a the keyboard. My nephews (aged 22) can only text with a program that connects letters, I don’t know how it works, they just drag their finger to connect letters. That works, connecting letters together by drawing a line is a completion of an action too.

Now, if there was some type of key sensor, like a vibration when the key is pressed, this design will work. Otherwise, forget it.
Ralidius

Form over function with windows drivers only. Uncanny.
Paul Renault

It’s like using Windows On-Screen Keyboard on a touch screen!

My nipples are bursting with pleasure at the very thought!
Justin Kirby

Many years ago I became addicted to the Fingerworks Touchstream. It has windows,osx,linux mode with emacs mode etc… I can not imagine life without this keyboard. Very programmable gesture based keyboard.

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

Of course as with all great products it is no longer produced.
phisrow

Did somebody miss the memo that was circulated, the one to the effect that ‘touchscreen keyboards’ were a last resort, only to be used in cases of extreme space constraint?

Seriously… Those $5 silicone rollable keyboards, which have the worst keyfeel in the universe, by the standards of physical keyboards, have better feedback than that. Heck, those gimmicky ‘projection keyboards’ have the same keyfeel, and are much smaller…

What possible reason would one have for inflicting a touchscreen keyboard on a desktop system? A cheap-and-nasty rubber dome switch unit, probably yours free with purchase, will feel like a double-vicodin and the caress of your true love by comparison…. WHY?
bytefyre

it doesn’t have the bumps on the f and j keys so wouldn’t you need to look at it to type? I can’t type even remotely accurately without looking unless i know where the f and j keys are, I don’t know about anyone else