| > I’d love to hear your take Well, I guess you already noticed that regular keyboards are made for people with arms growing from the front of their chests. Some, like MS, now generously provide some angle between the halves so people with shoulder-mounted arms can curve them in more comfortably without keeping the wrists crooked. Now, let's take the flat profile, specifically crosswise the keyboard. It seems greatly suited for people with digits extendable in the plane of the wrist. But where I am, fingers mostly rotate on joints instead. While we're here, feeble attempts at wrist support on most current boards don't have much respect from me. MS at least made the board incline the other way, which is vastly better (though I'd like some forearm support now). As for the staggered key layout, it works sort of okay for the left hand where the key columns are staggered to the right (going away from the user). Now, which way are they staggered under the right hand? Also to the right. Meanwhile my fingers mostly move forward and backward in line with each forearm, so I'd imagine ortholinear layout to be more reasonable. Kinesis Advantage and Maltron boards seem to get all of this right, but I'm yet to buy one. I'm not sure about the next point, but apparently in the ‘palms down’ position the bones in the forearm are rotated DNA-style, which may or may not be suboptimal. Some boards, like Kinesis Freestyle, can be mounted in a vertical accordion-arrangement, and there are also mice that are handled like joysticks. The sad thing is, while plastic boards could probably be manufactured in any shape you'd like (at least other gadgets don't seem to have a big problem), prevailing designs are seemingly dictated by the inertia of the market instead of the ergonomics, so they still hold on to ideas of typewriter design from a century ago. And better designs are caught in the bog of higher prices because no mass production for these weird things. |
Got this one backwards on the phone. It's to the left, under both hands.