Personally I think what the OP has achieved is very impressive. The design looks beautiful, and there's a very "Apple-esque" feel to the website. I love that sustainability has been made a requirement as part of the design.
I think some of the other comments give good feedback about the website, the most important of which is that some more photos with the entire keyboard in the context it's used (maybe sitting in front of an iMac) would be really to understand its actual size.
Well done though OP - I like this a lot.
I don't find the criticism demoralising. Quite the opposite, it means people are engaged, which I love. I tried to create a product with a strong design and as a result it's quite divisive. That's okay. Good, even.
I put this thing up on the internet and asked for peoples opinions... and that's what I got. Lots of opinions! Many of which are valid, and I will take back and work on.
At the end of the day the site got a lot of traffic, lots of people expressed interest in the product and I got lots of feedback. It's a win-win and I am very happy.
I wish we could all have a real conversation about key layouts, though. The layout with the less reachable left shift and right enter/return is just dumb. It's like putting the door lock control on the outside of your car door so you have to roll the window down to reach out and unlock the door. In place of where the door lock belongs, they put the hood release lever. Obviously that would be a really stupid design since we need to unlock the door much more than we need to open the hood. And that's how I feel about the tradeoffs between the US and US International layouts.
The tilda and backtick key is much less used than the shift key, so robbing reachable space from shift to put that less needed key is absurd. So is pushing squeezing the return key out of reach of the right pinky. Someone who was not a touch typist designed this, and they should be made to pay for the guaranteed loss in productivity that comes from using it.
Sorry for the rant. But really, I wish this could be resolved. It sucks that I cannot walk into an Apple store in Europe and get one with "good" US keyboard. (You can still order US layout in Europe.)
Respect you attitude! Keyboards specifically are a place where there's no one-size-fits-all product (especially among enthusiasts) and making bold choices is how we get drastic change
I think the gap is the difference between giving feedback to a person and broadcasting superiority. The former is what we do in-person. It takes constant active effort to not do the latter.
Giving feedback in-person, you want to make sure your feedback land. Encouraging where possible by pointing out what works, discussing the ways it can or needs to improve.
When people don't give feedback to the OP as a person, and rather treat it like a faceless corporate entity, or go full-Slashdot, that does get a bit mean-spirited.
In my view, the fact that you are speaking on the internet does not mean you have license to be harmful or careless with the people you interact with.
I also like that the parent complains about the very thing (being able to speak freely) but doesn't want to apply that to people that disagree with his standpoint.
This is because some people have discovered that it's a great way to emotionally manipulate others into upvoting that comment out of guilt - the structure of this kind of comment is designed to bypass the logical reasoning centers of the brain and cause an emotional reaction. (I saw another comment a few weeks ago that had more detail on this, but I have no hope of finding it without my exobrain) It's also just barely far enough away from the "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." in the guidelines that some people can justify doing it.
I automatically downvote comments of this form whenever I see them. Comments should be written in such a way that encourages curious and thoughtful conversation and not emotional manipulation.
If you look at my account age and number of comment upvotes you'll see that I don't care about comment upvotes at all and have never made any effort to increase them.
My original comment was to highlight that I think the ratio of positive to negative feedback for what is an impressive effort by an individual seems unbalanced. There's lots of negative feedback and very little positive feedback.
I think positive feedback is important - it's good to know what you're doing well in addition to what you're not doing well.
As someone who has designed a product from scratch before I also think it's incredibly easy for people who haven't gone through that process to underestimate the time and effort involved.
You're right. I do find, however, that the "default" reaction to showcases is to point out all the flaws, but not reinforce any of the strengths. To me that seems unbalanced.
I'm sure many HN users are content with this form of feedback - that's fine. I personally think that when receiving feedback, finding out what has been done well is as important as finding out what hasn't.
also, this thread is a gold mine of insight they can use to refine their product for the market. ie take off the stupid orange knob and hide the made in the uk nonsense and stop naming the product like a mars bound space rocket
As the time I write this, this link is at the top of the front page and there are 414 comments. People are interested.
But I couldn't deal without the trackpoint, which I use regularly for simple mouse actions even when I have a mouse just inches away. Also my right pinky actuates the emacs "meta" key using the key immediately below "/" (it's the RCtrl on the Lenovo), and on the Altar I that key is offset from the row above, which would be a muscle memory collision[1]. And there are no volume control keys mapped, which I find I use very regularly in the post-pandemic world of constant online meetings. (But it does have display backlight buttons? Why?! You don't use external keyboards with laptops. Seems like a weird choice.)
(Also, a nitpick: the backspace key on the US layout is marked "del" on the keycap. I REALLY hope this is a typo and that the key doesn't send Delete instead of BS when pressed!)
Beyond that though, this really does look great, and if I wasn't wedded to the thinkpad keyboard I'd definitely consider it. But... I'm a really small market, and even I'm not quite onboard.
[1] And this is the primary reason why I've stuck with Thinkpads for more than a decade. This isn't a standard key position, but Thinkpads (not even Lenovo generically, most of their other keyboards mess this up) do it best for what I want.
I'm working on a modification for a different product with a trackball, but learned about the trackpoint as well. The patent recently expired and besides that, it's ~$10-20 to buy a trackpoint component and you could hack it into a keyboard if you had the time and willingness.
(Though I just now realized that this is running Zephyr firmware, so I'm thinking maybe it might be worth retraining my emacs pinky...)
Historically the backspace key is literally that, moving the typewriter's carriage back (when the space key moves it forward).
On current computers the space key now inserts a "space" character instead of simply moving the cursor a step right.
Backspace isn't symmetric to that anymore, as it doesn't even insert a space back but deletes backwards, so it is (pedantically) a misnomer.
And this is true for "modern" computers, older ones were closer to teletypes and would move back for overwrite (e.g try vi compat mode).
The numbers look ugly IMO, and they are also a lot bigger than the letters.
Other than that, it does look quite good.
The OP did an extremely impressive job, and that's what matters in the end. I can totally see them selling a lot of these.
Except the whole site was screaming THINKPAD! at the top of its lungs at me. Which, again, isn't a bad thing. I'm typing on a thinkpad and have a mbp right next to me.
It's a lovely design.
