Touchstream LP Keyboard

Since I've been having problems with my wrist from typing I've been exploring different keyboard options, first I tried a Microsoft Natural Keyboard which I thought helped a little, but in the end really didn't. I returned that and for the last week I've been trying a Fingerworks Touchstream LP keyboard. These things are really interesting, they have a completely flat surface that integrates the keyboard and mouse together to minimize the amount movement you have to make to control the computer. Doing this also allows it to support gestures based in the positioning and movement of your hands.

The flat surface also requires minimal pressure to type, which helps tremendously with wrist pain. Of course it also eliminates that nice physical feedback you get from regular keys. Typing is definitely interesting, I do pretty well with my left hand, but my right has trouble consistently hitting the u, i, o, and p keys. If you see some weird typos around any of those keys this is why. It's getting better now, the first day I absolutely could not type a p without making at least one mistake first, now I'm getting it about 75% of the time. It's definitely frustrating to learn and I've been really unproductive over the last two weeks, first because of the pain and now because of the time it's taking me to get comfortable with the keyboard. It's funny, but it's really hard to do something like write software while at the same time having to consciously think about the mechanics of using the keyboard. I guess it takes a couple weeks to get comfortable with it, but once you do people seem to love these things.

The reason for that, while trading off typing speed, you gain a ton of new functionality from the gestures and chord capabilities of the keyboard. Gestures are just flat out cool. The keyboard has the ability to detect how many fingers are down and what their motions are so that you can do cool things like dropping three fingers and your thumb with a slight twist to save a file. The cut, copy and paste gestures in particular are also great.

There's probably a couple hundred gestures and they're all completely programmable, as is the entire keyboard surface. Also the gestures and chords replace many of the functions like arrow keys, home, end, ctrl, cmd and alt so that if you want you can reprogram those keys to run macros, launch programs or whatever. The gestures are much easier to use then reaching for those keys and in reality it's essential that you use them as shifting your hand positions away from the home keys is what kills your typing accuracy.

One of the things that appealed to me about this keyboard was the positioning of the arrow keys, what I didn't realize was that there are also gestures to move the cursor around just like you move the mouse around. You use the right side of the keyboard for the mouse and the left for the arrow keys. This has made it so that I haven't had to touch the arrow keys at all since I got the keyboard, very, very helpful as that twisting to hit the backspace and arrow keys was what was causing most of my wrist pain.

I'll reserve a final verdict on this thing until I've lived with it a little longer, but overall I do think it's a very cool and innovative product that is a real advance over the traditional keyboard mouse combo. My initial impression is also generally favorable, though it is tempered a little by the occasional frustration with being slowed down so much by the learning process. The good thing, it has definitely helped with my wrist, I'll need more time with that too, but so far it hurt the first couple of days but now seems to be fine. I had been seriously considering getting one of these to try out even before I had any wrist pain, now I kind of regret not doing it. It really is a much more powerful interface for the right kind of user. It also works just great with Mac OS X.

Posted by Kimbro Staken