Hi all,
I've been trying to think of what to do with this IC, here are my thoughts and concerns, in no particular order;
- At this moment the kit includes shift keys, fn, escape and bottom row.
For the shift there is the challenge with regards to new icons versus old icons.
New icons work with GMK 9009 R3 and onward. Old Icons work with GMK 9009 R2 and most OG Doubleshot sets. I'm not expert on OG sets, but I believe a lot of them have text+icons meaning you'll use the text+icons from this kit as well.
- The bottom row is only suitable for WKL boards or you would need to have an existing set that has the additional keys to use.
- Adding more keycaps to the kit will imo make it too expensive. Add-on kits usually run at a fairly low MOQ making them relatively costly. There have been a few requests in the from to add AltGr. I'm personally a big fan of it, but I would rather replace the 1.5u alt with AltGr than add it.
- There are multiple full GMK Sets on the horizon. For example GMK Red Alert, GMK Classic Arabic.
- GMK Missing Keys will have a Round 2
- Should it be offered at the same time as Missing Keys R2
- Should this even be a groupbuy or in-stock buy
So what I'm mostly wondering is; what is the goal of this kit and where should we aim for?
Is the goal to provide an add-on kit that works on any board assuming you have a fitting set to pair it with (so no GMK 9009 R2), then we should keep it as is and not add a single key.
Imo for this kit to work it needs to be as small as possible.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts
I've seen this answer a bit late.
This set should, in my opinion, keep OG icon mods. There are a lot of OG sets and previous iterations of 9009 that can benefit of this kit. Plus, GMK KA1953 and Classic Retro come with top left aligned arrows and, to allow using them with 2002 icon mods, these need to be top left aligned. Otherwise you're gonna get centered icons and top left aligned arrows, which would be weird. I add a less solid and maybe wrong motivation: if you read threads of sets with centered icon mods, there are a lot of people that ask for OG icons, while I've almost never seen the opposite. 9009 R3 centered icon mods are probably an annoying thing that people would like to get rid of and, personally, was quite disappointed that the iteration with R5 bottom row, which reminds OG, came with these new icons.
Regarding other questions, I like the kit as it is. Alt Gr is a thing, and it would be great to see in addition (like in GMK RGBYK) and not in place of Alt. I would prefer GB and I am neutral about running this at the same time of Missing Keys R2, since I don't think it is gonna affect the sales.