Hey guysss,
Just chiming in on the confusion with arrows keys, so to avoid further arguments.
As the votes are in, I have decided to go with AT layout (no arrow keys). Which
I have sent to a CAD engineer for inspection and to remodel. I'm mostly active
on discord where we can discuss and talk.
Sorry to heard some of ya'll will be leaving on this journey, and hopefully
I could make something that will interest you again in the future.
I'm truly grateful for the interest and the attention I've received with Type Box.
I really am, thanks.
To start, I just want to say that I think you're a valuable asset to the hobby as one of the great up-and-coming designers, and I completely respect that you created that poll to gauge interest in either layout as I think that was a great thing to do. However, something I noticed was that it had a very low participation rate compared to the number of people who know about this keyboard and who initially had great interest in it, which I largely think is due to the fact that the poll wasn't well publicized, the poll was released a bit late in the game after it was announced that the arrow keys were deleted from the design (which frankly turned a lot of people off and made them lose interest and stop following the project at that point), and it just didn't reach as many people as a result of that to give a full and accurate picture of what people really wanted on either side. I'm very active in the hobby online and found that a lot of people I knew that were initially interested in the board had no clue about the poll, since they stopped following the project after they heard about the deletion of the dedicated arrow keys before the poll was posted on Discord (and then also finding out that the poll had concluded a couple months ago with votes being in favor of no arrow keys). After going to a recent keyboard meetup (my first one ever), this same thing randomly came up in conversation with many people there, and the vast majority of which had the same exact experience after losing interest and no longer following the project after the announcement of the loss of arrow keys, but before the poll was posted.
Long story short, I think the results of that poll would have been very different had it been posted sooner (especially if it was done before any layout changes removing arrow keys were made and announced both here and on Discord). One interesting thing is that the gap in the poll numbers has been closing ever since the decision was made on the layout back around February, as it's currently 74-62, and seems there would have been much greater interest in it than the poll reflects based on all the people I've had conversations with about this project, as it's now much less functional for a lot of people than originally intended.
To end on a positive note, I did want to say that I love how open you've been to receiving feedback from people on this project all along, and how well you've handled any critical feedback with a very kind and professional tone. This remains one of my favorite keyboard designs to date, and will probably be the largest board I'll ever buy simply because I love the very unique aesthetics of it. Due to the loss of dedicated arrow keys, it unfortunately won't likely be in my regular rotation as I had originally intended, but hopefully I'll find some sort of reasonable workaround that won't trip me up or slow down my workflow too much so I can use it fairly often (something that doesn't use layers or that doesn't compromise the numpad layout). Either way, I'm glad that we have such a creative designer in the hobby like you who is also so open to listening to the potential buyers of your creation, and I'll certainly be watching to see what interesting designs you come up with in the future.
