Hmm, some excellent ideas: are you an engineer?
Well, according to my university diploma , yes i am
1. nice teensy location next to the thumb. I much prefer it that way, though I'm not sure if DOX would want to completely redesign his.
This is the unused space on the board i didn't find any other place to put besides the other halve at the same place.
2. The programming LED is great. Having a programming mode is cool, but having an LED so you know when you're in it is great. Hmm, Another idea is to have a row of LED's somewhere that light up if you're in another shifted layer (for example, hitting capslock shifts to all caps mode. Hitting fn+shift might move it to mousekeys mode, etc. Having lights available to the user to indicate this would be great. Like one lights up when fn is pressed (or if you have a way to "lock" the mode) and another would light up when altgraph is pressed, etc.
That's a good idea, however, if you do touch typing that's irrelevant, i just use them for "debuging purposes" and for backwards compatibility with PC 104 keys.
I need to keep key64 minimalist in design, while i not pretend to start a discussion about how many keys a keyboard should have, just take a look at the apple remote control vs. direct tv remote control:
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I would bet Directv remote control was designed by engineers.
While apple remote control was designed with people with usuability in mind (usually none of them engineers)
That's the way we need to think about keyboards, first focus on usability, then focus on engineering.
3. So you'd join them with a rainbow cable? Wouldn't you be concerned that it'd break, or pull out? I imagine you'd have feet on the keyboard, so that the excess cable can go under the keyboard. Hmm, you could use beefy connectors like the ones that were used in then (unrelated) project:
http://www.amb.org/forum/a-delta1-hat-trick-of-sorts-t776.html
Some similar ones, i don't have the time to polish those keyboard details, i just want to follow the programming rule "First measure, then optimize", which implies i need it working ASAP, there is still a long way to go and optimizations could be done later.