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I love the idea of being able to move your mouse cursor without moving your hand off of the keyboard. I just don't think that the trackpoint was fast and accura

I love the idea of being able to move your mouse cursor without moving your hand off of the keyboard. I just don't think that the trackpoint was fast and accurate enough to pull it off. I want to see someone try out a solution where each key on a keyboard gets a dedicated sensor, and you can have one hand/thumb press a magic "activate mouse" button, while the other hand basically runs across the keys just like you would use a touchpad. For bonus accuracy, you could sum/aggregate the movement of all fingers for the single pointer so that you can avoid lifting even any part of your hand.

bogwog 4y ago
The Blackberry Passport had a capacitive keyboard which you could swipe your fingers on to scroll without touching the screen. This was extra useful in landscape mode since it maximized vertical scrolling space. The feel of scrolling on the bumpy keys was awesome. I don’t think that would work as well on a larger keyboard, especially mechanical ones, or ones where there is a lot of space between keys.
- Findecanor 4y ago
  > I don’t think that would work as well [...] where there is a lot of space between keys. A capacitive "touch sensor" is pretty much the same as a proximity sensor, just tuned to the touch surface, so I don't think that could be much of a problem. Just put the sensor plane behind the keys. BTW, I've seen a keyboard prototype that used capacitive sensing of the user's fingertips as the key-actuation method. By doing that, the trackpad/keyboard might be even simpler.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Yeah but the keys/switches themselves could become damaged by pushing them side to side. Maybe on a low height keyboard on a laptop it’s less of a problem, but trying to swipe my fingers across my mechanical keyboard and my X1 Yoga keyboard definitely feels like I’m going to break something. The BB Passport had almost no gaps between the keys, so it felt like a continuous, slightly bumpy surface. I don’t think that’d work well on a larger form factor, but maybe I’m wrong.

bogwog 4y ago

The Blackberry Passport had a capacitive keyboard which you could swipe your fingers on to scroll without touching the screen. This was extra useful in landscape mode since it maximized vertical scrolling space. The feel of scrolling on the bumpy keys was awesome. I don’t think that would work as well on a larger keyboard, especially mechanical ones, or ones where there is a lot of space between keys.

Findecanor 4y ago
> I don’t think that would work as well [...] where there is a lot of space between keys. A capacitive "touch sensor" is pretty much the same as a proximity sensor, just tuned to the touch surface, so I don't think that could be much of a problem. Just put the sensor plane behind the keys. BTW, I've seen a keyboard prototype that used capacitive sensing of the user's fingertips as the key-actuation method. By doing that, the trackpad/keyboard might be even simpler.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Yeah but the keys/switches themselves could become damaged by pushing them side to side. Maybe on a low height keyboard on a laptop it’s less of a problem, but trying to swipe my fingers across my mechanical keyboard and my X1 Yoga keyboard definitely feels like I’m going to break something. The BB Passport had almost no gaps between the keys, so it felt like a continuous, slightly bumpy surface. I don’t think that’d work well on a larger form factor, but maybe I’m wrong.