In my quest to learn Dvorak and reduce my wrist and hand pain, I ordered a TypeMatrix keyboard (in Dvorak) last week. It arrived today! I’ve only been using it for an hour or so, but I figured a blog post would be a good way to practice on it and give my first impressions.

The Good

• One of the two distinguishing features of this keyboard is the alignment of the keys: they are in a grid instead of being staggered. This means your fingers aren’t reaching up and down at an angle. This is making touch-typing in Dvorak a lot less annoying, because it’s easier to find keys outside of the home row.
• It looks awesome. It’s small, sleek, and very “techy”-looking.
• It’s well-made. I can’t attest to its durability over time, but it feels very high-quality. The keys are sturdy, the frame is sturdy… nothing about it feels flimsy.
• The key presses are somewhere between an old-school keyboard and a laptop keyboard—low-profile keys with a somewhat deep press. Takes a little getting used to, but feels pretty comfortable after a while.
• It worked out-of-the-box on my Mac. No drivers, no hassle.

The Bad

• Some of the really customized keys—like the Calculator, Mail, Browser, and Desktop keys—don’t work on the Mac. I can’t figure out a way to make them work, because the computer doesn’t even register them as key presses.
• There are no little retractable “feet” to make it sit at an angle. I’ll need to get a wrist pad in order to really use it comfortably.

The Neutral

• The other big difference this keyboard has from all others is the placement and size of common functional keys, like Backspace, Enter, and Shift. The Backspace and Enter keys are in the center of the keyboard, so you press them with your index fingers instead of your pinky. I really like the concept for two reasons: one, your index fingers are stronger so having them in the center makes sense. Two, it forces me into reaching for keys with the proper hand. Hitting the “Y” key [on a QWERTY keyboard] with my left index finger now means I’m hitting the Backspace key. It’s messing me up a little, but hey, I should be using my right hand for that key anyway.
• The Shift keys are tall rectangles instead of long ones, which means I’m much more likely to hit it when I aim for it and I’m not looking at the keys.
• I had to switch the Alt and Command keys in my System Preferences so they’d be in more familiar positions. This is also the only way to get Command keys on both sides of the keyboard instead of only the left.
• The non-staggering of the keys means I’m hitting a lot of wrong keys in the top row. I’ll get used to it, but it’s a learning curve nonetheless.

I bought the Dvorak package that included a clear skin for the keyboard, and also a black QWERTY skin. The skins fit perfectly on the keyboard and stay in place while I’m typing. The texture on them is really nice, too.

There is a one-button switch to go between QWERTY and Dvorak, with a little indicator light so you know which mode it’s in. If you’re on a Mac, switching to Dvorak on the keyboard and in the System Preferences makes the key mappings all messed up, so be sure to do just one or the other.

So far, I really like this keyboard. I’ll write another review with my final conclusions after I’ve been using it for a week or so. In the meantime, wish me luck on learning Dvorak! It’s slow going so far, but I’m improving…

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A friend alerted me to the fact that some browsers weren’t showing the Fugue Sprite properly: everything was showing up as the topmost icon in the image (for example, the first 100 sprites all had the Address Book icon).

I did fix it, and I uploaded the new CSS to both my demo page and the ZIP file. Enjoy!

Fugue Sprite CSS (684 KB)

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Any Blueprint users out there have probably heard of SilkSprite, a plugin for Blueprint that provides easy access to the entire Silk Icon Set from famfamfam. It’s basically a CSS file and a single image that you can use in any website, whether or not you use Blueprint.

I came across the Fugue icon set a few months ago, and I’m using is often enough that I decided to make something similar to the SilkSprite. I created the Fugue Sprite: a CSS file & set of images that provides easy access to all 2,330 Fugue icons.

To use it, just unzip the file and upload that folder to your server. Then link to the stylesheet. Voilà! Now you can use the Fugue class names on any element in your website to give it a left-aligned background of that Fugue icon, with 20 pixels of padding on the left.

Make sure the images stay in the same folder as the stylesheet.

The Fugue icon set is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, so if you use it, be sure to provide a link back to Pinvoke giving them credit for the icons. Enjoy!

Fugue Sprite CSS (684 KB)

View the complete set of icons & classes.

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