A year with the Elgato Stream Deck

This has been my experience w/ fully programmable mechanical keyboards. 104 keys, 70 keys, 60%, split, columnar, macros, layers, switches, keycaps.

So much variation that it is effectively endless. At some point you settle and don't touch it because you realize you're spending more time optimizing the tool than actually performing the task it is supposed to help you complete.

- Later editions of the Touch Bar brought back the physical escape key.

- I'm typing this on a MacBook Air right now, and while I always thought "why didn't you put the touch bar over the function row keys," the answer is clearly that there's just not enough space on a 13" or 14" laptop unless you want to shrink the trackpad, which you don't.

- My biggest complaint with the touch bar -- accidental inputs -- would probably have been solved with the return of the scissor switch keyboards they have now rather than the flat "butterfly" switches.

- Most Mac programs don't make much use of function keys; most of us are probably only using the keys for media control. Even after all this time I do tend to glance at the keyboard to use one, particularly on a laptop, so the advantage of muscle memory is (at least for folks like me) lessened. I'm sure there are people for whom this isn't true, but I'm a touch typist who can hit 100+ wpm and still don't feel I can rely on knowing just where function keys are in relation to standard keyboard keys. It's not consistent between keyboards: look at the current Mac laptop keyboard, an external Magic keyboard, and a third-party mechanical keyboard, and there's a good chance you'll see three different arrangements.

- At least in principle, with the Touch Bar more Mac programs could have taken advantage of it in similar ways to the Stream Deck.

The biggest problem with the Touch Bar might just have been that Apple themselves never seemed to fully commit to it. It never showed up on external keyboards, so almost nobody using their computer at a desk could use it even if they wanted to; the majority of keyboards it shipped with used the, let's say, controversial butterfly keyswitches, so it got bound up with that in public perception, and when Apple started backing away from that design they started backing away from the Touch Bar as well; and, they never did much with the API after it initially shipped.

I got Stream Deck primarily to show status and control Teams online meetings on Windows. Unfortunately, on Windows, Teams does not have global hotkeys for mute/unmute mic, audio on/off, video on/off etc. The keys are local to the online meeting window only. It also does not have reliable way to get mic/audio/video current status for showing.

Some hacks exist using AutoHotKey to loop through all the windows and send the keypresses, but they require megabytes of scripts to work, because Teams does not have a reliable way to find that window.

Other ways exist to directly control the global operating system mute, but Teams does some hacks with the mute, so that showing the mute status does not work.

There is Microsoft Graph API for Teams API, but I could not get that work with Windows SSO for authentication, so I needed to build a login workflow, and became too complex very soon.

I am pretty sure there should be a way to accomplish this, as teleconferencing devices are able to accomplish this with Teams. I wish Elgato would work with Microsoft to provide this functionality.