The design is on point and the numbers look great. I want one.
Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
161–170 of 246 posts
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#162I’m assuming it’s not possible for it to include a fingerprint sensor? As much as I’d like a mechanical keyboard for my Mac that’s always the part that gets me. I end up using the one my Magic Keyboard 20+ times per workday. Otherwise it looks beautiful.
Yes, agreed. Beautiful keyboard, but when I heard "magic" I hoped to find a touch ID. That sensor so useful that even though I use a mechanical keyboard, I keep an apple magic keyboard off to the side of my desk just for the touch ID sensor. What I'd love to have is a standalone touch ID sensor that I could attach anywhere -- mechanical keyboard, side of the monitor, under my desk, etc. I guess this is bottlenecked b…
I've built a few boxes:
https://www.printables.com/model/355924-clickable-touch-id-b...
https://gist.github.com/KhaosT/1406a6b6bea38f59e059c2afcb39d...
You have to carefully tear down and extract the touch id sensor, and then remount it in a box. I went the battery route so it could stay wireless. The tradeoff is the box is bigger.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#163LOVE the industrial design. HATE the font, especially on the number keys. But, great job overall!
The keyboard seems to be missing important symbols, such as - and =, so it's likely not the final design.
Because it's backlit I'm guessing changing the eclectic number row design isn't an option that can be easily changed (for this version anyway).
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#164reserved...looking forward to giving this a ride tks for sharing
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#165LOVE the industrial design. HATE the font, especially on the number keys. But, great job overall!
I actually like the number font, the presence, but the loss of visibility for the shifted symbols is a huge loss. I know where the numbers are -- I admittedly need more reminding for the symbols as I never explicitly practiced them. The muscle memory for them isn't quite as strong and in low light I need to see them.
> symbols need to be lit
100% this.
One of my absolute favorite keyboard designs: G915 TKL Lightspeed got relegated to the donation pile because the symbols were NOT backlit. Such a dumb design choice to save a few cents IMHO.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#166I feel like this is similar to what Work Louder makes? Am I tripping?
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
fingerprint sensor is easily done. Touch ID-compatible fingerprint sensor from someone other than Apple is not possible as I understand it.
I just linked you a post with a Touch ID-compatible mechanical keycap. Reverse-engineered from the Apple Magic Keyboard and requires a donor board, though
You could do all that and maybe after many hours it might work, or you could also solve this in 5 minutes by just plug in the magic keyboard to the computer, stick it in a box with a cut out for the touchid sensor, and just stick your mechanical keyboard on top of the box.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#168I've built about 10 mechanical keyboards so far, including a bunch of split ergo ones and low profile variants too. From that, I know the layout matters a lot, as well as the switches themselves; the programability and other features to me are nice but ultimately can be worked around. I'm curious about the switches you're using. On the tech specs it says: "Dual steel arm scissor switch w/ retention spring, 40gf actua…
The switches feel like a M-Series MacBook with a decent amount more travel and more "snappy", tactile feeling. They feel quite different to, for example, Choc switches (which we used on our previous keyboard).
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#169I don't even know if this is going to be a big or a tiny ask, and I don't know if I'm going to end up with this beautiful product at all, but just in case it's going to be trivial to do so, could you add an option or extra keycaps to have Caps Lock key physically engraved as "Control"? IIUC the ctrl-caps swap itself isn't so rare, but actual keycaps engraved as such seem to be relatively rare. It's apparently a UNIX…
Caps Lock is such a tragic throwback. Even after decades of ridicule "Caps lock is cruise control for cool" keyboard designers don't get that we don't want it.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
#170I don't even know if this is going to be a big or a tiny ask, and I don't know if I'm going to end up with this beautiful product at all, but just in case it's going to be trivial to do so, could you add an option or extra keycaps to have Caps Lock key physically engraved as "Control"? IIUC the ctrl-caps swap itself isn't so rare, but actual keycaps engraved as such seem to be relatively rare. It's apparently a UNIX…
That is a very interesting detail, I never knew that!