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Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

yankodesign.com

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Re: Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

#11

Post by semi-extrinsic »

A year ago I went down the rabbit hole of looking into custom trackball-keyboard integrations. Ploopy, Charybdis, Dactyl, CCK-ball, etc. My final boring conclusion is that what I had already been doing for the past 20 years is much cheaper and gets me 99.99% of the way:

All you need is a regular ~$50 trackball and a regular ~$100 keyboard without a numpad. (You can have an overlay for that, if you need it.)

As someone else pointed out, this new trackball will make you move your fingers (and wrists) significantly off home row. If you do that in one direction or the other doesn't really matter.

If this works better for you than a Logitech or Kensington trackball, sweet, use it. But so far all the reviews are like "I've never used a trackball, but this looks cool". We've had this technology since the literal 1990s guys.

Re: Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

#14

Post by space_ghost »

toroszo wrote: post #12

Call me when they make a thinkpad-like trackpoint

This [0] is pretty close. IBM made a version of the Model M with Trackpoint but those are rare. Lenovo also sells [1] a keyboard that's basically a Thinkpad keyboard with trackpoint in a separate chassis.

[0] https://tex.com.tw/products/shinobi [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CS1FVF2

Re: Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

#15

Post by adolph »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #11

A year ago I went down the rabbit hole of looking into custom trackball-keyboard integrations. Ploopy, Charybdis, Dactyl, CCK-ball, etc. My final boring conclusion is that what I had already been doing for the past 20 years is much cheaper and gets me 99.99% of the way: All you need is a regular ~$50 trackball and a regular ~$100 keyboard without a numpad. (You can have an overlay for that, if you need it.) As someon…

Yes, seeing this product's very angular non-3d-printed yet-prototype design brought back memories of the days when the default portable hardware interface didn't always include a pointing device and thus there were these clip-on trackballs, like below.

Maybe some of the weirdest were things that looked like small mice that were linked and position-sensed by a bar linkage to the laptop. I can't find a reference to one tho, so maybe I'm mis-remembering?

http://xahlee.info/kbd/logitech_trackman_portable_trackball....

Re: Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

#17

Post by fidotron »

People have been putting Blackberry trackballs on QMK builds for quite a while.

I'm odd - what I want is a stupidly big trackball, like 4 inches across or so. And it should be able to detect rotation about the vertical axis. It infuriates me how optical tracking systems are designed to provide just translation and no rotation when there's a whole other DoF in play.

Re: Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

#18

Post by locknitpicker »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #11

A year ago I went down the rabbit hole of looking into custom trackball-keyboard integrations. Ploopy, Charybdis, Dactyl, CCK-ball, etc. My final boring conclusion is that what I had already been doing for the past 20 years is much cheaper and gets me 99.99% of the way: All you need is a regular ~$50 trackball and a regular ~$100 keyboard without a numpad. (You can have an overlay for that, if you need it.) As someon…

> If this works better for you than a Logitech or Kensington trackball, sweet, use it. But so far all the reviews are like "I've never used a trackball, but this looks cool".

Most people never saw a trackball, let alone used it.

Mainly because either your PC comes with a mouse, or you use a laptop which comes with a touchpad.

Your regular ~$50 sucks because it follows the form factor of a mouse even though you don't have to move it around. If you grew used to one then you don't notice the poor form factor, but it's awkward and still forces to move your hand away of a keyboard.

The Charybdis, Dactyl, and CCK-ball kind of address the problem by making it reachable by a thumb, but they don't eliminate it completely because it still forces you to follow an awkward user flow.

This product feels like a trackball that lets you place it where it makes sense. I think it's an improvement.

I have faith that keyboards with embedded touchpad such as the Kinesis Form fix this issue, but I'm not willing to shelf ~$300 for an experiment. I'd rather try out a split keyboard and have a boring touchpad where it feels right. Multi-finger touch gestures kind of eliminate any other flow. Hopefully keychron will consider that too.

Re: Keychron's Nape Pro turns your keyboard into a laptop‑style trackball rig

#19

Post by skinner927 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #18
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #11

A year ago I went down the rabbit hole of looking into custom trackball-keyboard integrations. Ploopy, Charybdis, Dactyl, CCK-ball, etc. My final boring conclusion is that what I had already been doing for the past 20 years is much cheaper and gets me 99.99% of the way: All you need is a regular ~$50 trackball and a regular ~$100 keyboard without a numpad. (You can have an overlay for that, if you need it.) As someon…

> If this works better for you than a Logitech or Kensington trackball, sweet, use it. But so far all the reviews are like "I've never used a trackball, but this looks cool". Most people never saw a trackball, let alone used it. Mainly because either your PC comes with a mouse, or you use a laptop which comes with a touchpad. Your regular ~$50 sucks because it follows the form factor of a mouse even though you don't…

The Form is $199, not $300. So, smaller gamble but it sure looks like a gamble.
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