Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
Great work! It's awesome to see the community get behind what we are trying to build. Love the animations and overall you did a great job breaking down and explaining all the concepts. Excited to see whats next. What inspired you to work on this?
To be exact, there were several things that inspired me to work on this project:
1. I recently got more into mechanical keyboards, which got me digging through drop comment sections, review videos, glossary pages on other forums, and other content under Mech Keys.
This ongoing journey of learning and immersion required quite a lot of manual and cognitive effort—in a good way. The terminologies used required extra research to understand; the drops mentioned by people also prompted my curiosity to check out the drop, what its owners' stories are, and what other opinions are.
This got me thinking if this whole experience of learning, communicating, and immersing within each community can be improved and realized through an app designed around how Massdrop users communicate and related to drops. Drop Mentions was one of the features inspired by this. A comprehensive glossary page for each community also came to mind, which I am planning to work on next.
I chose to start with a mobile app over a web app because the consumer moments when people turn on their device—to learn, discover, research, compare, and purchase—are increasingly mobile. Besides, going mobile first with my design also makes scaling up to fit larger devices much easier than the other way around from my experience.
2. I recently graduated from my university's interaction design program, with a couple of projects I've done with startups in the past. Unfortunately, the most completed project I've worked on (redesigning an SaaS application for municipal workers) was done under a strict non-disclosure agreement. I'm not allowed to share anything I've made before they finish and release the new design.
That doesn't leave me with a lot of other work to show in my portfolio beside my grad project and much smaller/ unfinished projects with other startups. Thus, I figured I will do a personal project both as a challenge for myself, and a transparent project that I can showcase both how I work and the results I craft as a user experience designer.
Massdrop and its enthusiastic communities immediately popped in my mind. While evaluating its UX, I also got myself into mechanical keyboards in the process, unintended. Oh well :)
It has been a fun challenge and I have learned a lot. It really means a lot to me to see people responding, and definitely makes me excited to design the next features!
Welcome to the mech keys community and Massdrop as a whole!