It's BEAUTIFUL but it's not for me - WorkLouder Creator Board
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,103 words · ~10 min read
0:00
- We're doing. (polythene bag squeaking) There's a reason I'm here and I'm not a sports guy,
0:05
all right. Whoa!
0:08
Look at these. Dude. Oh my God! That's cool.
0:14
Look at that. This is the Work Louder keyboard.
0:19
This can't be typical. Can it? - [Someone In Background] Yes.
0:22
They shipped it to us fully assembled. I thought I was gonna have to assemble it. It's a modular keyboard.
0:26
So it's ortho-linear. I am not used to type big.
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Oops. In ortho-lin-near space.
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I prefer full keyboards. I like having my num pad and so on.
0:48
You can turn any of these keys into anything you want.
0:51
It's QMK, which is great and everything you would expect.
0:56
Like here's the thing. It's cool that it's modular,
1:01
but all I can really do is like, move this slightly over
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or move this whole thing slightly over and then move this over there.
1:09
I'm not sure how you could make a keyboard any more modular than this.
1:13
Oh, that's cool. This is also a separate thing. See that?
1:16
I could move that here, not that I would want to. The thing that most interested me about this product
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are the dials and these ones they're discreet.
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They're not continuous. And the website says that it's compatible with apps
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like Premier, Photoshop and so on
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and I will put that to the test. So I'm gonna try that out.
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And then they have a QMK mapping GUI.
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Which is nice, 'cause I'm used to just having to do it in text,
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you know, like a notepad sort of a thing. So I'm looking forward to that.
1:49
It's gonna make it a lot easier to like, lay stuff out.
1:53
So something like this definitely appealing to the sort of person who wants to optimize their workflow.
2:00
As far as the dials go, I have no idea. We're just gonna have to find out.
2:03
Dials, why are dials important? Well, basically if you grew up in the nineties
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and remember what it was like using a computer without a scroll wheel on the mouse, it was more annoying.
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It's really nice to be able to like scroll down a webpage. And similarly,
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certain things like volume control are just much better to do with dials
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as opposed to keyboard shortcuts, where you're just having to push the key
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over and over again. And it's not just volume or scrolling on a webpage.
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There's lots of different things that are good to put on a dial as opposed to a key.
2:37
I am going to take off the bottom thingy. Let's take off this, scan me.
2:42
We don't need him. So now we can move this up.
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We can move it up halfway or we can move it up the whole way, which is what I'm gonna do.
2:50
Yeah. So you see there's the other circuit board right there.
2:55
I don't like where these, where these arrow keys are.
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Oh yeah, there we go. Oh wait. They are RGB.
3:04
Ah, yeah. Oh, I was wrong. It is perky RGB.
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Ta-da! Much better. Although now, I don't like such small keyboards.
3:14
Give me more room to work. What do you think about this sucker?
3:18
- [Man Wearing Cap] I think it looks pretty neat. I like how many knobs it's got.
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Oh, I don't like it (laughs). - What?
3:25
What's wrong then? What's wrong with it. You didn't even start typing.
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- It's the home row feels like, oh, I don't like the layout.
3:35
I've got to think before I type. - Well. - The note pad.
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- You gotta get used to. - The keys are okay.
3:42
They're they're not like, I'm not crazy about them. What I actually liked the most
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is the lively. I love the acrylic base.
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Like I like how it's like a cool, like it's so bare bones. Like it's an acrylic base. - Yeah.
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It's just like a PCB or something here. - Yeah, yeah. - Like that's super awesome.
3:55
- How much is this, $250? 400?.
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(someone in background laughs) That's too much.
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(someone in background laughs) And like, I'm sure it's really good,
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but is it $400 good?
4:10
Oh, we'll see. Thanks to Secret Lab for sponsoring today's video.
4:15
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4:20
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4:23
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4:27
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4:30
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4:35
So head to the link in the description and check out Secret Lab today.
4:39
Two weeks later of using this board kind of, sort of, and wow, this is not my thing,
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but that doesn't mean it's bad. Basically my assessment is,
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if this is the kind of board that you like,
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you'll know. I've never used a 40% board before.
4:58
I've also never used an ortho-linear board before. It is hard to get used to
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this exclamation mark.
5:13
Nope, that's a capital Q. Is it that one? There we go.
5:16
You have a bunch of different layers and things that you can do.
5:19
It's a little hard to remember everything. I prefer to have everything just labeled with just one key.
5:25
So, you know, keys are staggered because it hearkens back
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from the days of the typewriter. When the little thingy that leads to the thing
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that strikes the key actually needs to physically be aligned. So it's just a thing that we've gotten used to.
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There's really no reason for it. So I totally understand why somebody would wanna go ortho-linear.
5:43
So that's not really a strike against it. It's actually in its favor.
5:46
So it came with this little foot thing on the bottom
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and I don't like it because it makes your hands go up like this.
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I forget what that's called in ergonomic terms. But guess what?
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I put these cute little feet that I just happened to have lying around on the bottom.
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And those worked perfectly. There's a surprisingly vibrant and active community
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around this board. The whole thing was crowdfunded
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and people are like really into this. So, I've had to kind of rethink,
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how I do these product overviews?
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I've so often just been thinking about what's best for me.
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I've been talking to Mike on discord and he told me about all the effort
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that he went through talking to lots and lots of people to figure out, what do people actually want
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in their keyboard in this particular niche?
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He's targeting a niche. I'm not in that niche,
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but there's all sorts of interesting decisions here that were made because of the type of person
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who would want this. He says it's for creators/designers.
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I think those terms are too broad. I think you gotta throw in,
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like keyboard enthusiast and person with not much space on their desk
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and person who can stomach having to relearn ortho-linear
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and use like extra modifier keys for everything.
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Because, the one advantage is like, everything is really close together.
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Whereas with my setup, I have to move my hands all over the place,
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even though it's always in the same spot, you know, if you're good,
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you can just do some sort of fancy combination of keys.
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One thing I do like about it is that the interface for changing things is via,
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which is this graphical user interface. It's fairly simple to use, which is good.
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Compare that to what I had to do for my QMK based
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has tool converter right here. And you can see, you know, it's kind of visually laid out,
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but it's certainly nothing compared to a straight GUI.
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And of course, you've gotta just write all the texts down yourself.
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You know, it's either gonna be this or, Ooh, this is much nicer.
8:04
I can't really properly evaluate it. So all I can say is like
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what features it does and doesn't have, so perusing the website, for example,
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it kind of looks like this is gonna have API access.
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Like you look here and it kind of strongly implies
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that it has fancy access to Adobe creative cloud,
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DaVinci resolve, Final Cut, Ableton live blender. It has no API access.
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And I really think they should put that on the website. What you're doing is just putting regular keystrokes
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on the dials, which is what I suspected because they are discrete dials.
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Like they, they have obvious steps to them.
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You can always feel when a keystroke is being sent,
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which is the right choice for this kind of a use case.
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I particularly enjoyed using one of the dials
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to do undo and redo and Photoshop. There's standard stuff,
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like you can use a dial to increase or decrease
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the size of your brush in Photoshop, for example.
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And I've also got this one with shift where if I hold it down, it'll do the,
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what is that called softness, which is nice. But again, I do have a mac row
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that works way better than this and as much more visual, just using Photoshop's built in keyboard shortcuts.
9:22
It's nice, but I already have a thing that's better. But this keyboard really made me appreciate
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the monogram a lot more actually and understand a lot more of the problems
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that go into creating something that is modular,
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like this one and has, in this case, these are not discrete tiles,
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but they do have API access and it's gotten a lot better.
9:42
I, oh, I have a video about the monogram, if you wanna watch that too.
9:46
But this keyboard is seeking to solve different problems,
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right? It's intended as a primary keyboard. I was thinking I'd maybe use it as a secondary keyboard.
9:54
I've got all these secondary things already. It is, there's no reason to do that.
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Even though you can buy it with different key caps,
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some of which are blank. So you can just, I don't know, use your imagination.
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So here Mike says I wasn't comfortable spending 300 bucks on a keyboard I needed to build myself.
10:11
It's all fun and games until you fry your board 'cause you're not familiar with DIY, you know, soldering.
10:16
We're talking here about like, why didn't he make it a hot swappable key switches.
10:23
Most professionals don't have time to be fiddling around with switches. Hence why we picked a good all around switch
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for the pre-built and then, and then offer the DIY people who really want it.
10:31
I was just really impressed by how much research he did
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to determine what people would want in a 40% modular keyboard
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that also has little dials on it. And I don't get it,
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but I think it's, it's good. Like it's good for what it is.
10:51
He actually sent me some renders of a potential num pad module,
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which you could put on either side of the keyboard. So that's cool. And then that makes the whole thing more modular
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'cause you could move this one over to here, or you could put that one sideways.
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You could have a bunch of these, if you wanted to. It's kind of cool that you can just choose
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whatever legend you want on here. All right So, you can have blank key caps,
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you can have this, you can have that. So that's pretty cute.
11:17
I don't like it, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Yeah, that's it that's,
11:21
I can't, there's nothing more I can say. Other than to give you the information.
11:26
Do 40% people like it? I don't, apparently they do. 40% people, I don't understand you.
11:31
I don't understand. And maybe I never will.