We’re in the process of finalizing the add-on keycaps for the Model 100, but wanted to take a moment (or really a couple days) to let folks flag potential issues with our keycap legends.
These are the Linear A legends as currently planned. The layout here is how the caps are positioned on the painting jigs. Most keys are where you’d expect them, but the thumb keys have been moved around to make the tooling easier to manage. (I’ve also included the QWERTY keycaps for reference.) There is no significance to the colors.
As a heavy user of the Liniear-A keycaps, i actually couldn‘t say what even might be wrong
I use those keycaps because I switch positions of keys quite regularly and having something „unrelated“ makes it easier when accidentally looking at the keyboard.
So, for me it looks all good - and great thanks for the opportunity to give feedback!
Agreeing witih @zagdul here; I prefer the linear A look over blank keycaps; but they serve much the same purpose. I don’t think there is a “right” or “wrong” way to do them. It seems like the mirroring of similar glyphs such as on the function keys remains, which is awesome from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
Same thing as @zagdul and @Sukkubix. For all intents and purposes, they’re random symbols - they may as well be made-up, except we know how to pronounce most made-up alphabets. Any of us who picked Linear-A are really good touch-typists and most likely using a very different layout, so I don’t think anyone is going to be concerned about the glyph positions.
That being said, they look good to me. I’ll probably keep the butterfly, and maybe the “Any” key from the base set, but it’s nice to have the option to swap them out.
However, and being completely new please forgive me if this is a no issue or I didn’t understood I just made noise…
Our hands are horizontally separated. But our eyes are centered and behind the keyboard.
So in order to optimize the glyph viewing (yes, we who ask for Linear-A are touch typists, but these are non-blank keycaps) and minimize the finger obstruction, they may be all in the bottom part and more to the center (close to the eyes). This would be:
in the bottom left corner of the keycap for the right hand side and
the bottom right corner for those of the left hand side.
Again, maybe I didn’t even understood what is this about, but it’s better to err on the safe side.
I guess I was wondering about the thumb key legends being on the left whereas the Mac ones are centered. I guess it’s probably by design but thought I might mention it in case Without the physical keyboard it’s hard to know what it actually looks like though.
[Edit] I’m having trouble finding images of the Model 01 linear A but this render shows the legends in the middle i.e. left thumb has legends on the right - Linear A palm keys poll
Personally I like them to be bigger and centered, like on the Atreus.
But I guess it also make sense to align with the qwerty layout, in case some would like to mix the two, which I may.
The word-labels on the various function keys are centered, but single-character labels aren’t supposed to be. The centering on the first draft of the mac set was a mistake. I’m working on a rev of that set of legends.
Centered symbols don’t work well with LEDs – the stems of the keys block all light transmission, so we only get LED on one side of the key. We can’t deviate significantly from the size of the regular QWERTY legends.
(We do deviate for the butterfly key, but the uneven light is definitely visible.)
Strangely, having different symbol at the same place than my Model01 Linear-A keyset confuse me, so it feels good for me
For the size of the symbols, Model01 is very smart, and having bigger symbols may impact the light quality from the LED colors and intensity ? I’m not opinionated here : Jesse & Kaia can’t be wrong
