Just curious, for those that like to work in sla

[joshuac]

Just curious, for those that like to work in slate mode, do you use anything (usb/bluetooth devices) as a keyboard replacement so you can have your shortcut keys?

When i use my wacom at work, my left hand always stays in the home position to hit all my hotkeys when necessary. i can't imagine having to move the mouse/pen around to click on something that could be done 1.5 seconds faster! Yeah, i'm a nut for speeding up workflows.

anyway, as i await my M4 to arrive (yes, finally ordered it!), i'm thinking of my workflow when in tablet mode. for those that use hotkeys a lot, what do you do?

i saw the post about the playstation controller, and thats somewhat along my thoughts. here's my plan: i've had my eye on this since last year, but never had a real *need* to get it. i think this situation would be perfect though...

The Nostromo SpeedPad n52 by belkin.
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=2071&pcount=&Product_Id=157024

sure its a 'gaming' device, but i have friends that use them for maya and photoshop hotkey-goodness. it will definitely fill in that missing half of the keyboard for my left hand, while i ink away with my right.


thoughts?

[LoTekK]

Some months back I borrowed one from a friend to try it out with Photoshop, and it's a real boon. You can reach an much greater number of hotkeys and key combos without moving your hand than you could possibly hope to with a standard keyboard, and it's nicely portable to boot. And it certainly beats the limited number of hardware buttons available on most tablets.

[ejhdigdug]

You can alwayse try XKeys:

http://www.piengineering.com/xkeys.php

There's a lot of different types and footpads, personally I want to take my tablet on the road and a PS2 controller is just a more elegant solution.

[joshuac]

Ah yes, i saw a bunch of xkeys stuff at siggraph last year. cool stuff.

lotekk, did you end up getting one for yourself?

here's another product that looked very cool. there was a guy walking around a show floor demoing it one year... had to dig up his card to remember the name of it -
http://www.ergodex.com/

pretty neat that you can move your keys around however you want them laid out, plus you can label them however you want. the bad thing is that its not shaped to fit your hand like the n52 is.

[LoTekK]

Some of the XKeys stuff looks pretty nice, but the N52 is really comfortably contoured.

And that ergodex doodad looks incredibly bizarre. Kinda cool, but definitely not as portable as some of the XKeys stuff or the N52.

Oddly enough, I never got around to purchasing an N52 for myself, and over time I sort of forgot about it. Until this week, anyways. I'm planning to hunt for one some time next week.

[Keith Osborn]

I wish I could use the Speedpad n52 but alas, I'm a lefty. I do own an Xkeys and while not as ergonomic as the Speedpad, it does the job nicely. I like that you can print your own button labels too.