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As a straight dude, my first internal knee-jerk reaction was “this is such a stupid solution to a stupid problem”, but then my mental “Don’t be an asshat because not everybody is like you” guard rail kicked in.
Clearly this is a product for a market of people that it works for and I’m happy for them. Enjoy your neat keyboard thing, long nailed peeps.
you’re absolutely right. this is a stupid solution for a stupid problem. But you’re also right that this is a product for a special subset of people that need this and whom this works for.
Both can be true.
That’s the nice thing about capitalism (free market economics actually): You don’t have a authority that decides what is useful and useless, what gets produced and what doesn’t. Because in the End, everything is useless. I have a robotvac because I’m too lazy to vacuum myself. Stupid and Lazy. I have a Vacuum cleaner because I’m too lazy to use a Broom. Stupid and Lazy.
So yes, it’s both. Stupid solution to a stupid problem. But it’s also a great product that solves a problem that a subset of our population has and therefore useful.
You don’t have a authority that decides what is useful and useless, what gets produced and what doesn’t.
Well sort of, the “authority” in the case of a truly free market is The Market (or The People, if you will.) If it sells it sells, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, The Market will decide.
That said, I agree with the rest of your statement and realize that you meant authority in a truer sense, and I in more of a metaphorical sense.
*want
People want this, they don’t need it. Because nobody needs to have nails like that - they choose to. If they want to look silly, that’s their prerogative, but let’s not call it anything other than a personal choice and not a necessity.
But if you have the nails, then you need something to make it easier to type, assuming your job involves a lot of typing. Just because the need was created by fulfilling a want doesn’t make it less of a need, because at the end of the day, anything could be reduced down to wants instead of needs, and that’s not helpful.
Except they don’t. Example, my fiancee is a fine dining chef, and as such has to keep her fingernails trimmed pretty short. If she decided to do the long nail thing, she’d be told to trim them. If you want to wear a party dress or beach attire to your office job, guess what, you can’t. If you wear metal jewelry and are an electrician, that stuff stays in your locker or home, same for food service.
Utility > vanity. If your aesthetic choices inhibit your ability to do your job, then you need to make different choices. This isn’t an accommodation for a disability or religious thing. If you want your appearance to get in the way of your work and it doesn’t impact your work, then you don’t need accommodation. If it’s uncomfortable then that’s your own damn fault.
no they need it look it up
Exactly. There are a ton of stupid products out there, and ecosystems around those stupid products, and I think that’s awesome. Variety is the spice of life after all. For example:
- self-driving cars - if we had properly designed cities and infrastructure, we wouldn’t need cars in the first place
- shampoos and conditioners for damaged hair - only needed because we wreck our hair with bleaches and dyes
- waist trainers/corsets - only needed because we’re lethargic and eat too much
Yet each of those has facilitated variety. Cars are an expression of what we value, hair styles are a huge part of our identities, and plus-sized product lines can build confidence and have created a market all their own. I certainly won’t ever understand a ton of the products that exist, but I like that those products exist, because it means that there’s a ton of variety in how we live our lives.
So yeah, keep making weird solutions to unnecessary problems. But at the same time, let’s try to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy our planet.
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Good catch!
tippy taps!
A lot of people in this thread knee-jerk hating on the nails don’t realise that it’s just culturally-entrenched misogyny. More people need a “Don’t be an asshat because not everybody is like you” guard rail.
The 🏳️🌈🇺🇦🇪🇺🏳️⚧️🇹🇼🇮🇱🏳️🌈 thought police have gotten to you, brother.
Ok bud. Sure thing.
Typing with long nails is the embodiment of “beauty is pain.”
The pain is real, but the beauty is subjective.
To me long nails are ick
The longer the more ick
I will never forget when I had to help a coworker with her laptop, she had long nails that had worn grooves in her keyboard keys.
She typed on her nails, the sound it made was terrible.
Ew. Most people I’ve seen w/ long nails type with the pads of their fingers, with absolutely terrible typing posture.
It’ was a status thing. Those with manual labor jobs usually can’t have long nails, so long nails means they’re above manual labor. So the rich in the past did that, and now everybody wants to do that so and it becomes a beauty thing.
Everybody definitely doesn’t.
Jesus these comments scream basement dweller. You don’t have to like what someone does with their own body to accept it. It doesn’t hurt you so don’t worry about it. God forbid people have some self expression
I accept that people sometimes keep their nails long. That acceptance comes with a caveat that I will not be eating anything handled by hands with long nails.
I’ll snort the blow off their nail, though. I’m not a hater.
God forbid people have some self expression
They do indeed forbid it.
10 "If you go to battle against your enemies, and the LORD your God delivers them into your control, you may take some prisoners captive. 11 If you see among the prisoners a beautiful woman and you desire her, then you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her to your house, but shave her head and trim her nails
Deuteronomy 21
Oh man, religions are batshit crazy.
if the LORD your God delivers them into your control
AKA feel free to murder someone then fuck their wife (assuming you’re Jewish, of course)
❤️
It doesn’t hurt you so don’t worry about it
Eh, not so sure. Beauty standards propagate, and pressure to conform to those standards is real.
That’s just how fashion works. In this case fashion requires disabling a functional part of your body. It’s at least a bit icky.It’s not though. It’s got advantages, but typing isn’t one of them. I can open stuff peel based way better etc.
I really only need like 2 or 3 mm of extra nail on one thumb to open oranges and grapefruits perfectly fine. Anything longer than that and it becomes unwieldy and unhygienic.
On the contrary, since growing my nails out my nails have been way more clean. There is an awkward period between no nails and long nails where stuff gets caught underneath, but once you grow them out (only two weeks or so), they’re perfectly clean because there’s just more space underneath and nowhere for gunk to get caught as the angle is wider.
Great job insulting people for having a differing opinion.
A chiclet membrane to go over your non-mechanical keyboard, it’s like double hell.
Sounds like typing on a keyboard made of Jujubes.
I’d eat that in a heartbeat.
Actually, my giant mechanical Blackwidow keyboard is way easier to use than my laptop when my nails are long.
How can it be easier to use keys with traditional keyswitches? You’d have more key travel.
I’ve switched out keycaps to make them comfortable for me. You can customise them. I find it very hare to type on a laptop keyboard for a long time and it fucks up my posture.
Hmm. Interesting.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you describe what alternate keycaps were used? Like, taller keycaps in the front, shorter in the back? Like, I still think that the amount of keytravel would be a negative, but maybe the issue is that the long nails descend into the keyboard given the normal position of a hand typing, and basically changing the angle improves that.
If that’s the case, I’m wondering whether maybe it’d be possible to change the angle of the keyboard as a whole. Like, either use an external keyboard propped up differently, tilting away from the user, or a laptop with the front part of the base shimmed up to tilt away from the user.
I use softer keycaps, some are resin! I also have the back propped up like you mentioned with the built in lifts. I also have carpel tunnel so I don’t want to cram my hands into a small space and it’s OK to be slow sometimes. And a good wrist rest is key.
I also have the back propped up like you mentioned with the built in lifts
Ah hah!
Yeah, there are some ergo keyboards that have that “reverse tilt” built in. They’re aimed more at being easier on the wrist than at trying to permit for long nails, but they do exist.
e.g.:
I also have carpel tunnel
That’d be an argument for a keyboard, like, a mechanical one where you don’t bottom out the keys on press, and then training yourself to not bottom them out, which is a big argument mechanical keyboard fans have for theirs versus rubber dome keyboards. And you need a fair bit of key travel for that, yeah. Hmm.
I’ve convinced some if my girlfriends to switch as they have white versions and Blackwidows are fairly cheap on Ebay (£50-75). :) They like them as they’re heavy writers.
I’m not a fan of the long nails because it hurts my insides.
Also fecal matter and bacteria are stored in abundance under long nails.
This thing costs about the same as one good set of nails
This thing costs less than one dose of antibiotics :
Don’t use that on your bum.
It’s a sharp bidet.
Works great under the nails though
That part I like.
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I sometimes have medium length nails (3-5 mm past the fingertip), though I tend to just grow my own out, and I do it entirely for myself. I have a bunch of different kinds of nail polish and stencils for making cool patterns and it satisfies my inner elementary school librarian urge to dress up for even very minor holidays.
People have come up to me and told me that my nails are too long for them to find attractive, which is a bizarre non sequitur imo. I don’t know why the assumption is that any self-decoration is intended as a sexual signal: my ideal nail-based interaction is that a little kid asks about them and I get to tell them about Arbor Day or national soup day or something.
Sometimes they make life more difficult, and then I either find workarounds (opening pull tabs with a spoon, for example) or cut them, depending on how much time I have and how much I like my current nails.
I get that they’re not for everyone, but I like them, so I wear them. It’s okay if others don’t like them, they don’t have to wear them.
It blows my mind when people do that.
“Hey, the way that you styled yourself makes me not want to have sex with you.”
“Uhhh… Cool?”
And there’s a lot of people in the world that effectively get told this all their life.
Some for things that aren’t even their choice.
❤️
A solution to a self inflicted problem.
And? Nearly everything is a self inflicted problem. You could just lay down and stop bothering, so why don’t you do that?
Do I like long nails? Hell no. Does it affect me if somebody buys this keyboard to type and have long nails? Also hell no.
Ergonomic chairs are also a solution to an often self-inflicted problem. Mainly doing all kinds of things to your body when you’re young that you don’t realize you’ll regret when you’re older.
Are ergonomic chairs a bad thing?
Man, I wish I could just trim my bursitis.
Kinda cool but shit $45 for a piece of silicone those margins are insane.
Yeah but it’s for Macs so what do you expect
Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).
Now I know! :)
Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…
I’ve always wondered about wiping one’s ass. Seems like you’d want a nail brush handy to wash up every time.
Which part of the world are you from? Here we use toilet paper to wipe (but we still wash our hands afterwards). I haven’t really heard of someone using their nails before, that sounds kinda weird.
Must be the part where we don’t use armor plated TP.
What are you eating, Kevlar?
My SIL has long nails, and watching her use her phone and laptop is just fascinating. So many problems I just never even considered…
It’s about the angle, you cannot orient it towards your pads as much on a laptop.
Hmm. That’s an interesting problem to have.
On one hand, I can’t suggest a great alternative, but man, silicone keys…I guess if they work for the author.
Stenotypists – people who have to professionally do very high-speed text entry – do use these dinky specialized keyboards that IIRC from a Japanese-language one – I think that there were multiple Japanese layouts – can only have a home row or something. I think that they use chording or something. I don’t know if that might address it, but learning one would be a huge change. Also, I have no idea what keys they can output…given that they’re highly-optimized for text entry, they might not be able to do weird symbols.
goes looking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
A steno machine, stenotype machine, shorthand machine, stenograph or steno writer is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. In order to pass the United States Registered Professional Reporter test, a trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively.[1] Some stenographers can reach up to 375 words per minute, according to the website of the California Official Court Reporters Association (COCRA).[2]
Hmm.
Looking at the key layout there, and here:
…it looks like English-language stenotype keyboards don’t just use a single row, but rather two or more rows. So that’s probably out.
There’s apparently a second chording layout, the “palantype” layout, but that also doesn’t do only one key per finger:
https://www.openstenoproject.org/palantype/tutorial/2016/08/21/learn-palantype.html
There are dedicated chording keyboards that do use only one key per finger, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard
That has some examples of one-key-per-finger keyboards, like the BAT keyboard (well, that has three for the thumb, but given that you hit those with the side of the thumb, I assume that it’d be okay with long nails):
https://www.infogrip.com/bat-keyboard.html
The problem is that (a) the BAT is discontinued and (b) you really don’t want a one handed keyboard, which is what the BAT does…it’d be better to have a two handed chorded keyboard, or you’re taking half of your fingers out of the picture.
EDIT: Here’s an open-source, two-handed chording keyboard, the Ialboard, based on the discontinued DataHand keyboard. I’m not sure that it’d work with very long nails in its current form – they might collide with the structure of the keyboard – but it’s 3d printed and I’m pretty sure that if the format doesn’t work as-is, a tweak to the 3d-printed keys would permit for arbitrarily long nails. Just need to create a space for 'em.
Gonna need some serious keyboard re-learning, though.
EDIT2: Here’s another two-handed chording keyboard with one input device per finger, the CharaChorder. It uses an analog D-pad under each finger. I think that it’d have space for long nails as-is. It does have separate arrow key and mouse control sticks, and I’m not sure if those, given the placement, would be an issue for long nails. I’d imagine that if one were determined to work around that with an external mouse device and – if you use arrow keys enough to need it; I rarely do – maybe some dedicated arrow key keyboard, though I’d think that having the arrow keys in vim-style hjkl-style layout might be preferable to the inverted-T layout that seems common. I don’t know whether the barrel connector’s positioning there would be an issue, though the positioning of that is obviously not critical to the keyboard, and I imagine that if it is an issue, with a bit of work, one could relocate it.
EDIT3: It looks like there’s another DataHand-based 3D-printed keyboard besides the above-mentioned Ialboard, the Svalboard. Same argument as with the Ialboard – I’m not sure that it’d be usable with long nails as is, but I’m pretty sure that that design could be modified with approprately-different key shapes to permit long nails to extend through a gap. You can apparently buy the thing in kit form, 3D-print it, so I figure that if someone wants to make a “longnail” variant of a few of the 3D-printed parts, that’d probably be a pretty easy keyboard to start from.
The downside is that I don’t think that – unlike the above CharaChorder – this comes with a travel carrying case, which might be important if you’re a laptop user. I guess it’d probably be possible to craft something with foam and a shell, but that’s not off-the-shelf any more.
Words per minute meaning literally words or characters? Because 3 - 4 words per second seems a bit much to me and whoever talks that fast?
Words per minute meaning literally words or characters?
Words. Well, IIRC in tests it’s something like an abstract word of fixed length, something like 5 characters or something, as that’s the average word length in English. Like, it doesn’t mean you’re typing “antidisestablishmentarianism” over and over, one word each time.
kagis
Yeah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute
Since words vary in length, for the purpose of measurement of text entry the definition of each “word” is often standardized to be five characters or keystrokes long in English,[1] including spaces and punctuation. For example, under such a method applied to plain English text the phrase “I run” counts as one word, but “rhinoceros” and “let’s talk” would both count as two.
Karat et al. found in one study of average computer users in 1999 that the average rate for transcription was 32.5 words per minute, and 19.0 words per minute for composition.[2] In the same study, when the group was divided into “fast”, “moderate”, and “slow” groups, the average speeds were 40 wpm, 35 wpm, and 23 wpm, respectively.
With the onset of the era of desktop computers and smartphones, fast typing skills became much more widespread. As of 2019, the average typing speed on a mobile phone was 36.2 wpm with 2.3% uncorrected errors—there were significant correlations with age, level of English proficiency, and number of fingers used to type.[3] Some typists have sustained speeds over 200 wpm for a 15-second typing test with simple English words.[4]
Typically, professional typists type at speeds of 43 to 80 wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other time-sensitive typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm.[5] Two-finger typists, sometimes also referred to as “hunt and peck” typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorized text and 27 wpm when copying text, but in bursts may be able to reach much higher speeds.[6] From the 1920s through the 1970s, typing speed (along with shorthand speed) was an important secretarial qualification, and typing contests were popular and often publicized by typewriter companies as promotional tools.
Stenotype
Stenotype keyboards enable the trained user to input text as fast as 360 wpm at very high accuracy for an extended period, which is sufficient for real-time activities such as court reporting or closed captioning. While training dropout rates are very high — in some cases only 10% or even fewer graduate — stenotype students are usually able to reach speeds of 100–120 wpm within six months, which is faster than most alphanumeric typists. Guinness World Records gives 360 wpm with 97.23% accuracy as the highest achieved speed using a stenotype.[7]
So it’s not a typo or whatever, if that’s what you mean.
Because 3 - 4 words per second seems a bit much to me and whoever talks that fast?
It’s pretty fast, but then you’re talking about a professional text-entry person using the fastest plain-text entry mechanism we know about in a speed test. I’m sure that that’s not something demanded of a stenotypist in a normal real-time transcription session.
My guess is that you probably could still make practical use of it if you didn’t need real-time transcription by doing a recording and then playing back with software that can do time stretching to accelerate the rate of playback; you could transcribe more-quickly.
'course, automated transcription’s getting better too, and that might also be an answer on that front.
If only something allowed you to use the typing system you already know, was able to be rolled up, doesn’t require you to already own a 3D printer and have knowledge of modeling software, and cost less than $50.
If only…
The Tippy Type is a keyboard cover for MacBooks
I could have predicted that even if the article never mentioned it.
This is awesome. Not really any notes, I’m just glad this exists.
I guess a mechanical keyboard with round ketcaps would do the trick as well. Not the same budget though…
The thing that I can’t understand about this product is why they didn’t cover the function keys. They are literally functional.
Although using the top row of keys does not cause you to accidentally hit keys above it.
Yes but I’m guessing to also be universal some macs have the touch bar which this would then cover
Long nails can look pretty, and while I’m sure this would help people with long nails, I think it would just give me an RSI or just be differently frustrating.
No thanks. I’ll paint my short nails so I can—you know—use my hands. And that’s free.
