If I understand correctly, some keyboard companies (like Ajazz) have been willing to work with the community to do custom projects like BLF does… or at least customized products. But the community hasn’t really pursued that because it offers limited control and no profit? So the projects follow a different pattern instead.
It would take time and probably multiple projects to build a good relationship with keyboard companies, to get to a point similar to where BLF is at. It took a long time to go from group buys to special editions to completely custom products. I get the impression people haven’t been willing to follow that path though, because it’s too slow and it’s a lot of work for no compensation. Plus, keyboards require more extensive circuit designs and more extensive firmware, which raises the barrier to entry. But it seems like enough of that work is done now that it could maybe still be feasible.
Anyway, I’m not heavily involved in the keyboard community so I’m going based on outside impressions and limited involvement in a couple of the development subcommunities there. Regardless, it sounds like there are still some pretty nice items being made, and I look forward to some I’ve heard may be coming soon.
For now though, I’m typing on a keyboard I’ve customized quite a bit, configured so light splashes like raindrops at every keypress.
It doesn’t even have labels. I’m using blank white keycaps because it lets the light shine through better.
Maybe I should put up a video sometime soon. It looks like the keys are made out of white chocolate, except that they have rainbow lights splashing around underneath.
Yup. If you wanna do a group buy for custom keycaps (which usually costs more than $100) you have to give em your money first then wait up to a year (or more) to receive them. Right now there’s a group buy going on for keycaps where the chinese manufacturer hasn’t responded to messages in over a month.
I don’t have China experience, but there may be some generalization of West vs. Asia here. My experience working in a Japanese office is that there is a cultural barrier as well as a language barrier, and the cultural one is far more significant to our understanding, often resulting in those processes that don’t seem to follow common sense, as you describe. Our concept of a strong leader who can take executive control when the rabble can’t agree isn’t universally shared outside of the West. And again, I don’t know about China, but I saw meetings being held late into the night over the smallest, most trivial (in my opinion) stuff when I was in Japan because they wanted everyone to feel like their voices had been heard. When I suggested they just let a leader take all the evidence into consideration and make a suitable decision, or even to take an office-wide vote and go with the majority opinion, they looked at me like I didn’t have any common sense myself.
^ not following common sense is the short answer, these questions have come up before and in the long answer I certainly brought up both the language and cultural barrier. Still even for a chinese company with their chinese way of doing things I think that following a “western” approach to developing new products would be beneficial overall.
Messing around with an idea for a dual-purpose clip thats only possible due to the FW3A’s geometry. Default is a deep carry, with a cap clip on the tailside. The clip goes through itself, having to pull it out to get a cap-bill through. The sketch is exaggerated to make the design obvious. The first bend coming off of the body wouldn’t create a gap between it and the return bend