Meet SHORTCUT-S,  a 319-button keyboard, specially for Photoshop

 

 

Adobe Photoshop has a pretty high barrier to entry—not in the least because of the arcane nested menu settings, and contortionist key combinations required to use it quickly. SHORTCUT-S is a Kickstarter for a new type of keyboard, one designed specifically for Photoshop (and potentially other applications), where there's an individual key for each action.

For those of us who have been using Photoshop for years, many of the key combinations are so ingrained into our muscle memory that we couldn't tell you what they are without looking at what buttons we automatically push when we want to "invert selection". But the SHORTCUT-S wants to bypass that by giving each function a button of its own—and if you want one, the backing starts at just $89.

That said, we're skeptical about the whole thing. The idea is that you can have one hand on the mouse the entire time, but the incredibly large and confusingly laid out grid of choices in the SHORTCUT-S would actually probably be slower than key combinations, due to the need to hunt and peck from among the 300+ buttons available. A traditional keyboard has somewhere slightly over 100 keys, meaning you only have to be able to recall 1/3 as many locations to access a setting. Also, since you use the keyboard everyday anyway, when someone tells you to press the U key, you already know where that is. Finding a setting amidst 319 buttons might be trickier.

But, if you think it might make your Photoshop experience a bit faster, and a bit better, than by all means. For a new user especially, being able to see each command laid out is probably a bit more straightforward than trying to remember the Byzantine keyboard combinations that so many of us have become used to.

(via PetaPixel)