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A different kind of keyboard (2021)
I’ve always been attracted to chording keyboards in theory, but I lack whatever childhood musical training is required to wrap my fingers around them. So I made something else: an arpeggio keyboard. Peggi is an eight-key keyboard that fits on the back of your phone. While chording keyboards require you to press multiple keys at the same time, arpeggio keyboards only ask that you type multiple keys in sequence.
I thought it was clever to put keys on the back of a phone: it leaves your thumbs free to reposition the cursor or do other navigationy things; it keeps the overall form factor relatively compact and pocket-friendly. It only worked with a custom iOS app I wrote that listened to the individual keypress events and synthetically “typed” the corresponding letters into a UITextView. I’ve never actually used one, but the Twiddler v1 might have been the first chording keyboard I ever heard of, so it has a special place in my heart for getting me interested in the world of alternative input devices.
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