Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
Date I Joined the Drop: March 13, 2017 SillySpinner Expressed Concerns About FCC: March 27, 2017 YanboWu Dismisses Concerns About FCC: April 10, 2017 Massdrop Announces "a small issue" Promises kits en route by July 5th: June 12, 2017 Original Estimated Ship Date: June 26, 2017 Massdrop Announces FCC Testing Delays: July 10, 2017 Opt-in Email Sent: August 3, 2017 Opt-in Specified Ship Date "At the latest": August 30, 2017 Massdrop Announces They Don't Have Enough Switches: September 2, 2017 Current Estimated Ship Date: September 13, 2017
I think this time-line reveals a pattern of what is at best negligence and at worst deliberate lying from massdrop during communication. They had plenty of time from when SillySpinner asked about testing and the ship date to look into what was necessary for the boards to be cleared. SillySpinner even asked about international testing so I don't think that excuse is really valid either.
Then months after the testing is being performed Massdrop reveals that they don't even have all the complete kits due to an ambiguous "human error". So now they are scrambling to ship all of the kits and keep pushing the deadlines back. It feels like something a student would do after missing the deadline for an assignment yet again. I'm tired of MD providing dodgy answers and avoiding any communication unless they have to because they missed another deadline. I understand that manufacturing has issues, I've seen them in the MiTo Canvas drop and am mostly okay with them there, but these issues are not production related they are Massdrop related. They should have known about testing and we don't even know what actually caused the second delay because they won't tell us what caused it outside of "human error".
If my order doesn't ship today I'm never buying from MD again, and even if it does it won't be for a damn long while. I ain't paying for months of anxiety.