Wacom Cintiq: A Girl can Dream
I passed by Fnac this weekend and saw this beauty exposed there – the 21 inch one. It didn’t have a price and was near a bunch of other shiny unpriced, expensive-looking stuff. Anyway, it seemed awesome so I did some research and the smaller one (twelve inches) costs around 1000 euros and upwards. I didn’t bother researching about the 21” version as I’d probably have to sell my liver and both my kidneys to afford it.
I’m obviously not going to buy it, but a girl can dream. Maybe I should dust off my crappier version and try it out again. I didn’t enjoy using it much the last time, but it’s been a few years, and I have been wanting to digitally paint some drawings I’ve been doing on my new Moleskine…
Edit: Found a video of the 21” one being used. I want one. Damn it. 
In Mother Russia Keyboards Love You
Remember a while ago, when the Maximus Optimus keyboard was announced, and we were all ‘woha, such a cool concept, to be able to assign any symbols we want to our keyboard’s keys’? Okay, maybe you don’t remember, but I do and my friend Rafa told me about another keyboard concept made by the same guys: the Tactus Optimus keyboard.
The concept is even nicer than the other one, as this is basically a touchscreen surface where you can configure about everything key-wise. Don’t want the regular querty keyboard keys showing? You can change that. Want bigger-sized keys? It allows that. Want to watch videos on it? You can.
My inner usability/user interface geek squeaked a bit when I saw this. The ideas for its uses came flying – imagine you can create ‘profiles’ for the keyboard allowing you to just pick what configuration you want from a list to do something specific (a configuration for when you use the PC as a media center, another for when you play a role-playing game, etc.), imagine it has a decent support for widgets. It really does have endless possibilities.
If it goes from concept to the market, it will probably be sold at a prohibitive price (the Maximus Optimus costs something like 350 euros), but hopefully, this tech will catch on and eventually we’ll have mass market prices. Eventually.
