Introducing Combos

Hi |FNAME|,

December! What a year this has been. I know I say this a lot, but I'm so grateful for you, our friends and customers. For me, working and talking to you has been a very grounding and rewarding experience all year long. Thank you for all of the support, the lovely emails, and for believing in what we do and sharing it with your own friends.

This month's big release is an exciting one: Combos! It's a totally new way of using your keyboard. The full announcement is below. We also have a fun quality-of-life improvement for macOS users in the form of several new keycodes, also detailed below.

In other news, we're just coordinating the shipment of a big batch of Platforms from our factory to our fulfillment center, so these should become available to order sometime in the new year. Keep an eye out for an official announcement email.

Finally, speaking of shiny new things, our friends at Fishing Cactus just released a new typing game called Outshine. I interviewed them about what goes into making one of these.

Happy holidays and all the best to you and yours,
Erez

Introducing Combos

An entirely new way to use your board

With combos, you can mash several keys at once, and have your keyboard send a keystroke, switch layers, or run a macro. Some seriously powerful stuff.

Introducing New macOS Keycodes

One-key dictation and more

We just introduced five new keycodes specific to macOS: Mission Control, Spotlight, Do Not Disturb, Lock Screen, and Dictation. Not rocket science or anything, but these are quite handy.

Featured User Interview

Esther Weidauer

Writer, Musician, Artist

Synthesizers, a folding bike, lots of great mood lighting, and even a cameo by Totoro. Esther's interview has it all — so great!

"I volunteer as a bike mechanic for a local organisation that maintains a fleet of free-to-use cargo bikes in Berlin."

Layout of the month

Layout of the month: Moonlander Mac Workman 3.0

I switched to Workman, and despite a woeful amount of practice, I got to a passable 50+ WPM after a month. I find it much easier on the wrists and pinkies. I'm a coder, who also writes documentation, so I'm working in JavaScript, MarkDown and the shell. So this is not a gamer keyboard, and any changes have to pay their way quickly, or they're out. I'm a huge fan of the tap-dance feature, and I moved from the ErgoDox-EZ to the Moonlander for the extra memory in the controller. "Come for the memory, stay for the low-profile typing experience!" ;-)

Layout of the month: Moonlander Mac Workman 3.0

Things we liked

Darwin Correspondence Project →

His life in letters

From the University of Cambridge, Darwin’s letters neatly scanned and carefully transcribed, dated, linked, and annotated. This is a surprisingly interactive way to learn about the man and also his contacts and the times he lived in. Each letter has a tab that says “Around this date” and opens up a view much like an email inbox. Fascinating.

RWTS PDFwriter →

A PDF printer for macOS, free and open-source

I recently had to deal with a password-protected PDF on my Mac. I had the password and was able to open the file — but there was no way to remove the password, not even printing it into another PDF via the Mac’s built-in PDF option. This free and open-source printer driver solved it.

Floor796 →

Where's Waldo meets Rick and Morty

An ever-expanding animation scene. The goal of the project is to create as huge an animation as possible, with many references to movies, games, anime and memes. All scenes are drawn in a special online editor right in the browser by one person, as a hobby. Note: this features some (pixel) nudity and may be NSFW for some.

Screenplays →

Movies and TV episodes

These are original scripts, scanned in. The link goes to Seinfeld— it’s just one episode, but it’s a classic. Lots of other movies and shows, too. Even if you’re not an aspiring filmmaker, these are quite fun to read through.