Voyager trackpad, DIY edition

Hi |FNAME|,

The Voyager turns one in just a few days! So crazy. At this point, with many thousands of Voyagers in the wild, I feel I can confidently say: It works. It works as a keyboard, and it works as a flexible, open platform for so many creative hardware ideas.

Below you can see one such idea, beautifully conceived and implemented by Robin: Adding a trackpad to the Voyager. Quite a fun project, and one that may inspire a more "official" product from ZSA in the future (stay tuned).

Earlier this summer, we went to NYC and met a bunch of ZSA users in person. It was quite fun, and the conversations were wide ranging. We're making a series of short videos about them which we'll be publishing over the coming months. Below you can see the first, featuring Holger.

In other news, I wrote about my favorite camping stove which is excellent despite being aggressively marketed. There's also a great interview below, with Kat. And this month's featured layout comes from Patrick, who shares all the ways he optimized the keyboard for his work as a litigator.

My favorite "find" this month has to be Entertrained. It's a new typing trainer that's both beautiful and fun to use, and has lots of great literature.

As always, thank you for reading. Email me anytime, ez@zsa.io.

All the best,
Erez

"I really didn't have to remap my brain.
That was super helpful"

- Holger Matthies, Voyager User

The Saucer

A DIY trackpad for the Voyager

This is a super cool project by Robin, resulting in a fully-functional trackpad that looks like it was made for the Voyager. ZSA might make something like this in the future — but if you're handy, you don't have to wait.

Featured User Interview

Kat Nykiel

PhD Candidate

Kat has some great recommendations for little Mac utilities as well as a Linux distro that runs on Apple Silicon machines. Plus (and maybe most important?) epic cat photos.

"Recently, I’ve been looking at graphene-like materials for ultra-high temperature applications."

Layout of the month

PEM Legal Writing

This layout is designed to address the most common issues I run into as a US litigator. I've made a lot of changes over the years, but I'm now at a place where I'm happy with it (meaning I only change something once every 2-3 weeks). There are a lot of shortcuts to cut down on three-key combos and Home Row Modifiers to keep my hands from stretching awkwardly.

Things we liked

Entertrained →

Type out books

This is not the first typing trainer I’ve seen that lets you type out whole books, but it is the best executed by far. An extremely clean experience. The onboarding “lessons” are a great way to see what it can do. The interface rocks, and there are so many great books to choose from. At the time of writing, this is ad-free and does not require creating a user account.

Strudel →

Code music in real time

Strudel is a real-time music coding environment. Just click the link, hit Play, then start editing the code as it’s playing. When you’re ready, hit Update to listen to your changes. You can also uncomment the “hush” lines and then hit Update to mute parts of the track — you can DJ!

draw →

An artful toy

Take a simple line-drawing tool and add a particle system with thousands of particles in different weights. It’s like a sandbox: To interact with the “sand”, draw things and move them around. I will not tell you how long I spent “evaluating” this for the newsletter.

X-CMD →

One command to use 500 open-source tools

This would have been a Swiss army knife if the Swiss army knife also contained a drill, a toothbrush, and a small electric vehicle. It’s a command line system (not one tool) that lets you compose numerous other tools from ls to ChatGPT. Has a plug-in system, of course. Free, open-source, and cross-platform. A little daunting.

Public Work →

Search public-domain images

There’s a seemingly endless supply of vintage drawings and photos in the public domain, spread across many museums and institutions, not always behind a pleasant search interface. Public Work is a clean and beautifully executed marketing project that gives you a search interface for over 100,000 of these images from institutions like the Met, NYPL, and others.