the review tag
Preorder Art. Lebedev Optimus Maximus Keyboard
Three days ago, I posted about the imminent release of the Optimus Maximus Keyboard by the russian design studio Art. Lebedev. Now, the countdown on their website finally reached zero and we get to see the details of the 1500$ keyboard:
- Keyboard Dimensions: 53.7cm x 17.3cm x 3.8cm
- Key Dimensions: 2.02cm x 2.02cm
- Visible OLED area: 1.01cm
- Resolution of each key: 48px x 48px
- Frame Rate: min. 10 frames per second
- Color: 65536
- Viewing Angle: 160°
- Connection: USB2.0
- OS: Windows XP / Vista, Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher
To enhance the life of the OLED displays and the ribbon cables used to control them, Art Lebedev Studios decided to make every button a module consisting of a chip, the OLED display and a moving, transparent cap. Since only the plastic cap is moving, the displays have a much higher lifespan.
Preorders can be placed now. The price is US$ 1564 or approximately € 1257.
Simulate Color Blindness with Color Oracle
I just noticed an interesting article on color blindness over at Pixelgraphix. Color Oracle helps webdesigners to view in real time, what a website would look like for people suffering from one of the various color blindnesses. The filter is applied to the whole screen so it’s completely independent from the browser and even works with images in Photoshop.
Color Oracle is free and available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Panic’s 10th Anniversary: Coda
The stars finally seem to be in a good constellation for web designers this month. Adobe shipped Creative Suite 3, CSS Edit was upgraded to 2.5 and we are seeing the first Alphas of Firefox 3. Iwas even more excited, when Steven F. commented on Panic’s 10 Year Anniversary:
“It is by a more or less random coincidence that on the day after our company’s tenth birthday, we will be conducting by far our biggest, most ambitious new software launch of all time. I hope you’ll come by to check it out, especially if you make web sites.”
What Panic released a few days later reminded me once again why a Mac is the best platform for developing websites: Coda is just the application I’ve been waiting for all my life. I’m not merely enthused, I’m seriously stunned.
Coda is a single, tiny application which handles all your webdesign needs. Editing (X)HTML and CSS, previewing, FTP (of course), Terminal access and a great reference book, all in one. The Panic team introduces Coda with the words:
“So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. ‘This could be easier,’ we realized. ‘And much cooler.’”
You can read more by Panic co-founders Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser. And John Gruber also has a nice review of Coda on his web site.
