Life and Incredible Adventures of Optimus Keyboards

Changing Optimus Maximus
Engadget (after changing its own design) is asking people how they would change the Optimus Maximus:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/11/how-would-you-change-the-optimus-maximus/

As with most of our specialized products we have the same problem with Optimus keyboards: people know why they need them and give us no feedback. They just quietly use our keyboards in the secret labs :-)

I know what I want to change.

1) Make Optimus Maximus an 'instant gratification' tool from the second it's connected. Now some people can spend half an hour without understanding how the keyboard should change the keys. We're working hard on designing a set of predefined layouts for most of the popular apps so that people would have more fun from the beginning.

2) Create hybrid keys in the Configurator to accomodate more than one display mode on one key. Here's an example I use in Photoshop with English and Russian keyboards both visible (it turned out that having a Brush icon is more effective on a B key when there's letter B still present). We will indicate active layout with white.