Digenis.org

If you haven’t seen Art Lebedev Studio’s Optimus keyboard, do yourself a favor and go take a look. It’s freaking amazing.

Each key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at any particular moment. When you hit CapsLock, the display will show all uppercase letters, and you can easily toggle between languages and keyboard layouts. Add to that the capability of associating keys with certain controls for Photoshop or video games, and you’ve got one mighty powerful keyboard.

In high school, when I was most seriously studying Spanish, I always had a cheat sheet next to my keyboard. It told me where all the letters with diacritics were. When I started studying Russian and using it on the computer, I had to learn to type all over again. And those little stickers didn’t help all too much; with the amount that I use my laptop both the Latin and Cyrillic letters were worn off in no time flat (it left me with something like this, which was annoying as heck)…

You can bet I’ll be buying one of these when it hits the markets in 2006.