The Stream Deck mastered the LCD key by making it peripheral

Like many nice merchandise, the Elgato Stream Deck wasn’t precisely a brand new thought.

When the very first one debuted six years in the past this month, we immediately in contrast it to Artwork Lebedev’s legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard, which promised an array of swirling OLED screens underneath your fingertips a complete decade earlier. Razer, too, pioneered LCD keys earlier than their time, tacking them onto a keyboard and the corporate’s very first Blade laptop computer.

In at present’s digital age, it generally seems like {hardware} has taken a again seat to the software program that drives our units. Button of the Month is a month-to-month column that explores the bodily items of our telephones, tablets, and controllers we work together with every single day.

However at present, we’re celebrating the easy genius of Elgato — the corporate that lastly turned them right into a viable product by making them comparatively low cost, cozy, and most significantly: peripheral.

Artwork Lebedev and Razer each believed we wished a brand new keyboard that morphs, the place our main computing enter mechanism needs to be changed with one which intelligently adapts to our wants.

Even at present, the thought feels grand: “Why would Photoshop and Quake current you with the identical boring keyboard?” you may virtually hear Artwork Lebedev’s idea pictures ask.

Left: a Photoshop format. Proper: a Quake format with fewer keys used. Picture: Artwork Lebedev

Razer, maybe impressed by that Quake keyboard format, requested a follow-on query in 2011: “In case your keys can morph, possibly you don’t want so lots of them to play PC video games on the go?” The outcome was the Razer Switchblade, a 7-inch idea handheld gaming PC prototype created by a partnership with Intel.

Razer did not promote that one, although. The ultimate “Razer Switchblade” turned out to be far much less thrilling on the time: ten LCD keys and a touchscreen trackpad embedded into an everyday keyboard. You possibly can virtually see a Stream Deck in the event you look carefully — however nonetheless built-in, not but peripheral.

That’s why the thought didn’t stick. Razer thought customers would purchase into an expensive keyboard ($250) or laptop computer ($2000+), quit the familiarity of the enter units they already owned, and belief that sport builders would help its new Switchblade UI. It additionally didn’t assist that the keys felt brutal — stiff, flat and brittle.

The Elgato Stream Deck requested for none of these tradeoffs.

Photograph by Dan Seifert / The Verge

The Stream Deck instantly pitched itself as a purpose-built device proper all the way down to its identify, providing you with helpful buttons to manage Twitch, OBS, and Twitter proper out of the gate. (It does way more at present.) You place it alongside your favourite keyboard, as a substitute of changing it, and between that and the $80 beginning worth of the six-key Stream Deck Mini, I used to be simply offered.

The buttons on an Elgato Stream Deck, in profile. Photograph by Dan Seifert / The Verge

And the keys, these keys… comfortable, soft, inviting, every jeweled press like popping a bit of bubble wrap. I’m not saying it’s something just like the satisfying crunch of a mechanical swap — it’s a distinct pleasure totally.

Talking of which… I’ve an little announcement to make, a deal with for any Stream Deck homeowners who is perhaps studying this story:

The Verge has its personal official bubble-popping Stream Deck plugin!

Earlier than he left on a 2600-mile hike — significantly, he’s strolling the Pacific Crest Path — my expensive colleague Mitchell Clark coded the bubble popping app of my daydreams, full with sound results. (He truly submitted it to Elgato his first day on the path.) It really works with as many buttons as you want; Tom even examined a full web page of bubbles on his 32-button Stream Deck XL.

It’s stay within the Elgato app retailer, it’s our free reward to you, and you may obtain it proper now.

I’m set to interview the pinnacle of Elgato within the close to future, and I plan to ask how they managed to make these keys truly really feel good. We already know there isn’t a tiny display screen beneath every key:

The buttons are all lenses that sit on prime of a single LCD display screen. The extra you realize!