I have been gaming for roughly 15 years now, and I also use a lot of other software rather regularly. Now one thing that always seemed to be an issue was my keyboard. Particularly when you ended up playing a game with anything more than fifteen regularly used keys, or a program such as Photoshop with an incredibly large amount of keyboard based shortcuts.

One other thing that I always had to have was macros. Now for those of you that aren’t 100% on what a macro is, it’s a pre-recorded set of keystrokes that can be played back via a trigger. Now most modern above standard keyboards will support four macros, however there is now another solution for all these problems of the past.

The Ergodex DX1 allows for a user to have a fully customisable layout. That means you only put on the keys that you need.

Now as you can see you have a base, with a number of keys that you can place and move as you wish. Just in case you were wondering, there is also a pack of labels that comes with the Ergodex that allows you to label each of your keys as you wish. It also comes with blank labels for you to write your own. Now OK, we have buttons that we can move around and put where we like, so what. Well this is where the cool features come in. The beauty of it is it allows you to assign keys on the fly, using the button in the top right hand corner, so you can just place your keys on, and away you go. Macros are equally as easily created just by using another shortcut key. So this means you can navigate through menus, enter commands, activate shortcuts, or even start up a program just by pressing one key. Now due to my remote location here in Australia, which deprives us of all the latest gizmos and gadgets, I went and bought mine through Edmund Scientific. (Link to the item is here.)

Now all of you are asking, what does this mean for me? What can all this allow me to do? Well, in the end it means you can have funky layouts that do EXACTLY as much as you want them to do, however you feel comfortable. Below is an example of one possible configuration.

So as you can see, it can be whatever you want, with as many or as little keys as you would like! I have wondered where I was before this, it’s made gaming so much easier, but also as I said, it can make Photoshop a dream, particularly with it’s macro recording.

Links:
www.scientificsonline.com