My home office's "personal work area" has been evolving over the last ten years, and one of the more recent additions I've made to it is the Nostromo N50 SpeedPad.
I'm not much on gaming, but this little device looked to be the perfect thing for me to add to my keyboard shelf to reduce the number of repetitive keystrokes I type in a day.
The SpeedPad itself consists of ten function keys, a scroll wheel, and a four-direction "game pad" under your left thumb.
The SpeedPad does not lend itself well to being used with the right hand, having been designed specifically for the left hand.
The driver that Belkin provides for the SpeedPad allows three "shift" levels, so the keys can be assigned different functions depending on which "shift" mode you're in. There's an array of LEDs on the left side of the unit that tell you if you're in red, green, blue, or "none" for the shift mode.
I didn't think the LEDs would be useful, since they're in kind of an odd position, but it turns out that they're very bright and just barely visible out of the corner of my eye while I'm working, providing a nice visual cue.
Unfortunately, the driver that Belkin provides for the Mac (via download - there's no Mac-specific material in the box at all) generates regular kernel crashes on my
Power Macintosh Dual G4. So, I've had to resort to using the stellar "USB Overdrive" generic USB driver from Alessandro Montalcini. It doesn't support the shift modes, and doesn't drive the LEDs, but it also doesn't crash the whole machine - making it very useful for me.
For each of the applications I use on a regular basis, I have a set of keystroke macros that I've assigned to the SpeedPad. The scroll wheel is especially useful, because once you have it scrolling, it won't stop until you return the wheel to its "neutral" position. This is much nicer than the regular mouse-based scroll wheels, as you don't have to keep scrolling it manually once it's in motion. In some games, this could be assigned to the "run forward" key and the "run backward," or throttle controls.
The "game pad" cursor controls under my left thumb on the SpeedPad come in very handy when doing certain editing functions, as I can use the
Kensington Turbo Pro in my right hand to move a pointer, then shift-click-lock and use the arrow keys on the SpeedPad to highlight what I need. The Kensington Turbo Pro and the SpeedPad fit nicely on either side of my
Happy Hacking USB Keyboard Lite II.
Over the last two weeks, I've grown very fond of the SpeedPad. It fits perfectly into my left hand, and offers a lot of my more regularly-used commands with single keystrokes.
She isn't too fond of it, though. Even though I got her a new iMac, she still asks me how to do certain things. With the SpeedPad and the Turbo Pro, I move too fast for her to see exactly what I'm doing...
Whether you're doing a lot of gaming, or just a lot of very repetitive work, the Nostromo N50 SpeedPad will let you work faster, and for a very small chunk of change.
