Ever wish you had a lightweight stick-on keyboard that you could use with your iPad whenever you needed to type? Well, you’re in luck. Two fellows by the names of Steve Isaac and Brad Melmon have developed a flexible keyboard that weighs less than an ounce that attaches to your iPad with magnets. It’s transparent, retractable, and designed to work well with both the original iPad and the iPad 2.
Instead of going the traditional route of slapping a keyboard at the bottom, they engineered a way to meld the onscreen keyboard with the tactile nature of traditional keyboards. If it works as well in real life as it does in the demo, I could see this selling pretty well among the nerdy crowd. As of writing this, it already has over 1,300 backers on Kickstarter as well as over $86,000 USD invested.
TouchFire is soft and supple if you swipe through it horizontally, so you can easily select the special characters on the keyboard. Yet it is stiff enough vertically to allow you to rest your fingers on the home row keys without accidentally triggering the touch screen. At the same time it responds to typing with just the right amount of resistance and spring-back to feel like a lively and responsive keyboard. Amazing!
If you’d like a Touchfire of your very own, you can pre-order one for only $45 USD (plus $10 USD shipping for Canada or $25 USD shipping for the rest of the world). You should hurry, though. The Kickstarter campaign ends on December 13th at 2:00 AM EST.
Truly, the amazing ingenuity that we’ve seen with the iOS device add-on market makes me swell with pride. We’re living in an age where small, independent companies can make neat things like the Touchfire and get them into the hands of consumers with just a good idea and some hard work.
Source: AppAdvice
