Touchfire, the innovative "screentop" keyboard for the iPad, got a lot of early buzz when it was first previewed late last year. Now the company has announced the first units are finally ready to be shipped. Touchfire had initially hoped to ship earlier this year after it easily surpassed its funding goal of $10,000, raising over $200,000 via Kickstarter, a crowdfunding resource site.
The Touchfire is a $49.99 add-on for the iPad and company co-founder Steve Isaac makes no bones about it being worth the expense. While he gives Microsoft credit for innovating he says Touchfire’s approach is more in sync with how tablets are designed to be used.
In fact he even sees a coming “tactile war” as companies battle over which has the best input technology. Isaac says Touchfire is slated to receive its first patent approval this week and has several more pending.
“One of the key aspects of Apple’s iOS is the direct manipulation model,” Isaac told TabTimes. “It’s beautiful because it lets you do what humans have been doing all along, you want something, you grab it, you touch it.”
The Touchfire mirrors Apple’s approach by augmenting the iPad’s virtual keyboard directly. The Touchfire is a clear and flexible silicone overlay that weighs less than an ounce and aligns with the iPad’s virtual on-screen keyboard. It stays in place thanks to the magnets usually used to secure the iPad’s Smart Cover. It’s also designed to provide the same kind of resistance and “spring back” feel of touch-typing versus the flat glass of the virtual keyboard.
“We’ve fixed that typing on glass issue, that’s our contribution,” says Isaac.
By contrast, the Touch Cover, and the many Bluetooth iPad keyboard alternatives, rely on what he calls indirect manipulation. Rather than type directly on the iPad’s screen as Apple envisioned, the add-on keyboards are “indirect” in that they move your hands off the tablet's screen, making it more like a netbook or notebook experience.
So why does this matter?
“When you have to lift your hand from the keyboard to poke around the tablet’s screen it’s unnatural and uncomfortable in my humble opinion,” says Isaac. Other scenarios, like typing on your lap, could be problematic for the Touch Cover which fixes the display at a 22-degree angle. Isaac notes that angle may be fine in most cases, but again perhaps not for typing on your lap, or in a confined space like an airplane seat.
Microsoft actually announced two different keyboard/cover combos for the Surface, the Touch Cover and the Type Cover. The Type Cover has moving keys, while the Touch Cover keyboard is capacitive and reacts to human touch. Whether either will be included with the Surface or sold separately, hasn’t been announced.
Just how good the Touch Cover keyboard will perform isn’t yet known. Microsoft severely limited press access to the Surface tablets at the announcement event and many in attendance complained that the prototypes didn’t have working keyboards.
Isaac says Touchfire has had “hundreds” of testers and had plenty of positive press for the prototype.
In an article last December during the company's initial press tour, a writer for Wired, said in part after trying the prototype: "The keys give properly, strike properly even if not hit exactly right, accept sliding (to reveal alternate characters), and allow your fingers to actually rest and re-orient."
It feels like you're typing
There are also some pretty neat engineering and design tricks in the Touchfire to make it work seamlessly with Apple’s virtual keyboard. For example, you can rest your fingers on the Touchfire keyboard without pushing any keys (actual pressure is required). But at the same time, it’s thin enough that you can also swipe your finger right through when you need to, to unlock the iPad or for other actions where a swipe is required. The Touchfire also can be simply rolled up out of the way when you want to access the full screen without the keyboard.
(Photo: Touchfire co-founders Brad Melmon and Steve Isaac work on an early Touchfire prototype).
In the course of testing Touchfire also discovered its keyboard could be an asset to blind iPad users. Apple provides an accessibility mode that gives even blind users the ability to use the device by giving them auditory feedback. So, for example, the iPad speaks each letter as it’s typed on the virtual keyboard.
“With Touchfire you can type so much faster with the tactile feedback you get. It’s a game changer for blind users based on the beta testing we’ve done,” says Isaac.
First in line for the Touchfire
By the end of this week Touchfire plans to ship the first units to the Kickstarter members who supported the project financially. By early next month, Isaac said the company plans to start shipping to everyone who placed pre-orders.
July 11 is the official launch of the company and, if all goes as planned, the new keyboards will be broadly available for purchase at that point.
If they pull it off, it will be quite a coup for Isaac, who’s worked at Microsoft, Sun, and Go (an early pen-based portable computer company), and his co-founder Brad Melmon, a mechanical engineer who’s designed a range of products including computers, toys, smartphones and medical devices.
Touchfire, based in Seattle, was set to manufacture overseas after failing to find a company in the U.S. that could do it to their specifications. But Isaac says an unexpected email over the Christmas holidays changed things. The email to its Kickstarter page led to a connection with a company in Southern California that could do everything they wanted at the right price and it’s now ramping up production.
And while it's focus now is on the iPad, Isaac says they're very interested in talking to other tablet manufacturers, including those making Windows 8 devices. Safe to assume Microsoft won't be interested, but who knows, other WIndows 8 tablet makers blindsided by Microsoft's announcement, might be.
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