While I was working on my Podcast Notes script, my initial concept was that I’d press a button to kick off the script, then type a little note to myself. But I wish it all was easier and looked better. ![]() You can get things just the way you want them, with some work. If you’re someone who cares even a little bit about how the Stream Deck looks-and you probably should, since the customized buttons are its primary appeal-you will find yourself art-directing buttons and button sets, which is fine if you’re into that sort of thing. ![]() Text generated in the Stream Deck apps is extremely ugly, with a limited font selection. (The app really should offer all of Apple’s SF Symbols as icon options, but it doesn’t do much on that front.) Instead, I need to turn to an app like Icon Creator, which lets me set a custom color, choose an icon, and even overlay text in a font of my choosing. I wish it was easier to do things like choosing a button color and a simple icon. The Stream Deck companion app is… adequate? It does the job, but that’s all I can really say about it. In some ways, it’s great to be given a blank canvas! You decide what the keys do! You decide what they look like! On the other hand… you have to make all those decisions, and if they don’t work well, you’re the one who needs to fix them. You have to place an item on every button and decide what goes where, and if you want to use more than the allotted number of buttons, you’ll need to deal with the added complexity of programming buttons that take you to other profiles (and back). Even better, it makes the Stream Deck feel almost like an extension of my keyboard, eliminating some amount of mental friction when I stop typing and press a button. ![]() It’s easy to reach with my left hand to press any of the buttons, and it’s a quick glance down. Instead, my Stream Deck lives on my keyboard tray, just to the left of my keyboard. That would make it easier to see, but I’d need to reach up my keyboard tray to press any of the buttons. I have a lot of friends who place their Stream Decks on their desks, front and center, under their monitor. And it shares a few essential characteristics with a keyboard: ergonomics are vitally important, and everyone’s ergonomics will be different. It may not look like it, but the Stream Deck is essentially a tiny, weird keyboard. I had gone from a skeptic to a convert, and it only took a few months-and a bunch of lessons learned. It turns out that, yes, the concept of wiring up commands I could never recall from the keyboard shortcuts, of placing front and center all the macros and shortcuts and scripts I spent hours building and then promptly forgot existed, made it all worthwhile. Why not just memorize those keyboard shortcuts?Īnd yet, after using a Stream Deck Mini that I bought at Target on a whim for a few months, I decided to upgrade to the full-sized Stream Deck. ![]() I’ve got a perfectly nice keyboard, full of keys on which to map commands. I was initially quite skeptical about the Stream Deck. The goal of the Stream Deck is to make esoteric actions on your computer easier by letting you place them on dedicated keys with custom artwork, so you’ll always know to press the blue button instead of typing Command-Shift-Option-3. It’s a USB peripheral that offers a grid of buttons with a display underneath, so each button can be labeled with an icon and/or text that you specify. I’ve been using an Elgato Stream Deck for more than a year now.
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