Palette co-founder Calvin Chu has a problem with how people work. "Creative professionals spend so much of their time on the computer, and at the moment, they still use a very generic one-size-fits-all keyboard and mouse interface." It doesn't make sense, he says -- photographers, gamers, film editors, musicians and accountants all using the same interface? Surely there is a better way. "It should be specialized and made for your needs, and that's where we came up for the idea for Palette." Palette is Chu's answer to a world that's discarded tactile dials and switches for keyboards, mice and touch screens. It's a modular collection of buttons, sliders and potentiometers that can be programmed to do almost anything on your PC. We took a look at an early prototype of the customizable controller to reacquaint ourselves with the tactile world.
Building control layout with Palette is dead easy - within seconds of touching the assorted modules, we were able to snap together a nifty control board with multiple buttons, dials and even a slider or two. The components connect using up to two ports located at their base, daisy chaining their way to a power module that connects to a laptop. Firing up a copy of Photoshop Lightroom, Chu puts our creation to use, tweaking a image's lighting with the twist of a wrist or adjusting digital brush sizes on the fly. The demo didn't use Palette's buttons, but we couldn't help mashing them anyway: they respond with the delightful pop of a classic arcade controller.
James Potter