Being that I have been experiencing a bit of discomfort when I type as of late. I thought I would take drastic measures to prevent RSI from becoming an issue. After reading Carl’s post about the DataHand I decided to spend some time online researching the product. After pouring through testimonials, user guides and PDF’s I decided to call the sales department.
I asked to speak to someone who actually used the datahand. It just so happened that the person I was talking to had been using the product since 1998. I grilled her about the mechanics and how friendly it is towards programmers. She even took the time to describe to me how I could perform my refactorings in ReSharper. She also mentioned that she has not used a mouse since adopting the product.
Well that was it. A way to decrease the stress of typing on my arms and wrists while also achieving mouseless computing (physical mouse that is); I was sold.
My DataHand should ship by the 15th of June. At which point I am sure that I am going to be going through a massive un-learning/re-learning of how to type with this, what looks to be, phenomenal device.
@Sahil,
I choose life!!
I will make sure to blog about my experiences with the DataHand in the event that it will save the typing hands of other programmers!! I am hoping that it is as awesome as a couple of people I have talked to say.
JP
@Jay,
Better $500 spent today than >$500 lost in the future due to an inability to type.
Dude, what you’ve gotta do now is, get a projector to project the image on the screen, and lay in bed with the datahand, and code all day and all night.
SWEET!
Seriously, do blog about your experiences with DataHand – if you thought it was worth it, I’d be watchin’ ya, and frankly if you think it was really that good (i.e. worth $700), I’d buy one myself (health trumps everything else).
My goal in life is to one day be able to just drop $500 on such a device on a whim. Perhaps when it will count as a tax write off?
JP: I just recently worked on a project with a guy who had one (because he already suffered severely from RSI). He was crazy fast with it.
On flat-out speed tests, some of us could still keep up with him, but I’m sure we had significantly more movements and more stress-points on our joints than he did for the same characters-per-second.
The whole team was quite envious of him and we all coveted his DataHand, but we were too nervous ninnies to get one ourselves.
The only downside I noted was that the hand-rest pad got really nasty yellow-brownish from hand oil, sweat, etc.
So if you *do* get one, make sure to follow all the guidelines on cleaning it RELIGIOUSLY, lest it start looking like spoiled milk.
Let us know what you think of it…$700 is pretty intense…but….maybe it’d be worth it.