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XSKN Keyboard Skin for Photoshop Users

If your photoshop skills suck as bad as ours does—queen of poop anyone?—this keyboard skin for Apple laptops may just be the thing for you. The XSKN is just a silicone keyboard skin with the appropriate Photoshop shortcut keys silk screened onto the surface. This way you can just look down at your keyboard to remember which key does what.

These skins are only for MacBooks and desktop keyboards for now, but we'll let you know if they make more styles.

Product Page [XSKN]

Update: From what we hear, this company's a bit shady. Buyer beware.

8:45 PM on Tue Jan 23 2007
By Jason Chen
1,348 views
13 comments

Comments

  • IT'S A TEMPORARY ALTERNATIVE UNTIL LCD KEYBOARDS TAKE OVER. I LIKE THE IDEA OF UNIQUE KEY PADS FOR DIFFERENT PROGRAMS.

  • And this will do what, except encourage people with below-average cognitive abilities to give up and just look down.

    Ah well, things like learning it by heart has never caught on. Like this touch typing thing I heard about a while ago...

  • I want one, its a little hard to remember everysingle shortcut, but I have a MBP.

    I have already emaied the CEO to try to get this one done, so we'll see what happens.

  • real pshop pros don't look at the keyboard.

  • Its quicker to look then to go to the menu

  • Don't MacBooks 'inhale' through the keyboard? Am I just imagining the breeze that flows past my fingers while Aperture does the impossible and sends my CPU to 120% usage?

    That aside, it looks like a pretty useful thing to speed the learning curve.

  • Um ... why don't you guys at giz at least put like, I don't know, 5 minutes into learning photoshop. Your skills would be about 500x better than they are now. Or what about taking somebody on that knows the program?

    The majority of the stuff that you put together could be done literally in a couple of minutes by somebody with experience, would definitely help with the image of professionalism that the site (sometimes) tries to convey.

  • bah.. Photoshoping is bloody boring, so if I ever needed to work with it this might be nice. Gizmodo is a techblog, so I don't mind if the images is a bit shoddy sometimes (Is shoddy a word? it sounds so right in my head, and so wrong on-screen..).

  • I'm awful at PhotoShop, so much so to the point that I bought myself a copy of Fireworks just so I could be comfortable again when my new work MacBook came only with PS. This keyboard thingy could have been extremely useful

  • They seem to have that categorized under iBook G3. They have category listings for the newer books, but I didn't see any other PS skins.

  • Whilst nice, I also have a MBP, so they won't fit on my keyboard. but I use Keycue to display shortcuts whenever I hold the command key and a box appears with all of the shortcuts for whatever Application that is in focus, and most of the universal access shortcuts also.

  • Maybe for learning some of the easier shortcuts, like M for Marquee and V for Move, but reading tiny type on a keyboard cover doesn't seem like a productivity booster. I can't tell by the photos how detailed the cover is.

    However, knowing keyboard shortcuts does not make you better at Photoshop.

  • ITs like a z-board, but without having to buy a new keyboard and find the damn layouts. If they just take this idea to that level...it might actually catch on.

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