{"id":13073,"date":"2022-08-24T15:12:42","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T15:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/08\/24\/technology-needs-more-buttons-and-thats-why-we-love-the-stream-deck\/"},"modified":"2022-08-24T15:12:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T15:12:43","slug":"technology-needs-more-buttons-and-thats-why-we-love-the-stream-deck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/08\/24\/technology-needs-more-buttons-and-thats-why-we-love-the-stream-deck\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology needs more buttons \u2014 and that\u2019s why we love the Stream Deck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/23319758\/stream-deck-tips-tricks-podcast<\/a>
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I initially bought a Stream Deck<\/a> for one purpose: to control the lights in my home office. There\u2019s just one light switch in there, and that switch controls the light\u2026 and also every outlet in the room. Lights off, everything <\/em>off. So that switch now has a piece of tape on it, and I bought a smart bulb and a Stream Deck so I could still control the lamp in the corner.<\/p>\n

The Stream Deck isn\u2019t a smart home controller device, at least not the way its creators at Elgato originally conceived it. (It\u2019s also not a Steam Deck<\/a>, the game console from Valve.) They built and marketed the $150 device toward streamers (hence the name) who need to be constantly switching scenes and camera inputs, moderating a fast-moving chat, and grabbing clips to use for later, all without losing focus on the game at hand. The Stream Deck\u2019s 15 buttons \u2014 or the six on the Stream Deck Mini or the whopping 32 on the Stream Deck XL \u2014 turned a bunch of menus and touch targets into big, mashable buttons. You develop a kind of muscle memory with the Stream Deck, and many streamers can now run their whole stream without ever even looking down. Plus, each button has a tiny display behind it, too, so if you do look, there\u2019s even more to see. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a streamer, though, and neither are most of the folks we talked to for this episode of The Vergecast<\/em>. Instead, we all found the Stream Deck because, it turns out, a bunch of programmable buttons is a pretty powerful idea. Den Delimarsky, a programmer who reverse-engineered his Stream Deck<\/a> so he could build even more powerful software, called the Stream Deck \u201cbasically just a keyboard with custom buttons, right? You can make it do whatever you want just by having the buttons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Say you like to play super-complicated games, the kind that require complex item management or remembering the location and combinations for a hundred different buttons. You could map some or all of that work to a few Stream Deck buttons like Robert Van Der Pas did to get hundreds of buttons and knobs working with Microsoft\u2019s Flight Simulator. Through his FlightDeck plugin<\/a>, players can control more than 30 entire planes right from their Stream Deck. (Pro tip: get the big one in that case.) The Verge<\/em>\u2019s Alice Newcome-Beill<\/a> uses hers similarly while playing Destiny<\/em> to quickly swap between characters and load-outs without burrowing into the game\u2019s many menus.<\/p>\n

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Fans of Microsoft Flight Simulator have turned the Stream Deck into a super-powerful tool.<\/em><\/figcaption>Photo: FlightDeck<\/cite><\/p>\n

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If you\u2019d rather spend your time tending to your super-aesthetic Notion setup, you could do what a YouTuber named Simon, who runs a channel called Better Creating<\/a>, does: set up a bunch of Stream Deck buttons to make Notion pages easier to build and manage. Rather than typing slash commands and remembering names, you just whack \u201cTo Do List\u201d and \u201cTable\u201d and \u201cDivider\u201d and \u201cEmoji,\u201d and you\u2019ve created a nice-looking page. And because every Notion page is just a URL, and you can use the Stream Deck\u2019s software to get a button to open any webpage, you can turn your Stream Deck into an index of all your most important stuff.<\/p>\n

The Stream Deck is so powerful not because it\u2019s a particularly great piece of hardware \u2014 it\u2019s just a slightly clunky hunk of black plastic with a too-big logo on top. We have a long wish list for it, too: it doesn\u2019t shut off properly when your computer goes to sleep, none of the sizes seem to have the exact right number of buttons, and we\u2019d love to ditch that pesky USB cable. It\u2019s also kind of expensive, for what it is.<\/p>\n

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