Logitechg Craft Wireless Keyboard

A KEYBOARD for creative people is the pitch, despite the fact people have been creative with PCs for decades using a standard 104-key model. What it means in practice is a really nice wireless keyboard with a dial in the top-left.

It’s good and heavy, not exactly portable, but not designed as that, and uses Logi’s Unifying Receiver. The keys are on scissor switches, but have a decent amount of travel and sense your hands, so they light up when you need them to. They’re concave, so your fingertip fits into a depression in their surface. It’s really good to type on.

The major gimmick is the dial, or Crown, which can be programed for different apps. For Photoshop’s Brush tool, it changes the size of the tip, a tap on its edge bumping across an on-screen overlay to change Hardness, Opacity, and Flow. With other tools selected, it zooms, adjusts brightness, and more. Select a cell in Excel, and the Crown zooms and scrolls, but select several, and it creates charts and tables, then changes their colors and styles. Select text in Word, and it changes the font size or alignment; choose an image, and you can scale and rotate it. In web browsers, it flips between tabs.

That last one might get lots of use, because using the Craft is, at first, a memory test. You’ll get used to it, will miss it when it’s gone, and it certainly beats holding down a function key and rolling the mouse wheel. $200, www.logitech.com/craft