The older and lazier I get, the easier I want my life. So when I discovered the Stream Deck+, a versatile little desktop controller with programmable buttons, built-in screens and rotary knobs, I knew I had to have one. If I'm not in the right browser tab, saying "Hey Yaffle, office aircon 24" works perfectly well, but it's just … More. Effort. Than ... Click.
I know, hardly difficult, but reduced friction all the same.
Turns out this is quite the rabbit hole. I'll spare you the sales pitch, but turning things on and off is just the start of it. One button became six, then a couple of folders, then a few pages. Oh, I appear to have accidentally built an entire dashboard. Or two. These days my Stream Deck+ monitors my CPU and GPU in real time, lets me recall preset room environments, and even controls my Home Assistant smart-home setup. But my favorite, and surely my nerdiest button, opens the firewall long enough for my IoT devices to download updates before slamming it shut again.
All my IoT devices (cameras, thermometers, anything Tuya – one of the biggest smart-home brands) like to phone home. I like to let them think they can phone home by having them on a separate network and shutting off their internet access. Unfortunately they do need updates so I have to let them out occasionally. Tired of digging into firewall menus, I made a button. I am quite proud of the utter laziness of that solution!
Then something struck me as rather odd. One day I realized I'm not using my phone nearly as much any more. Which makes no sense. Phones and their ubiquitous slab of glass form factor won, didn't they? If touch screens won, why am I buying buttons? Have I lost the plot?
For 20 years we've been removing buttons from technology. Phones lost their keyboards, music players lost their controls and car dashboards gradually became giant tablets. The future, apparently, was a sheet of glass. Back in 2005, our company founder Mike Hanlon covered one of the earliest attempts to make "touchscreens touch back," using haptic feedback. By 2013, Tactus brought us the innovative rising button touchpad. Continental followed in 2018, implementing something similar in a dashboard display that offers "the best of both worlds." Apple refined haptic feedback until a sheet of glass could convincingly acknowledge a virtual button press, and Volkswagen recently bowed to consumer pressure and announced that physical buttons would return to future models.
Meanwhile, programmable desktop controllers such as Stream Decks, macro pads and even dedicated AI buttons quietly started appearing. Enthusiasts and tinkerers alike are building their own versions using Open Source software and inexpensive hardware.
So maybe we missed something. Then it dawned on me. For 20 years we'd been inventing increasingly clever ways of putting back the tactile feedback we'd spent decades removing. So maybe, having seen the evidence, craving physical buttons isn't so odd after all. Perhaps the Stream Deck wasn't bucking the trend, perhaps it was following it. Like Continental's experimental dashboard, it combines software flexibility with physical controls. The labels can change, pages can multiply and functions can be reassigned at will. But when it comes time to actually do something, your finger still finds a real button. It offers the adaptability of a touchscreen with the tactile certainty that human muscle memory seems to crave.
There's another benefit too. Muscle memory isn't just satisfying, sometimes it's safer. Once your fingers know where something is, you don't need to look at it. That's why physical controls make so much sense in a car. I'd rather not rear-end someone because I was busy trying to find the climate controls. It wasn’t just about the buttons, though. I remembered I'd fallen into exactly this same trap before.
I'd lusted after Steinberg’s CC121 Cubase controller for a very long time. It's a dedicated control surface for music production, with knobs for EQ, buttons for transport controls and a gorgeous motorized fader. When I eventually got one, I took the time to integrate it into my workflow, but begrudgingly returned to keyboard shortcuts because, for me, it was significantly quicker than the official controller. On the other hand, I did have a very clever chap make me a MIDI controller that is beautifully tactile. A non-centering joystick and six fully assignable knobs make for a great little volume, filter cut-off, and resonance controller. Simulating the expression and dynamics of a string section is hard with a mouse (but really it was just an excuse to make the famous VCS3 synthesizer wibble like Pink Floyd's On The Run).
If it isn't buttons I like, what is it? If buttons aren't magical, and touchscreens aren't bad, I think what I really like is a frictionless interface. Three, four, five clicks into a menu, tedious. Having to say a whole sentence, too much effort. A button that does exactly what I need, fabulous! Click. So after years of buying controllers, knobs, buttons and dashboards, I realized I didn't really want more ways to control my digital life. I just wanted ways to stop thinking about it altogether. Which, for someone who keeps buying boxes full of buttons, struck me as rather odd.
