Pod Insights The Vergecast The Elgato Stream Deck's endless buttons About this episode Today’s whole episode is about buttons. We’re talking about the Stream Deck from Elgato, a desk accessory that is basically just a bunch of buttons. We hear how people use their Stream Deck, how to hack it to do even more, and how to turn your old devices into something like it.
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Transcript 9,006 words · 14 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of mappable buttons. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am standing on my back patio in front of the grill I just bought. It's a weird time to buy a grill, right before the end of the summer, but I did it anyway because it was on sale and because this grill, the Weber Spirit E310, is the one everybody told me to buy. So I bought it. I like it so far, but the best thing about this grill is this button.
0:29 David Pierce? The ignition, which turns on all the burners all at once. I find myself yelling, "I have created fire!" every single time I turn it on. It just feels powerful, you know? Today's whole episode is about buttons. We're going to spend the whole show talking about the Stream Deck. Not the game console, the Steam Deck, but the Stream Deck from Elgato, which is a desk accessory that is basically just a bunch of buttons. And it turns out a bunch of buttons is a pretty seriously powerful thing. We're going to hear how people use their Stream Deck, how to hack it to do even more, and how to turn your old devices into something kind of like it. But first, let me finish these burgers that I came out here to grill. Buttons are good, and so are burgers. That's the takeaway. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.
1:14 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:00 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:44 David Pierce? Welcome back. So, like I mentioned a minute ago, this whole episode is going to be about a single device, the Elgato Stream Deck. If you've never seen one, it's basically just a panel of buttons, each one with a small square screen inside. It's about as wide as my thumb, and you can customize it however you want. It's like having a teeny tiny control panel for your computer, like you're sitting in a music studio at one of those huge mixing boards, except much less chaotic. The Stream Deck is a pretty niche thing. It was built mostly for people who livestream on Twitch or platforms like that, and thus need to switch between cameras and streaming software and manage comment threads all simultaneously without spending all their time staring down at their keyboards. It has big, bright buttons
3:29 David Pierce? that you can feel and press, and that goes a long way towards helping that. You see tons of Twitch streamers actually using Stream Decks. They're really good for that. But the Stream Deck is actually much more than just a streaming thing. Because it's just a big blank slate of buttons, it's also one of the most fun, hacker-friendly, tinkerable things you're ever going to find. You can program it to do almost anything, which is, in a way, both a little overwhelming to think about and just incredibly fun. There's nothing it can do that you couldn't technically do with your mouse or keyboard or game controller. That's definitely true. But the Stream Deck takes all kinds of complicated computer stuff and just turns it into a button. And if there's one thing you should know about us here on The Vergecast, it's that we believe in buttons.
4:13 David Pierce? Screens are great, but they're complicated. Software is great, but it's often badly designed and hard to figure out. But buttons? Buttons everybody can figure out. So really, what this episode is actually about is buttons, and how a bunch of people we know and like are finding ways to put more buttons back into their lives, because computers are complicated and buttons are not. We're going to get deep into the weeds on how people use their Stream Deck and all these buttons, but let me just give you a few examples from my own Stream Deck. I have one button on mine that's connected to the lamp in my home office and just turns it on and off. Super helpful. I have one that mutes or unmutes my computer so I don't have to find the button on my keyboard every time. I have a page full of buttons that just open links to
4:55 David Pierce? Google Drive, to the app we use to record this podcast, to my calendar app, to a bunch of other stuff. I have a bunch of buttons linked to Spotify playlists, so I can start playing what I want without even having to open the app. None of these things, you might note, are for live streaming, the stuff that the Stream Deck is ostensibly meant for. It's just useful in my life. I have six buttons on my Stream Deck Mini, but they can be 1,000 different things, and I'm really only scratching the surface.
5:22 David Pierce? But enough about me. Let's get into the show. The first thing we did was ask a bunch of Verge staffers how they use their own Stream Decks to see what kind of tips we could get from our own team. We got a lot of good stuff. Let's start with Sean Hollister.
5:35 Speaker 02 I'm a senior editor at The Verge, in charge of finding gadgets.
5:39 David Pierce? Sean has the Stream Deck Mini, which is what I have, the one with six buttons.
5:43 Speaker 02 First thing I've got right here is I have a button that will allow me to dim my entire room's lights, because I have Home Assistant hooked up to the Stream Deck, and so I can go dim, I can go bright, I can be like, oh, I don't want any of that background light when I'm in the middle of the night playing games. That's perfect. Then I have a Verge button that will immediately pop up to verge.com, because why wouldn't you do that? Then I have a button that will allow me to not only shut down my computer, but toss it into sleep mode, or reboot it, or lock it. It's great. The fan will stop running, the lights will turn off, because I got a button right there that does it.
6:17 David Pierce? Dan Seifert, deputy editor at The Verge, also has a Stream Deck Mini.
6:20 Speaker 03 The story is, I bought the big one, that has like 30 something buttons on it. And then I realized, I don't have 30 something things that do with this, and it takes up way too much room on my desk. So I returned it, and I went all the way down to the six-button one.
6:34 David Pierce? Dan actually wrote a while back about how he uses his Stream Deck, and that story convinced a bunch of other people on staff to buy one.
6:42 Speaker 03 I only ever use it for Zoom. And what I do with Zoom is there's a Zoom plugin for the Stream Deck, and you can program buttons on there to mute, to turn your camera on and off, to bring the Zoom window forward. So like if you've clicked off of it, and then your boss is like, oh, hey, Dan, what do you think about this? You click that button and boom, the Zoom window is right in front of you again. And then I've got a shortcut that runs with macOS to join my next Zoom meeting. But the most powerful button is the leave Zoom button, which allows me to just push a button and I leave the meeting. And I never have to like struggle with my mouse to find the leave meeting button and then click the little agree window that pops up or whatever.
7:26 David Pierce? You avoid the awkward five second, let's all sort of wave at each other while we look for buttons on the thing.
7:31 Speaker 03 Yes, I just mash the button and the icon is a little running man. He's just running away from the meeting.
7:36 David Pierce? The fact that the Stream Deck's buttons are also teeny tiny screens makes this even better.
7:42 Speaker 03 So when you are muted, you've got a little line through the microphone. But if you push a button, you'll know that your mic is live. And so, you know, don't say bad things about your boss.
7:49 David Pierce? Are there versions of this for other conferencing systems? We obviously use Zoom. Is there a thing for others?
7:54 Speaker 03 I don't believe there's one for Teams. I've not really been able to find one for Teams.
7:58 David Pierce? Surprise.
7:58 Speaker 03 We know there's not one for WebEx. We just kind of assume there's not. But there is a plugin for Google Meet.
8:04 David Pierce? Okay.
8:05 Speaker 03 So I've got a folder for Google Meet on my little Stream Deck that's like four pages down because we rarely use Meet at The Verge. But when I do need to use it, it does basically the same things. It's got a mute button, a video button, a hang up button. But then it also adds a raise hand button because that's a function that you use a little bit more in Google Meet.
8:24 David Pierce? Along with the Stream Deck Mini, there is, of course, the original Stream Deck, which has 15 hardware buttons that you can customize. What I've learned from this is that I think the 15 button one is the right one. Liam James, the lead producer on The Vergecast, has one of those.
8:37 Speaker 04 I cannot imagine how I could possibly fill 32. I'm struggling with 15, but I have just a bit more than what would be comfortable on the six button one.
8:47 David Pierce? Liam basically said that in life as a producer, you tend to do a lot of the same things over and over and over again. So he wanted to automate that with the Stream Deck.
8:56 Speaker 04 So I'm making to-do items all the time, but they're not always coming from one singular place. So after giving up this idea that to-dos need to be titled in a nice way, I found a way to just highlight text, doesn't matter where it is, and hit a button and it will be added as a new item in my to-do list. That is a huge one. I use it probably 10 times a day.
9:19 David Pierce? So it copies whatever text it's hovered on, opens up your to-do list app and paste it in as a new task?
9:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's actually like, you know, you don't need any add-on software. And my to-do app happens to have a global shortcut. So it's really just a copy and paste job, right? So it's, you know, copy the text, hit the global command, paste, hit enter, done. I don't even see it. It's so fast.
9:40 David Pierce? A lot of what he does on the Stream Deck is essentially activating an app called Keyboard Maestro, which allows you to automate almost anything on your Mac with keyboard shortcuts. Which also means, apparently Liam spends a lot of time sending emails to developers, asking them for more keyboard shortcuts.
9:54 Speaker 04 One of my favorite ones, which is kind of very in the nerdy category, is going to my VNC server. I've got a headless Mac that runs Plex. What's up, Alex? You know, I would love to have a keyboard shortcut. If you're the developer of Screens 4 for Mac, please add a keyboard shortcut to go to your favorite VNC server. Keyboard Maestro just does all the hard work and I can hit one button on my Stream Deck and I've got a window open that is showing me what's going on with that Mac.
10:20 David Pierce? Liam also uses the Stream Deck pretty often for making this show.
10:24 Speaker 04 I do have a kind of like a podcast recording button, which just does a series of things. Turns off my air conditioner, mutes any apps that are going to make noise. It starts an app that has a count-up clock to keep you and Eli in line and not go too long on the segments.
10:41 David Pierce? Never works.
10:41 Speaker 04 So it's just kind of like a smart home parlance, like a scene that I have set up.
10:47 David Pierce? Okay, now let's talk about the big Kahuna. There's the Stream Deck Mini, the regular Stream Deck, and then the Stream Deck XL, which has 32 hardware buttons. I talked to Alice Newcombe Beal, who works on commerce and deals at The Verge, who has her own Stream Deck XL. I needed to know what all of those buttons are for.
11:05 Speaker 05 Honestly, a lot of the passive buttons on here are just kind of mapped to desktop functions, because even though I have three separate monitors and tons of windows spread out across that entire real estate, so I can map different buttons to resize and move my windows or just show my desktop really quick. Currently, I have one that just allows me to minimize everything and also just empty my recycling bin whenever I need to. And I also have just a clock, basically, just another clock. I only have like four available to me, but I was like, "Okay, what else am I gonna do with this space? All right, I guess I'll put a clock in there, sure."
11:46 David Pierce? Alice also has another profile for when she plays Destiny, the hugely popular, hugely complicated video game. And that's where the XL really comes into its own, filling all 32 of those buttons.
11:57 Speaker 05 The Destiny community has done a lot to kind of fill gaps in quality of life improvements where Bungie may have potentially dropped the ball. And one of those aspects is just in inventory management. Okay, so you have several characters with different loadouts and stuff you want to swap between them. And for a long time, you could do that with a browser-based app called Destiny Item Manager. Recently, that same functionality was brought to the Stream Deck with an app exclusively for Destiny Item Manager, which allows you to connect your account, connect your Destiny account, and program different loadouts to different buttons.
12:41 Speaker 05 There are some hiccups in the process, but for the most part, if you want to swap between loadouts, all you have to do is press a button, which normally would require a lot of moving back and forth within the game. But instead, it's been consolidated into just this single input.
12:59 David Pierce? Yeah, that's awesome. And actually, kind of a perfect example of what the Stream Deck, I feel like, is good for.
13:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, frankly, I was aghast when I first used that app and just like, everything worked. I was like, wow, like, that actually works. That's pretty amazing. Part of it, too, is just kind of exploring and experimenting with what you can do with the Steam Deck, with these optional macros, you know, like it was with me. It was sitting there, just kind of idle for a long time. And then I kind of forced myself to explore the different apps and other functions that you can tie to this device that you keep on your desk.
13:40 David Pierce? Tom Warren, a senior editor at The Verge, has a Stream Deck XL as well.
13:44 Speaker 06 I got it pretty early on, and I think the folder support back then wasn't great. So that's why I got the giant one.
13:50 David Pierce? He also uses his Stream Deck to play games, just like Alice does.
13:53 Speaker 06 So I have a button on here that basically is my Xbox mode. It's when I'm streaming on my Xbox. It'll have all the stuff where I can like, change my lights to green to match the Xbox sort of brand. I will change all my scenes in OBS to certain Xbox stuff. Then I'll have a PC one, which is PC focused and all that sort of stuff. So I do the sort of basics there. And then I'll have like a switch button where I might press it and I'll be able to press, you know, BRB or live or anything on stream.
14:21 David Pierce? But he also uses it in the most like, obvious, as intended way, as a soundboard.
14:27 Speaker 06 So if I'm hanging out in like Discord, I have like a bunch of meme sounds that I'll play when people say something stupid.
14:33 David Pierce? Give me an example. What are the most used sounds that we're gonna hear from you in Discord?
14:36 Speaker 06 If you want a fart sound, I can give you a fart sound. It's stuff like Simpsons characters. It's all very character centric. So it'd be like Destiny characters. Ninja saying, you know, what the hell did you say to me? Remember that line? The classic.
14:56 David Pierce? After everyone showed me what's on their Stream Deck, I asked them what their wishlist was. What do they wish the Stream Deck could do that it can't? And Sean's request is either the worst idea or the best idea of the bunch, so let's start with that.
15:09 Speaker 02 I want to make a bubble wrap app.
15:12 David Pierce? Okay.
15:12 Speaker 02 We are going to make a bubble wrap app for the Stream Deck where you push a button and it just pops a bubble. Because it feels like that when you touch the Stream Deck, all of these little keys, they have this delightfully squishy feeling to them, kind of like Bowser. And I'm like, we should go all the way. It should make the sound. It should pop the bubble animation on the screen. I think we're going to build it.
15:33 David Pierce? And here's Liam's idea, which he made me promise we would not cut out of the show.
15:37 Speaker 04 Top thing on my list that the Stream Deck needs is to go to sleep when my Mac goes to sleep. I don't understand this. I have many devices plugged into my Mac that, you know, they're powered over USB. And when I put my Mac to sleep, they go to sleep too. Stream Deck just lit up like Times Square all night long. That's kind of annoying.
15:59 David Pierce? Dan had some thoughts as well.
16:01 Speaker 03 I've got two buttons set on one page. One is for the space heater in my office to turn on, and one is for it to turn off, because I couldn't figure out a toggle to make it just like switch state. I don't know if it's because whatever smart plug I'm using doesn't work with the Stream Deck directly or whatever, but I had to like use two buttons. So there's a lot of room to improve on the smart home controls.
16:24 David Pierce? And Tom had an idea, and I've been thinking about it for a while, and I still can't decide if I love it or I hate it.
16:29 Speaker 06 I would love if it could do notifications or if there was a new Stream Deck that just had like a notification LED bar or something. So it's like, here's an email, you know, like all that sort of stuff. It'd be useful not to have that necessarily on my monitor, but like off to the side so I can check it.
16:46 David Pierce? Okay, so we've been through all of this and you might be thinking, "David, this is all ridiculous overkill. You're just buying a gadget to do stuff your computer can already do." And people in general who don't like or understand the Stream Deck argue just that, and that actually what you should do is learn keyboard shortcuts and use the mouse like a person and save money, you idiot. People have said all these things to me and I think they're wrong. So I asked my Stream Deck owning colleagues how they'd respond.
17:13 Speaker 02 Keyboard shortcuts are great. I have plenty of them. Every now and then, I try to remember what some of them are. I like that the Stream Deck just shows me the things that aren't baked into my muscle memory.
17:25 Speaker 04 The mental process to remember what your shortcut key is to do this special thing is already too much for me. I just want to hit a button. You'd be surprised how much that time adds up over the course of a work week.
17:37 Speaker 05 The app list just keeps growing and all of those apps are totally free after you've purchased the hardware that it needs. So that's kind of refreshing, actually.
17:47 Speaker 03 Any keyboard shortcut is actually slower for me to do because I have to put my hands on my keyboard, get oriented and like remember what the keyboard shortcut is or whatever. The Stream Deck makes it super easy to like quickly push something that is one action and you don't have to like worry about your spatial awareness as much.
18:03 David Pierce? It just comes back to buttons, right? The Verge loves buttons. I love buttons. The Stream Deck is a simple gadget, but it's also a hugely complicated one. And that's the thing that's so much fun about it. It makes those complicated things simple, but it also buries all kinds of functionality behind one press of one button. I think too much of life is spent in menus and scrolling around stuff and trying to figure out where things are and I'd rather just have buttons.
18:31 David Pierce? We're going to take a quick break and we'll come right back to talk to a few more people who have taken the Stream Deck to even more impressive places and done way more than just improved their Zoom setup. We'll be right back.
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19:54 David Pierce? Welcome back. When I started doing research for this episode, I found a lot of people doing a lot of the things we just talked about. The Stream Deck is a great smart home controller. It's really handy for playing music. It can get you off of Zoom, all that kind of stuff, all over the place. But the more I dug, the more I found people who are using the Stream Deck to take some of the most complicated technology that exists and simplify it all the way down to a bunch of buttons. Like, here's how Simon, a YouTuber who makes a channel called Better Creating, uses his Stream Deck to make video editing easier.
20:25 Speaker 09 For example, I've got a line of buttons in front of me which are cut, blade, which is just to chop a certain thing, cut the whole timeline, trim to start or trim to end. So when you're going through, you can kind of be skimming through with your mouse and just hitting those buttons, trimming the start of a clip, cutting something in half, trimming the beginning off it, and so on. So just that frictionless ability to press those three buttons in a row and zoom in and out on the two buttons below on the timeline means that I think I cut the speed that I would edit my A-roll down in half.
20:57 David Pierce? Again, this is one of the things I heard over and over from people, both in and out of the Verge. Using a computer now means constantly poking around menus and looking for options and then doing those same things over and over and over again. So instead of doing the long, complicated dance in GarageBand to split tracks and apply a compressor and add a little warmth in the EQ and then add a slight reverb, why not just hammer the button on your Stream Deck and have all of that happen automatically every single time? Sounds great, right? One of the groups taking this idea to its coolest extreme is this huge community of people who use the Stream Deck when they're playing Microsoft's Flight Simulator. Flight Simulator is this massively complicated game. That's the whole point, right?
21:40 David Pierce? It's like you're flying a plane in every realistic way possible. That is both really fun and, on a computer, kind of annoying. Here's how Robert Vanderpas, who says he's a big Flight Simulator fan, describes it.
21:53 Speaker 10 When I started Flight Simming, it really annoyed me how many buttons I had to press with my mouse to fully control the plane. I was really annoyed by that, so I thought, why not? Because I already had a Stream Deck, which I used for all kinds of shortcuts in my daily jobs, things like starting teams, opening shortcuts, and stuff like that.
22:11 David Pierce? Robert and a bunch of other Flight Sim fans decided to stop relying on complicated controller moves and keyboard shortcuts, and they bought Stream Decks instead. Now, Robert is the developer of a piece of software called Flight Deck, which is actually super popular in the Flight Sim community.
22:26 Speaker 10 If you look in a plane, especially the big planes, you've got a lot of buttons, especially on your overhead panel. So you don't have to go there with your mouse to click it. You can just press a button that's right on your desk. And that's a lot quicker because you don't have to move your view. You can still keep your eyes on the sky, on whatever's in front of you, while executing functions in the plane.
22:47 David Pierce? Flight Deck now has custom Stream Deck control sets for more than 30 different planes, which means more than 30 different complete button layouts depending on what you're flying. Robert said he's created more than 1,100 icons, hundreds of buttons and knobs and folders, and you can control every light and flap and camera angle and even turn on the seatbelt sign and fly your whole freaking plane right from the Stream Deck.
23:10 Speaker 10 For example, if I take the 737 profile, then you've got an overhead panel folder, and that contains a lot of subfolders. So for every part of the overhead panel, there's a separate folder, and the folders are in order that you're most likely to use them. So when you're starting up the plane, the things you do first are in that order. Because I make every profile for the 32-button Stream Deck and the 15-button Stream Deck. And the 15-button Stream Deck, that's always the big challenge, because then you've got even less space to work with.
23:41 David Pierce? Talking to people like Simon and Robert really started to open my eyes to what a device like the Stream Deck, which, again, is just a blank set of buttons, can actually do. We live in a world now where, if you think about it, everything is just an endpoint in software. So you can, for instance, use a Stream Deck to navigate around your Notes app, like Simon does, because Notion and many other apps treat all of your pages just as you are else.
24:04 Speaker 09 You can put in the address of a page, link that to a button. So rather than navigating between pages in the sidebar of your Notion system, you can create icons that jump straight to key pages in your system. So actually, I can integrate my homepage in Notion with my content creation dashboard in Notion and my Google email or jumping to a website, all in one page on Stream Deck.
24:28 David Pierce? Or you can go even deeper and do what Dan Delamarsky did and actually figure out how the Stream Deck sends information in order to get it to send even more.
24:37 Speaker 11 As a developer, I started running into the limitations where I wanted to do things that are developer-specific, like connecting to GitHub or anything beyond that. And that's when I realized that there's a lot of things that just, you know, I'm not sure if it's, you know, the Stream Deck is not necessarily tailored for developers, which makes sense. It's Stream Deck, it's not Developer Deck.
24:56 David Pierce? Dan told me he originally bought a Stream Deck for the same reasons we keep hearing here, to make calls, mute himself, that kind of stuff. But then he decided it wasn't powerful enough, and he wanted to write his own software for it. But that required understanding how exactly the Stream Deck actually works and talks to your computer.
25:13 Speaker 11 I wanted to do more without necessarily using the Elgato software, because I wanted maybe to connect it to a different device that doesn't support it. So to do that, what I first started doing is there is a tool called Wireshark that basically monitors what happens on your network. So you can capture network packets, but also it's magic superpowers that actually capture the USB transport. So if you're using a keyboard or the mouse or any USB connected device, it can capture what's happening.
25:40 David Pierce? Long story short, Den then built his own software development kit, which lets you build more powerful things for the Stream Deck than Elgato's own tools would let you.
25:48 Speaker 11 The tool or the library in this case only basically allows you to connect to a Stream Deck and send commands to it, but it's up to you to still implement what you want to do. For example, I want to see my Nest cam and I want to see, well, who triggered the alarm? Or something like that. And I would click the button and it would instantly pop me into like a view. Or another thing that I did actually fairly recently was when I'd get an alert from Nest, if something happened, I would just click a button that basically says capture. So it would capture the last like 30 seconds of the video and store it in the cloud. A lot of this stuff is entirely custom is because it's, it does not exist. It doesn't integrate yet, but by the power of me knowing how that API works behind the scenes, I just kind of stitched it all together and it's managed by the Stream Deck.
26:30 Speaker 11 And because every button has basically a mini screen, I can get a snapshot inside that button, however useless it is, because it's very tiny, but to see like what is in front of my door.
26:42 David Pierce? This goes back to that URL thing, right? Practically everything in our digital lives is an API or an SDK or a URL away, whether it's the button to leave a Zoom call or the live feed of your doorbell camera. And people like Den are finding ever more clever ways to bring all of that stuff together. Stack enough of those things on top of each other and you can do just about anything. I should say though, the Stream Deck software by itself doesn't make this as easy as it should. And programming your Stream Deck can still kind of feel like you're programming a computer, but that's going to get better as developers build more of these plug and play systems and as more developers break the whole system like Den did. Like I did with The Verge, I asked almost everybody I talked to what their wishlist items were, what they want from the Stream Deck that it can't currently do. In this
27:27 David Pierce? case, almost everybody had hardware ideas. Some people wanted more buttons. Simon wanted one that didn't have any cables and maybe worked over Bluetooth. Robert told me he wanted one where there's no divider between the buttons, so it looks more like a coherent screen rather than a bunch of individual things. And everybody had ideas about how it should be designed. But one thing I heard a bunch of was that this thing is super powerful and versatile already. So what new superpower could it get that might unlock even more?
27:55 Speaker 11 Hopefully in the future release of Stream Deck, we're gonna see at least, you know, like throw Raspberry Pi in it. Like just, you know, put an SD card maybe that does some, you know, save profiles locally. But that's for the future. For now, I'll have to work around these constraints by creatively writing software and decline computer.
28:10 David Pierce? After talking to all of these people, I honestly love the Stream Deck even more. No two people use it exactly the same way, but it makes this complicated technology feel simple and just gives you more control over how things work and how you use them. You can tinker with it to your heart's content, or just set up a few actions, run your computer from your little control panel, and never think about it again. There are no wrong answers, right? It's just buttons. Buttons are great. And if you don't like them, change them. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and then come right back and figure out how you can get the best of the Stream Deck, all the automation and control and simplicity, without actually needing to buy a Stream Deck. Because remember, it's all about buttons. We'll be right back.
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30:17 David Pierce? Welcome back. Remember how I said at the top that this episode wasn't really about the Stream Deck? Here's what I mean. The Stream Deck is many things, many, many, many things, but it's also kind of expensive. The little six-button Stream Deck Mini I have is 80 bucks. The regular 15-button model is 150 bucks. And the Stream Deck XL, and it's 32 buttons, will run you $250. That's a lot of money just to do some stuff your computer can already do. So let's see if there's a cheaper way. Maybe a way to repurpose a device you already own, or some software that can do some of the awesome automation and simplification that the Stream Deck does. Even if we lose the button-y feel of the whole thing, can we at least get some of the goodness of the Stream Deck for a lot less money?
31:01 David Pierce? That's the question I posed to Alex Cranz, and she went off to try and find out. And now she's back to tell us. Hi, Alex.
31:06 Alex Cranz? Hi, David. How are you?
31:07 David Pierce? I'm terrific. How are you?
31:09 Alex Cranz? I'm excited to talk about key remapping software, more than you think.
31:14 David Pierce? Actually, I feel like knowing you as I do, the answer is very high. I feel like I'm on brand with that. Are you a Stream Deck person?
31:20 Alex Cranz? No, but I really, I really want one, but like, I feel like it's a bridge too far, like socially.
31:27 David Pierce? You're not ready for the lifestyle, is what you're saying.
31:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like, I'm not ready for somebody to come over to my house and be like, what is on your desk? Because my desk is the first thing people see in my home. So I try to keep it like fairly like useful, because I'm a giant nerd and I'm sitting at it all day. But also like, I don't want people to judge me. And I feel like I'll get judged with a stream deck. No judgment to any of our colleagues and listeners who use a stream deck, including Dan, who just uses it for Zoom.
31:53 David Pierce? It's, yeah, I mean, listen, these are our people. This is what this episode is about. But your job was to find people a way to do the same kinds of things that you want to do on a stream deck without actually having to buy a stream deck. Which I feel like is a very useful exercise, and I'm realizing an especially useful exercise for you, who might want to do some of these like nerdy automation things, but don't want a giant piece of hardware sitting on your desk.
32:18 Alex Cranz? What I really wanted to do, and I have not yet figured out yet, is I want like one that'll work with like a Kindle or an e-reader, just like repurpose one of those old e-ink devices. So it's like my calendar and also like turns off my Zoom camera.
32:33 David Pierce? Oh, I like that idea.
32:34 Alex Cranz? But that doesn't exist yet. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got your, I got your hopes up.
32:37 David Pierce? Well, the e-ink stream deck is, is a thing that needs to exist. I wasn't going to bring that up, but that is a thing that needs to exist. And I like this idea very much of using an old Kindle, because I have like five old Kindles.
32:47 Alex Cranz? Exactly.
32:48 David Pierce? That are just around, and I would love to have a better use for them.
32:51 Alex Cranz? But for most people, you're going to be better off using your number pad, because a lot of people have been trying to figure out what to do with the number pad if you're not like in living in spreadsheets all of your life.
33:03 David Pierce? Okay.
33:03 Alex Cranz? So Windows has one called AntSoft's Key Remapper. If you click on the website, you will be like, why did I travel back to 2007?
33:12 David Pierce? It's bad. Yeah, it's real bad.
33:14 Alex Cranz? The software is also pretty dense. So, but it's, it's like $15 to $30, like you get the license. You can also do some remapping just like in Windows. So you don't necessarily need to go to that, but if you want like app-specific stuff. Antsoft. For Macs, it's a little easier. You can do stuff like I use, I've got Alfred. I'm a huge Alfred fan. I gave up Quicksilver a decade ago and have been Alfred ever since. You can also use like the automator shortcuts, like Apple's been building this stuff in from the beginning. And then there's like the old school, yes, right down to the website, Keyboard Maestro. It's like $36. You can do it all. It is much like Antsoft, not pretty. This is not a place where like the developer is really focusing on UI, which makes sense, right? Like this is for people who just want like really quick button to turn off their
33:59 Alex Cranz? zooms and do other quick automations.
34:01 David Pierce? That's fair. Well, and I think I will say the the number pad, like off to the right of your keyboard is a very useful place for that. But also, what I've heard a bunch of people say is that the the function keys are a thing that everyone should be remapping, which I think is very smart.
34:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:14 David Pierce? The downside is you have to like remember what they all are, because there's nothing about the F3 key that like tells you anything of consequence. But you should absolutely remap all of those to be like global, universal shortcuts to whatever you want, because otherwise you are never going to touch those keys.
34:28 Alex Cranz? I was gonna do that, but I'm on a happy hacking keyboard, so I have to already do that just to get to the F3. Like I have to use the function keyboard keys. But it's really good, because like on Macs, it's super easy to be like, oh, I want a universal mute button. I want a universal launch a specific app button. Like you could just do all of that. Like a lot of this stuff, I think one of the reasons this software you're seeing is so old is because a lot of this stuff you can now just kind of do in Windows and Mac. So it's really nice.
34:57 David Pierce? But if you do want to repurpose an old gadget, like a tablet or a phone for this, there is the Stream Deck app. It, in theory, is the Stream Deck, but for your phone, it is trash. The app is bad. It charges you, I think, four bucks a month to use it. It's super slow. It's like the closest thing to what the Stream Deck could be on your phone, right? Like it's just, it looks like buttons and you press them and things happen. But it's slow and it's bad and it's stupid and you shouldn't use it. Like the Stream Deck software is not like famously fast and great anyway, but it is the worst version of itself on phones, which is a real bummer. I would not use that unless like forced to for some reason.
35:35 Alex Cranz? You get just enough to be like, oh, I get the potential of this. Clearly, I need dedicated hardware.
35:41 David Pierce? There is another app called Touch Portal, I think, which seems to be the deeply nerdy one that people really like.
35:46 Alex Cranz? This is the one that a lot of people enjoy, and they actually like it more than a Stream Deck.
35:52 David Pierce? It's just finicky. I feel like it's like mad finicky for all the reasons that people like to tinker with their Stream Deck. This gives you even more stuff to do. It's like Plex, right? In that you like run it from your computer and use it from your device.
36:06 Alex Cranz? You're getting a server, and that server is listening for a client software. And the client software, you can put it on your old phone, your old Amazon Fire tablet that you've had for a billion years and you probably need to just recycle. You can do them all there. And there are a lot of people, like especially a lot of streamers, who are like, oh yeah, Touch Portal is the way to go. And I think that's just because like, I really want something that I can like dig in and customize and get really weird about and make individually mine and 3D print a little case for my old phone and do all of that. So I'm gonna go Touch Portal.
36:40 David Pierce? The thing it has going for it is that it works everywhere. It's like it's on Mac and Windows. I think it's on Android and iPhone. Like it does the thing for all the places, which is great. It's so insane to me that the Stream Deck has not solved this problem. Like as we're talking about this, I'm getting angrier at how bad the Stream Deck app is. Because the thing is like, we've been talking about this for years, right? There's that question of like, what do you do with your old devices, right? Like I have an iPad from like six years ago that like won't install software anymore, but still runs fine. And like, the perfect version of those things is that I like use it as a thing on my wall to, you know, control my smart home or whatever. And if I could have one of those that is like a remote control for my computer, that's the dream. It's so simple. I want that. I would even happily like connect it, like Apple should
37:25 David Pierce? make this thing and it would like iCloud into my computer and it would all work fine. You just have to hack it just one step more than it seems like you should have to. And that's frustrating. But people do love Touch Portal. So what do I know?
37:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah, people love Touch Portal. They've made it work. There's also another one that's a little easier than Touch Portal, but it's also only runs on Android, only runs on Windows. This is for the people who are already like, I really like to get in there and customize my entire workflow, the appearance of my workflow, every little bit of it. And that's Matrix?
37:59 David Pierce? It's like the singular of Matrix. It's just one Matrix, two Matrix.
38:03 Alex Cranz? Matrix. That seems right. Yeah, so it's totally free. It's a little bit more pared down, but because it's more pared down, it's going to be like easier to set up. You're not going to have to worry about like getting all everything just right. Cause like Touch Portal, part of its appeal, I think to a lot of people is that you can do so much. It does give you so many things, but it's kind of like the first time you play Skyrim. Go back, it's 2011. You've put Skyrim into like your PC or your 360 or whatever. And you're like, I'm going to play this game. This is going to change my life. And then it's like so much stuff. And you're like, okay, well, do I like become the dragon person, the dragon born? And like shout my way to victory? Do I go start like this, stop like these weird Romans who are doing their thing? Do I go build a house? Do I adopt a child? Do I become a blacksmith?
38:48 Alex Cranz? Like, there's so much going on and you're like, I don't. For me, I just like stopped playing for a year and a half because it overwhelmed me. And Touch Portal is kind of like that. There's so much choice that you're like, oh, I don't know where to start. So you want to come in like with a plan.
39:00 David Pierce? As we talk to people through this whole show, one of the things that seems like the key is to any of these devices is start with like a thing. And it's like, okay, I'm going to set this up. It's going to do this one thing for me. And then in the process, you like learn how to use it. You fix some of the weird bugs and then you like slowly start to add other stuff. But you need like the one problem you're trying to solve. Cause for me, like I bought a stream deck and was like, this seems neat. I wonder what I'll do with it. And then it just did nothing for a long time. But then when I was like, oh, I'll make it run the light in my office. All of a sudden it was like, okay, now I have a reason to put this in front of me. And then it opened up the rest of everything to me.
39:33 Alex Cranz? The fanciest light switch on the planet.
39:36 David Pierce? I mean, could I reach six inches out of frame here and turn off the light? Yes, I could, but it's much easier when I have my stream back.
39:42 Alex Cranz? Well, have you seen, like, did you guys talk about a lot of the different boutique keyboard makers make little number pads? And they have little like volume dials on them?
39:51 David Pierce? I was going to bring this up actually, because one of the things we should say is that for people who are thinking like, oh, maybe I'll do like the Keyboard Maestro or the number pad stuff. One thing you can buy pretty cheap is a dedicated number pad that could act as just a set of dedicated buttons for you.
40:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you could do that. And then you could use one of these like Keyboard Maestro or Ansoft's Key Remapper. Or just honestly, Mac and Windows do a pretty great job of this stuff nowadays. And just do it. That's been my other way. And that feels like a little more socially acceptable than the Stream Deck with its light up keys, which I really love. That's probably like the way I'm going. Because then like you've got the volume button, instead of having like hunt for the volume in my menu bar or hotkey it.
40:31 David Pierce? A dial is clutch, but that's a whole other accessory roadmap. We will go down some other day.
40:35 Alex Cranz? It's the same thing. It's got the number pad and the dial, all in one. So that's kind of where I'm leaning now.
40:42 David Pierce? That makes sense. And we should say before we go that if you are a person who wants to use the Stream Deck for its actual like intended use, which is to like live stream yourself, you're actually in much better shape because there's some really good apps out there that plug into OBS, which is the streaming software that everybody uses that actually works really well. Because there's like a big market for that. It's a thing a lot of people do. So if you want to like run your Twitch stream from your tablet, like Deckboard is supposed to be pretty good. I think UpDeck is supposed to be pretty good. Touch Portal works really well for this. There's one called like Stream Puppy that I was reading about that I just like inherently don't trust, but supposedly people like it. I don't know. That kind of stuff is like more functional. So if you want to stream, you're in good shape. But if you want the like wacky productivity stuff that we're about here at The Verge, you're kind of host.
41:26 Alex Cranz? We're doing it all wrong. We're like, none of us Twitch stream.
41:29 David Pierce? I know. It's really true. Okay, so we're all buying e-ink Kindles and hacking them to run Stream Decks. And when we do, we will be back and we will report on it because that will change my life.
41:38 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be a lot of tears.
41:39 David Pierce? It's gonna be amazing. All right, Alex, thank you. Appreciate it.
41:43 Alex Cranz? Thank you. Talk to you later.
41:45 David Pierce? All right. And with that, it's time for me to press the button on my Stream Deck that turns off my microphone because I have one of those and it's awesome. That's it for The Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more coverage on the Stream Deck and everything else we talked about at theverge.com. And you can also follow all of us on Twitter. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Norrie Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, buttons that will play The Vergecast on your Stream Deck, anything else, you can always email [email protected] or call The Vergecast hotline 866-VERGE11. Alex, Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about Twitter whistleblowers, House of the Dragon, e-bikes and much more. See you then. Rock and roll.
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