KeyTouch has been downloaded over 10,000 times, which is a milestone for the keyTouch project. Because of this I will write something about the history of the keyTouch project.

In May 2004 I bought a new keyboard that had extra function keys. A cd-rom was included with the keyboard and contained software for configuring the extra function keys under Windows. Because I could not find any working application on the internet for configuring the keys under GNU/Linux, I found out a way for configuring the keys. However this way was not userfriendly, so I started to develop keyTouch that would provide an easy graphical user interface for configuring the keys. In October 2004 the first beta version was released. Version 1 supported in the end only 9 different keyboard models.

When I started to use Linux kernel 2.6, I noticed that some extra function keys stopped working. This was caused by changes in the keyboard drivers of the kernel. Because I wanted to make it possible to get all extra function keys working, I started to develop keyTouch version 2. This version would work perfectly together with kernel 2.6 and the first beta version of it was released in September 2005. After this release keyTouch became more popular and more keyboard models got supported.

In February 2006 keyTouch got nominated for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2006 in category "Hardware". As a result of the nomination an article appeared in the Dutch news paper "De Spits" (click here to read) and in the regional news paper "Dagblad De Limburger" (click here to read).

In June 2006 I released version 2.2 beta where the user can select an application as an action for a key from a list of applications. So my mother can now also choose an application, without having to know the application's command.

So there we are then: at 7 July keyTouch was downloaded over 10,000 times from the SourceForge.net servers. On that date keyTouch supports 82 different keyboard models, installation packages for different distributions are available and the application is translated to 7 languages.

Is my mission completed? No I am still working on it to make it better. Now for example I am working on a version that will perfectly support USB keyboards and to make that possible I wrote a patch to improve the kernel keyboard drivers.

I would like to thank everybody who provided feedback about the application and those who sent a keyboard file to support their keyboard model. Special thanks go to the packagers that made keyTouch easy installable on different GNU/Linux distributions and the translators.

- Marvin Raaijmakers, developer of keyTouch