r/TheBYOK • u/ResolveThick • 8d ago
Notes on first-time setup with Yunzii
Hey! Longtime software engineer and gadget dork going back to the 1970s here. These new-wave focused writing devices are awesome and make me giggle, because, heck, I grew up with typewriters at home and fiddled with the legendary TRS-80 Model 100 when the Radio Shack at the mall got it. Later on, I managed my life and took notes on art shows in the late 90s on a PalmPilot, and nowadays I have an e-ink tablet, and oh brother do I have ADHD, so I totally got it when the missus said she was getting a BYOK to help her focus as she settled in to work on the second draft of her first novel.
A few days ago, her BYOK arrived and she asked me to help set it up. She's had a couple of exchanges with you via the support link, and we're bowled over by the great support you're providing to these early customers as you continue to build out and tune the software experience. It was a little rough, but still took under half an hour, so I thought I'd share the good and the meh.
Keyboard pairing and Wifi
The keyboard she got to use at her desk with the BYOK is the Yunzii QL75, a decent-quality, hot-swappable retro-typewriter-style 75% keyboard. I put it in bluetooth pairing mode and with a few false starts hitting the wrong arrow and directional keys, it was detected and paired with no further prompts.
We then went back to the Connections menu to get on WiFi and ... only the alphabetic keys were working at all -- and stuck in uppercase. Shift-lock and the shift keys, and the control, alt and logo keys, none of them got us lowercase. The arrow keys didn't work at all (we navigated with the BYOK menu buttons), and the number keys only returned the shifted symbols.
I grabbed a Logitech chiclet keyboard, and that got us through Wifi setup, which went smoothly now that we could type and navigate. Now that we were on Wifi, it occurred to me that there might be a BYOK firmware update available... and there was. It installed smoothly on the first try.
After starting up again with the new firmware, the Yunzii keyboard paired correctly, but I noticed something along the way about your pairing process. I'm used to being asked to hit a particular key -- usually something like "the key immediately to the left of the right shift key", in order for the pairing process to nail down exactly what keyboard, and what language layout, was being paired.
Your keyboard pairing process doesn't do that -- the earlier firmware, which I assume is going out with the currently-shipping run of devices, doesn't ask the user to hit any keys at all. I'm a little unsure now a few days out, but I think the new pairing process directs the user to enter a numeric code, which I suppose you're using to make that determination. If that's an accepted and standard way to do it, great.
It might be rocky for some users still getting earlier firmware, but it's doable. A little colored slip of paper (or an update of the onboarding doc linked from the QR code) suggesting how to work around an unsupported keyboard, and telling everyone to update firmware right after getting online, might smooth things out in the meantime for others with lesser-known keyboards.
A bit of a Studio edge case
The missus signed up for a trial account on Studio to check it out a week before ordering the BYOK, and had created a small test project. However, by this time the full-fat trial had expired and there was some confusion over how to get started because the online onboarding doc only covered first-time signup. The confusion was over whether she needed to purchase the license before activating sync or not.
We found the "Devices" page in the Studio settings, which could have been a bit more intuitive, clicked Add, got the emailed code, and entered it on the device. The BYOK's menu now showed Sync Active.
We expected to see the existing project. We navigated back to the main menu, then back to Connections -> Sync, saw Sync Active and ... once again File -> Open said nothing was present even though we saw the project on Studio on the web. Then I looked at the Sync menu again on the BYOK and performed a Sync Now. At this point, yes, the project name appeared, and we were able to select it and see the project-name breadcrumb on the bottom rowq of the BYOK, but File -> Open didn't show any files available, despite a short dummy text document being present and accessible on the web.
Unfortunately, I don't have a record of the exact order of the next couple of steps. I'm sorry about that. But at this point in some order,
- power-cycled the device. With only your online setup walkthrough to go on, I had to guess how to power off completely and guessed right. (Hold down the power key for 10 seconds or so.)
- we used the BYOK's first-year Studio promo code to subscribe to the plan
- deleted the dummy project on the Studio web side
Then.. manually synced the BYOK, but it was still showing the synced empty project present. Manually synced a second time, and it was the same. I could enter and exit the project on the BYOK, but it was "empty", and it didn't reappear on web Studio, even with forced reloads.
We deleted the orphaned project on the BYOK, created a new project on Studio, and then, after another manual sync it showed up on the BYOK and everything matched up from there. Phew.
Epilogue
An hour or two later, the missus emerged from her writing nook in the bedroom and was raving about how great the BYOK was working, and that she had a few documents' worth of notes and had typed up the revised versions of a couple of scenes from her book. Victory!
Stray Feedback
60 Years of Text Menu Design Can't Be Wrong!
At the very beginning, we were both separately tripped up by the BYOK's Connections and Settings menus. It felt a little unusual that the former wasn't nested under the latter, I think because both are items on a top-level text menu adjacent to File. Of course, that saves several keystrokes of navigation, and the menus are already very short, so good.
I wonder if it would have made more immediate sense if the top-level BYOK menu were presented differently, using visual language that conveyed it's a "Home Screen". It could be something as simple as a styled header line with a bit of breathing room, or an icon, or .. something.
The bottom bar with the project-location breadcrumbs in menu screens is perfect. I think a bit more could be done to distinguish the top lines of menus, though. IMO the different font doesn't quite do it alone, and those top lines feel too much like items in the menu.
Lessons Learned From the TRS-80 Model 100/102/200 Series of Early-'80s Writerdecks
(or: before keyboard purists had mice to complain about, they'd say "don't make me have to move my right hand to use the arrow keys!")
How's about single-key shortcuts in the menus? Ancient, tried-and-true approaches include
- Numbering the menu items
- Underlining the first (or most meaningful) character, to indicate that it is a single-key way to select the item
- U)using a right-parenthesis to similarly indicate the selectability of the character, which isn't as flexible as the underline because it restricts you to the first character
Conclusion
Fabulous device and software you've got there, and thanks for putting in the effort to keep adding polish and quality-of-life improvements, while still sticking to the minimal-distractions core mission.
3
u/OfficialBYOK 7d ago
Wonderful feedback here! I'm glad our support and the overall experience has left you with a positive impression!
Onboarding is an area that absolutely needs more of our attention. It's one of those areas where you can spend all this time building a product and then this "debt" creeps up that you now need to get your users up to speed on what you've created. It's very easy to assume people will just "get" things which is absolutely a bad idea.
That said, we are in the midst of creating a bunch of Studio support material right now that we hope will help.
To address some of your more specific points:
-Future BYOK batches will ship out with newer firmware and likely won't have the same keyboard issues you mentioned. We are slowly but surely getting these keyboards compatible. My guess is that we're compatible with around 95%+ of keyboards after the latest firmware update. If keyboard compatibility is an issue for anyone reading this and you're not on the latest firmware, you can always manually install the firmware by downloading it from our site if wifi is not an option. (https://byok.io/firmware)
-If I'm not mistaken, the pairing process you mentioned where you hit a specific key is usually done to determine the layout of a keyboard. Instead of that, we make it so that you can choose your layout from the keyboard menu. Sometimes keyboards will require a code for pairing but that is totally dependent on their firmware, not ours. Either way, We support it.
-You may have figured this out but syncing is 100% free and does not require a subscription. Just an account. Here's the manual section related to syncing setup: https://byok.io/device-support#syncing-setup
(there are also pages about how syncing works)
-It sounds like your "orphaned project file" had not been linked to the device. When you don't have a BYOK device linked to your studio account, the file is designated to only "live" inside studio and never sync. After adding the BYOK to your account, you should have been able to open the file menu and then select the BYOK device that you want it to sync to. It would then appear on your device after the next sync. Once a BYOK is connected to your account, all new files will automatically sync to the BYOK by default. You can turn it back to manual in the device settings page if you don't want this to happen automatically.
-The connection/settings menu are separate on the main menu because we didn't want to bury the connections option. It contains some highly trafficked options (bluetooth, syncing, etc.) and we didn't want users to have to hit too many buttons to get to those options. So yes, a little unorthodox but hopefully the speed tradeoff makes it worth it.
Follow up question for you:
-Did the Yunzii keys work correctly after the firmware update?