Non-Bundled And Community-Authored Grids
On top of its standard offerings, Roccat has a number of official Grids available for beta testing. The company provides custom stylized controls for games like Battlefield 3, Minecraft, StarCraft 2, Team Fortress 2, Football Manager 2013, and Counter-Strike.
In addition to game Grids, Roccat also offers Grids that expose Windows controls, VLC Media Player controls, and even turn your smartphone into a trackpad. While the beta version of the trackpad software only offers single-touch capability, applications like this show real potential for improving the user experience, delivering functionality for the PC previously only achievable with dedicated hardware.
Roccat's offerings are nice, but the real potential of Power-Grid lies with the community's ability to create custom interfaces. While the software is still in open beta, we thought we'd show you some of the first publicly-created and shared Grids. Let's start with productivity-oriented offerings: a forum user under the name Goblinstomper produced some Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator Grids, while user Marxim created a Skype Grid and user Happy Chicken covered Spotify. Lastly, user Domen178 provided Crunchyroll controls.
There are some interesting game Grids, too. Forum user Necrosylos gave us a Defiance Grid and MajorNono put together a control interface for Far Cry 3. SwedenMN released a Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Grid, and Harme developed a SimCity option.
Some of these are quite useful, and all of them were created by a very small handful of beta users who participate in the forums. Now that Power-Grid is in open beta and enthusiasts have access to it, we expect to see a huge number of interesting Grids put together by the community.
With that in mind, how hard is it to make a Grid? Can an average user put something decent together? In our experience, it's a quick and easy process once you get around a couple small interface quirks. We'll show you how on the next page and share some of the things we learned on the way.
