Software

James Donkey really needs to do a better job telling its customers where everything for its products are going to be available. The various retailer pages say nothing about software support and neither does the product box nor the included user manual. But I knew from before that there usually are software drivers for the brand's keyboards found on this page, except this time there was nothing there either. However, there was a note at the bottom linking to the Chinese website which did end up having the installer for the R2's software drivers. It downloads as a ~90 MB compressed archive that contains the installer file as well as a firmware updater tool with instructions in Mandarin. Running the executable triggers the installation that has absolutely no options for you, and I can't help but comment on how bad this is from a user's point of view. The installer decides to add in a desktop shortcut and Start Menu folder for you without asking and there obviously wasn't any T&C to agree to here. James Donkey is clearly using a re-skinned driver that we've seen used before, so the company needs to work on incorporating these basic features in addition to a more polished user experience, into the OEM software provided. The final install size of the "Alpha LV Driver 0.0.0" is 276 MB, but thankfully the program is light on system resources.

Be sure to have the keyboard connected to your PC before opening the program or else all you will get is an error message. Once done, the software drivers immediately recognize the keyboard—no surprise given they are specifically made for this keyboard—and open the home page we see here. There is no maximize Window option which would have been nice, although this does scale relatively well with your display resolution and Windows scaling level. The video above goes through the general functionality of these software drivers, including the ability to create, edit, delete, and assign different layers outside of the previously defined Fn layer. The default tab pertains to key mapping in addition to a few keyboard settings and there is a dedicated macro editor/recorder tool in addition to the expected section for RGB lighting effects. Here we see a mix of confusingly named lighting effects as well as the ability to control the LEDs on a per-key basis. You can also save/import/export these lighting profiles and James Donkey also has an online component involved, wherein you can create an account to share your creations or download those from others if you so desire. The program also allows you to check for any software or keyboard firmware updates, change the language and background picture, including opacity, as well as reset the keyboard in case you messed up and wanted to go back to its default settings. It's certainly an improvement over my last time using a James Donkey keyboard software program, but there of course remains room for improvement.