4 ms·

What if they made the display modular, so that you could swap it with a regular display for when you want to do gaming and other stuff like that? I personally

What if they made the display modular, so that you could swap it with a regular display for when you want to do gaming and other stuff like that? I personally would buy an e-ink laptop, but then again I'm very much into e-ink, I have a Kindle and ReMarkable 2, years ago I also bought DPT-S1 but I returned it because it was too expensive. Also colour e-ink displays have been getting better and better too! So I'm sure that in time, it'll be amazing!

synapse26 5y ago
The modularity of the Framework laptop comes to mind, maybe one day, we’ll see.
mdp2021 5y ago
> so that you could swap it with a regular display You may just want to lay an EPD tablet on the original screen and link the two. Check: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=173025&stc=1&id=1566157578 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmenti... Issues? Yes. HDMI does not allow for the touchscreen, and you may want that. And the hardware system must optimize battery life, which can be awful on the HDMI connection. What you really want is an optimized data connection and screen mirroring to the tablet. Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android...
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android... This is my hope with the future PineNote running a Linux distro.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Mind you, Android can be pretty effective on the tablet for some tasks. But when you will want to use a complete Office Automation suite, instead of the more toyish mobile alternatives... What I finally did, this June, was: I coded my own word processor for Android. A dual boot system (Android vs Linux Desktop) would be the best solution.
    - exikyut 5y ago
      I'm idly curious about the word processor you put together. You're not saying "text editor", which suggests some level of interesting/novel functionality.
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        Exactly: full fledged Word Processor, optimized for the contextual technology of a ~13'' EPD display (so, for example, no scrolling, corner-to-corner (but the margins) use of the display in two columns landscape - for use with a slotted BT keyboard). Native Java for Android (no need for NDK). Rich text and full paragraph justification, spacing and indenting - from scratch: text is rendered and placed on the bitmap of the screen canvas bit by bit whenever necessary upon editing. Functions through touchscreen and keyboard shortcuts. I structured a markup (using both paragraph styles and ad-hoc "direct formatting" - bold, italics etc.) which allows for simplicity and comfort in file manipulation, but the translation to .fodt (or .xml in general) is almost trivial (there are libraries around to manage typical formats: I have checked but not implemented as for personal use I do not really need the feature). Battery wise, I managed to remain very conservative: sometimes even 2%/hour (~100mA, equivalent to many days of work) of consumption (fortunately, also the use of BT keyboards consume very little). It was started this June (2021), and I have used it for many hundred of hours with good productivity. I have not published it (yet) as I would want to polish the code first. It was quite rewarding to get it done (the best tailored product is the one you develop for yourself) - but still with a sensation of quite absurd oddity, since I had been using full-fledged word processors in the early nineties, and "there I was", almost thirty years later, with tablets much more powerful than the desktops of yore, coding a word processor because all was available for Android was unfit for use if compared to desktop tools, and I was just losing time waiting for "the product"... It's not "normal".
        exikyut 5y ago
        Oooo. Wow, this sounds awesome. I hadn't thought of the concept of writing into a multiple-column layout before. That's really really neat. It keeps the individual runs of text short (faster for proofreading, I've heard), scrolls less, and lets you keep more context on the screen. I'm definitely very interested in this when it comes out, I don't currently have a tablet-size device but that probably won't be the case for too long and I can see myself giving this a go. A single-column option for phones (in landscape mode) might be practical. I do completely agree that Android feels structurally broken (for want of a better way to put it) in terms of application support - it honestly feels like someone figured out how to bolt WebKit onto a feature phone and add capacitive touch and eye candy, while (somehow???) maintaining the same "smol device" fundamentals of "toy" and "not full PC". IMHO the PC experience isn't really one single cohesive vision, but rather the emergent result of years of many thousands of little independently-evolved self-sustaining threads and ideas (particularly in UX design) intersecting and bouncing off each other in a sort of cohesive balance that resulted in (comparative) miracles like Windows XP. Microsoft et al didn't invent the fundamentals of the ideology and language that emerged; rather, they just figured out how to capitalize on the net result and realized that if they knee-capped it too heavily they'd kill the thing they were trying to benefit off of. From a distance it kinda looks like Apple/Google are trying to (re)invent everything - conventions, expectations, design language, (tens of?) thousands of tiny details, etc - from first principles, without giving sufficient consideration to whether their fussing about accidentally edits and rewrites the technological aspects of the goal narrative. I think advertising and the exponential over-valuation of user data are to blame for the current insanity - and sadly so, since it's obvious that won't change soon. I think the fundamental incentive to refine and optimize for technical experience/competence has become diluted by All The Ad Revenue™ from the current status quo, producing the current ecosystem, app store offerings, app quality level, fragmentation, etc. Basically everything seems to be working as intended, or in other words I don't mean that "current status quo is fundamentally bad and evil" (for want of a better way to put it), I rather mean that between ad revenue, internal politicking, Google/Apple/Microsoft competition, antitrust regulations, overall public perception of how invasive ads/tracking is, etc etc, the system as a whole has basically reached a steady state that simply doesn't have room for pure technical excellence, which I don't think will change until the ad bubble collapses. I'm tentatively hopeful that might actually happen in my lifetime, although as a counterpoint, hopefully it doesn't take so long the world ends up in a WALL•E-style dystopia with everything paperclip-maximized around ads instead of garbage. Haha. However, this all provides a unique opportunity for anyone prepared to make the effort to make apps that are actually interesting: can I interest you in a "Buy" button? :P You mentioned cleaning up the source code - and while I certainly won't dissuade you from open-sourcing something like this :D (it would be a genuine net improvement, and you could list on F-Droid as well), I'm reminded of the "source code is <license> on GitHub, but ready-to-go APK in Play Store is $.$$" model, which I think could work quite well for this sort of thing. There are a lot of small, focused apps out there that have loyal followings. Maybe you could do an "early beta" sort of thing to cue users to understand the first versions are free but you plan to change that at some point. (The Play Store management dashboards probably make it straightforward to grandfather everyone who started with the beta into free updates for life or something like that.)
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    I was wondering if you can freely customize the system (install software like a normal Linux Desktop OS) and checked, and I found a curious detail ( https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote ): > NPU (Neural Processing Unit) Capabilities: * Neural network acceleration engine with processing performance of up to 0.8 TOPS; * Supports integer 8 and integer 16 convolution operations; * Supports the following deep learning frameworks: TensorFlow, TF-lite, Pytorch, Caffe, ONNX, MXNet, Keras, Darknet Very odd for an EPD tablet!

synapse26 5y ago

The modularity of the Framework laptop comes to mind, maybe one day, we’ll see.

mdp2021 5y ago

> so that you could swap it with a regular display You may just want to lay an EPD tablet on the original screen and link the two. Check: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=173025&stc=1&id=1566157578 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmenti... Issues? Yes. HDMI does not allow for the touchscreen, and you may want that. And the hardware system must optimize battery life, which can be awful on the HDMI connection. What you really want is an optimized data connection and screen mirroring to the tablet. Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android...

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android... This is my hope with the future PineNote running a Linux distro.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Mind you, Android can be pretty effective on the tablet for some tasks. But when you will want to use a complete Office Automation suite, instead of the more toyish mobile alternatives... What I finally did, this June, was: I coded my own word processor for Android. A dual boot system (Android vs Linux Desktop) would be the best solution.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    I'm idly curious about the word processor you put together. You're not saying "text editor", which suggests some level of interesting/novel functionality.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      Exactly: full fledged Word Processor, optimized for the contextual technology of a ~13'' EPD display (so, for example, no scrolling, corner-to-corner (but the margins) use of the display in two columns landscape - for use with a slotted BT keyboard). Native Java for Android (no need for NDK). Rich text and full paragraph justification, spacing and indenting - from scratch: text is rendered and placed on the bitmap of the screen canvas bit by bit whenever necessary upon editing. Functions through touchscreen and keyboard shortcuts. I structured a markup (using both paragraph styles and ad-hoc "direct formatting" - bold, italics etc.) which allows for simplicity and comfort in file manipulation, but the translation to .fodt (or .xml in general) is almost trivial (there are libraries around to manage typical formats: I have checked but not implemented as for personal use I do not really need the feature). Battery wise, I managed to remain very conservative: sometimes even 2%/hour (~100mA, equivalent to many days of work) of consumption (fortunately, also the use of BT keyboards consume very little). It was started this June (2021), and I have used it for many hundred of hours with good productivity. I have not published it (yet) as I would want to polish the code first. It was quite rewarding to get it done (the best tailored product is the one you develop for yourself) - but still with a sensation of quite absurd oddity, since I had been using full-fledged word processors in the early nineties, and "there I was", almost thirty years later, with tablets much more powerful than the desktops of yore, coding a word processor because all was available for Android was unfit for use if compared to desktop tools, and I was just losing time waiting for "the product"... It's not "normal".
      - exikyut 5y ago
        Oooo. Wow, this sounds awesome. I hadn't thought of the concept of writing into a multiple-column layout before. That's really really neat. It keeps the individual runs of text short (faster for proofreading, I've heard), scrolls less, and lets you keep more context on the screen. I'm definitely very interested in this when it comes out, I don't currently have a tablet-size device but that probably won't be the case for too long and I can see myself giving this a go. A single-column option for phones (in landscape mode) might be practical. I do completely agree that Android feels structurally broken (for want of a better way to put it) in terms of application support - it honestly feels like someone figured out how to bolt WebKit onto a feature phone and add capacitive touch and eye candy, while (somehow???) maintaining the same "smol device" fundamentals of "toy" and "not full PC". IMHO the PC experience isn't really one single cohesive vision, but rather the emergent result of years of many thousands of little independently-evolved self-sustaining threads and ideas (particularly in UX design) intersecting and bouncing off each other in a sort of cohesive balance that resulted in (comparative) miracles like Windows XP. Microsoft et al didn't invent the fundamentals of the ideology and language that emerged; rather, they just figured out how to capitalize on the net result and realized that if they knee-capped it too heavily they'd kill the thing they were trying to benefit off of. From a distance it kinda looks like Apple/Google are trying to (re)invent everything - conventions, expectations, design language, (tens of?) thousands of tiny details, etc - from first principles, without giving sufficient consideration to whether their fussing about accidentally edits and rewrites the technological aspects of the goal narrative. I think advertising and the exponential over-valuation of user data are to blame for the current insanity - and sadly so, since it's obvious that won't change soon. I think the fundamental incentive to refine and optimize for technical experience/competence has become diluted by All The Ad Revenue™ from the current status quo, producing the current ecosystem, app store offerings, app quality level, fragmentation, etc. Basically everything seems to be working as intended, or in other words I don't mean that "current status quo is fundamentally bad and evil" (for want of a better way to put it), I rather mean that between ad revenue, internal politicking, Google/Apple/Microsoft competition, antitrust regulations, overall public perception of how invasive ads/tracking is, etc etc, the system as a whole has basically reached a steady state that simply doesn't have room for pure technical excellence, which I don't think will change until the ad bubble collapses. I'm tentatively hopeful that might actually happen in my lifetime, although as a counterpoint, hopefully it doesn't take so long the world ends up in a WALL•E-style dystopia with everything paperclip-maximized around ads instead of garbage. Haha. However, this all provides a unique opportunity for anyone prepared to make the effort to make apps that are actually interesting: can I interest you in a "Buy" button? :P You mentioned cleaning up the source code - and while I certainly won't dissuade you from open-sourcing something like this :D (it would be a genuine net improvement, and you could list on F-Droid as well), I'm reminded of the "source code is <license> on GitHub, but ready-to-go APK in Play Store is $.$$" model, which I think could work quite well for this sort of thing. There are a lot of small, focused apps out there that have loyal followings. Maybe you could do an "early beta" sort of thing to cue users to understand the first versions are free but you plan to change that at some point. (The Play Store management dashboards probably make it straightforward to grandfather everyone who started with the beta into free updates for life or something like that.)
- mdp2021 5y ago
  I was wondering if you can freely customize the system (install software like a normal Linux Desktop OS) and checked, and I found a curious detail ( https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote ): > NPU (Neural Processing Unit) Capabilities: * Neural network acceleration engine with processing performance of up to 0.8 TOPS; * Supports integer 8 and integer 16 convolution operations; * Supports the following deep learning frameworks: TensorFlow, TF-lite, Pytorch, Caffe, ONNX, MXNet, Keras, Darknet Very odd for an EPD tablet!