5 ms·

They aren't taking the type of product that has existed with Wacom type tablets and bringing it to the portable capacitive world. This is going to be terrible i

by phaus 13y ago

They aren't taking the type of product that has existed with Wacom type tablets and bringing it to the portable capacitive world. This is going to be terrible in comparison. Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon.

slantyyz 13y ago
>> Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon. Which is why I think Apple needs to offer a version of the iPad with a Wacom-style digitizer. Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation, but it doesn't apply for a lot of other use cases, including the ones that Pencil is trying to address.
- leoc 13y ago
  > Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. Jobs' stylus ban did serve as a useful forcing device: with a stylus available, pre-iPhone developers of touch UIs tended to fall back to producing bad ports of the WIMP concept, complete with buttons of minute size. But at the same time it would certainly have been possible to produce a good smartphone/tablet UI that was stylus-enabled. In fact I think you could, for example, port the original iPhone's UI to a stylus-only basis fairly smoothly. You'd need a couple of extra physical buttons for call accept/reject and other instant-response actions, and you'd need some alternatives for the few places where two-finger pinch/spread gestures are really important, but otherwise it would be a pretty straightforward port with, I think, a very usable result: only slightly less appealing than the finger-touch original. Overall it seems pretty similar to Jobs' ban on cursor keys on the original Macintosh, which probably helped make early Macintosh software more Mac-native but was rolled back without difficulty later. Agreed that the lack of proper stylus support is an increasingly glaring lack in the iPhone/iPad line, the largest iPads in particular.
  - slantyyz 13y ago
    >> I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. I don't disagree, that's why I used "might" as a weasel word.
    - leoc 13y ago
      All good. Weasels are beautiful, intelligent creatures. ;)
- tannerbrockwell 13y ago
  A Double entendre if ever I saw one, leave it to the greatest salesman of the 21st century!
joeschmoe 13y ago
I've used one that worked like a pen. It had a small plastic disk at the tip that swivelled so it would keep contact and not slip. I never found out who made them though. It didn't feel like a giant cumbersome crayon though.
- phaus 13y ago
  I've used one of those and I found it to be an equally terrible experience. Not sure if they fixed them, but the first few generations of that product left scratches on the screen.
  - desipenguin 13y ago
    Recently came across this on kickstarter : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/227221698/truglide-apex-fine-point-electronic-stylus-for-ipa http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/227221698/truglide-apex-... - says it has 2.4mm tip (also says 5mm some other place - but that too is equally small) This one is w/o the "disk"
- kalleboo 13y ago
  HTC made one like that
- egypturnash 13y ago
  Probably an Adonit Jot. http://adonit.net/jot/classic/ http://adonit.net/jot/classic/

by phaus 13y ago

slantyyz 13y ago

>> Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon. Which is why I think Apple needs to offer a version of the iPad with a Wacom-style digitizer. Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation, but it doesn't apply for a lot of other use cases, including the ones that Pencil is trying to address.

leoc 13y ago
> Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. Jobs' stylus ban did serve as a useful forcing device: with a stylus available, pre-iPhone developers of touch UIs tended to fall back to producing bad ports of the WIMP concept, complete with buttons of minute size. But at the same time it would certainly have been possible to produce a good smartphone/tablet UI that was stylus-enabled. In fact I think you could, for example, port the original iPhone's UI to a stylus-only basis fairly smoothly. You'd need a couple of extra physical buttons for call accept/reject and other instant-response actions, and you'd need some alternatives for the few places where two-finger pinch/spread gestures are really important, but otherwise it would be a pretty straightforward port with, I think, a very usable result: only slightly less appealing than the finger-touch original. Overall it seems pretty similar to Jobs' ban on cursor keys on the original Macintosh, which probably helped make early Macintosh software more Mac-native but was rolled back without difficulty later. Agreed that the lack of proper stylus support is an increasingly glaring lack in the iPhone/iPad line, the largest iPads in particular.
- slantyyz 13y ago
  >> I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. I don't disagree, that's why I used "might" as a weasel word.
  - leoc 13y ago
    All good. Weasels are beautiful, intelligent creatures. ;)
tannerbrockwell 13y ago
A Double entendre if ever I saw one, leave it to the greatest salesman of the 21st century!

joeschmoe 13y ago

I've used one that worked like a pen. It had a small plastic disk at the tip that swivelled so it would keep contact and not slip. I never found out who made them though. It didn't feel like a giant cumbersome crayon though.

phaus 13y ago
I've used one of those and I found it to be an equally terrible experience. Not sure if they fixed them, but the first few generations of that product left scratches on the screen.
- desipenguin 13y ago
  Recently came across this on kickstarter : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/227221698/truglide-apex-fine-point-electronic-stylus-for-ipa http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/227221698/truglide-apex-... - says it has 2.4mm tip (also says 5mm some other place - but that too is equally small) This one is w/o the "disk"
kalleboo 13y ago
HTC made one like that
egypturnash 13y ago
Probably an Adonit Jot. http://adonit.net/jot/classic/ http://adonit.net/jot/classic/