8 ms·

Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

58 points by dpflan 11y ago

dlsx 11y ago
Wired and Microsoft... 2 dead companies with bad ideas collaborating on a get hype for pens piece. Can I just say, kek. Microsoft and it's team of "brilliant patent holding geniuses" are tired. I would rather invest in 2 random kids in a garage that think pens are stupid. Or buy the latest macbook, the space grey is more innovative than anything these group of troglodytes and their cronies will ever produce. Plastics!
dpflan 11y ago
Reminded me of Dr. Ivan Sutherland's "SketchPad" demo; here's a video of it with Alan Kay commenting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI
melling 11y ago
Better pen input would be great, especially for drawing. How about some form of chorded keyboard or glove? A chorded keyboard was demonstrated in 1968 by Engelbart: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mousesite/1968Demo.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mouses... Google's Soli project might lead to better input: http://youtu.be/0QNiZfSsPc0 http://youtu.be/0QNiZfSsPc0
- dpflan 11y ago
  Soli looks very interesting. There is Smarter Objects from MIT Fluid Interfaces that is similar in nature, but has a more dynamic approach. It's certainly not as simple as Soli seems because of the augmented-reality component it uses. But if Google brings back Glass and ships Soli in IoT/smart household objects, then you'd have the same result. --EDIT-- Link to MIT Fluid Interfaces Smart Objects: http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects
- abawany 11y ago
  I have been using Windows Tablet PC since 2003 (HP, Toshiba , and now Fujitsu). The (typically) Wacom stylus works very well and with OneNote, allowed me to take extensive class notes across two masters programs. OneNote also interprets the handwriting so it was quite the pleasant surprise to find that my scribblings were somewhat searchable.
frandroid 11y ago
How many tens of millions of dollars has Microsoft sunk in Surface, tablets and other touch technologies, only to have Apple eat their lunch? How many billions sunk in MSR every year yielding no commercial products? Microsoft has always needed to get their product vision from somewhere else, and for all of the hoopla about Nadella and open sourcing everything, that core fact about Microsoft hasn't changed. It's really sad because Microsoft has everything stacked in its favour to succeed. I mean it's not like like don't succeed on those products that they copy from others, starting from Windows all the way down to the Xbox and Bing, but when it comes to commercial innovation, that's not who they are.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Microsoft seems to be perfectly successful to me, no? R&D, by virtue of being R&D, rarely makes it to the market in a recognizable form. My guess is that the lessons learned there certainly have been applied to their real profit centers.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    Plus their massive patent portfolio has definitely paid off in various ways. PS - I don't personally like software patents, but you cannot deny they make money for research-based organisations.
    - frandroid 11y ago
      The patent portfolio is a good point, I'll concede that.
  - frandroid 11y ago
    > it's not like like don't succeed on those products I acknowledged that they are successful. But they aren't successful in creating new markets; they succeed in invading existing ones.
- melling 11y ago
  I'm a bit of an Apple fan, but let's be honest, Apple isn't eating Microsoft's lunch. Apple has 18% mobile market share, and it seems that they've broken into the double-digits in desktop share: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc-market-share-ever-in-q3-2014-according-to-idc/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc...
noir_lord 11y ago
I'd love an A4 sized one of these and a screen, monochrome would be fine, I spent so much of my life drawing out code/approaches on squared pads only to leave the pad at the office. All I would want is some way of indexing them and one press to send as an email. I'd drop 200 quid on that right now.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone1234 11y ago
  That's more or less what a Surface Pro with OneNote (and OneDrive) does. But it isn't even ballpark $200. More like $700+.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Indeed and I've considered it a bunch of times but I have a fast android tablet and a nice laptop/desktop setup running Xubuntu. $200 would be ideal, I don't need a tablet just a high quality portable digitizer rather than another tablet. Next tablet upgrade might well be a surface pro though even running Windows (which I haven't done for a decade) as I'd really like instant access to all of my sketches going back months or years. EDIT: It would be incredibly useful to pull up a sketch of an architecture against a git timestamp so I could figure out WTF I was thinking at the time ;).
    - garblegarble 11y ago
      I've got a workflow that gets close to that - I use a "smart pen" for architecture diagrams, you have to write on special paper but in exchange you get a digital version of everything you write/draw, indexed by time (and, if you want, you can record audio as you're writing/drawing and later replay the audio it recorded by pointing at some part of the text) It's quite useful for architecture diagrams, and for capturing requirements in a meeting (because you've got full audio of what the client said). The main drawback of the pen I use is it's quite bulky (I use a pen from livescribe), although I suspect there will be better-proportioned pens nowadays...
bsder 11y ago
> he’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Oh, the irony. It's Microsoft's own fault in the first place that we have an operating system that is so horribly unresponsive. And, now, umpteen years later, it's a BIG ADVANCE that we actually make computers do what we want, when we want. Just like before Microsoft.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  That's almost laughably incorrect, although unfortunately popular amongst a certain segment of the tech set. The nearly-impossible-to-use computers that did very little very slowly back in the 80s (and earlier) were not nearly as amazing as your memory is fooling you into believing. Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now. And in any case, you mean "before Windows" if anything, because DOS was fast as blazes (and did pretty much nothing as a consequence).
  - bsder 11y ago
    > Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now. And we had Amiga. And BeOS. And Plan9. All of which had very good latency. All of which Microsoft displaced with monopolist behavior and marketing money. Microsoft is only interested in fixing the problems they caused now that they aren't the 800lb gorilla anymore.
  - jameshart 11y ago
    Essentially, when people think back to how responsive computers were "before windows", they are recalling computers which had no networking, and disks which were so slow that you would never write software which depended in real-time on getting that data from disk. You'd pre-load all the data you needed into your meager RAM and then, yes, for doing the one thing that was loaded into memory, with the data that was already in memory, the computer would be very very responsive. But when it came to saving or loading, you could go and get a coffee.
sosuke 11y ago
Reminds me of the 1ms touch delay technology also from Microsoft's applied sciences group. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4
omarforgotpwd 11y ago
I cannot think of another tech company that's as obsessed with pens as Microsoft is. They've been working on and promoting this stuff for what feels like decades now.
- scholia 11y ago
  Indeed, I used the Pen extensions for MS DOS ;-)
- brobinson 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing I remember reading that MS basically killed the nascent pen computing industry by announcing their entry into it.
ypeterholmes 11y ago
Mistaken premise here in my opinion: Think about typing the character ‘a’ on a keyboard. Fast, right? Just the one keystroke. “It is fast,” Bathiche says, “if you make some certain assumptions. That the position of the letter ‘a’ is where you intended it to be, the font is the way you intended it to be, the size of the ‘a’ is what you intended it to be.” All those decisions are made before you hit the key, and you often don’t have a choice. “But with ink, you can dictate all those things, almost simultaneously as you’re writing. I can put my ‘a’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.” I can type wayyy faster than I can write with a pen. So... yeah
- gohrt 11y ago
  If you don't care about font and style, yes. But if the "markup" is high relative to the character count, pens win. This is also a pronounced issue in information graphics -- the off-the-shelf stuff in Excel etc is quite limited; you can do a custom visual a lot better, easier, with a custom drawing, what is impossible or ungainly in a "smart" diagramming program.
- jm_l 11y ago
  His thought here resonates with me though, particularly when I'm taking the kind of notes that involve diagrams, I find that using the space I'm given exactly how I want it, whether to draw boxes with big symbols, simple graphs or sketches, is a lot quicker on paper with a pen or pencil than on a computer using a keyboard. I'm a pretty fast typer and a writer so I'll admit that there is probably some person whose speed difference is so large that this really isn't helpful, but mostly what takes up time if I want to type like a write is using the mouse to select my font size and type, click the button that tells the word processor I want to draw boxes or arrows and then drawing those boxes and arrows. Also importantly, he admits there are many cases where you really just need a keyboard (writing a long paper, composing a tweet or comment) but I think he's right that there's also many where you really need a pen.
  - hug 11y ago
    To preface this, I'm a mid-20s guy who grew up with a keyboard in his hands. I type absurdly faster than I write, with handwriting harder to read than a doctor's, and the idea of carrying an honest to goodness piece of paper and pen around with me seemed archaic. Then I started my most recent job, and was provided with a Surface Pro. I'm already well embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, and I used OneNote before, but the workflow was a minor assistance to me, and I didn't get what the big deal was. You stuck some notes in a notepad, and then you could look at them later. So what? How does this help me? Now, though, I've got a pen. I take my surface with me to each and every meeting I go to, and it's made a world of difference to how meetings work for me. I can take notes that have more contextually appropriate information than just text, because I can scribble out a diagram of a process as it's being explained to me. If I'm leading a meeting, I'll project from my Surface and use it to whiteboard out ideas onto the projector (like a ghetto version of the Surface Hub). I'll note other people's contributions into the same document and then share out a fully editable version of that document into a team notebook. All of these interactions feel more "natural" than the action I'm most accustomed to, which is typing, and the end result is somehow more human-friendly (despite how horrifying my handwriting is) than my previous "list of things discussed and some dot points" method of taking notes. If the future of interaction is pen, it'll come less of a surprise to me now than it would have five years ago.
Animats 11y ago
"He’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Here, Bathiche has solved that infuriating problem where you write or draw on a screen, and the ink is always a half-second behind your finger." So few people get that. Alan Kay once wrote in the 1970s that it was as unacceptable for there to be a delay between user action and response on a computer as it was unacceptable on a piano. Now we have several gigaflops on every desktop and still can't get that right. We really need this in web browsers. Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later. Touch a link in Firefox for Android and see what happens, or rather what doesn't happen.
- mtrpcic 11y ago
  People often don't understand that for an action on the web (clicking a link) the user feedback and end result don't need to be the same thing. You can update the UI in a meaningful way while you wait for the end-result to come back from the server. A user should never have to sit there after doing an action and ask themselves "Did I really click that? Or did I miss it?"
- bhilburn 11y ago
  This is one thing Apple really 'got right' in iOS. You can especially see it in any app that allows you to zoom or pan the view. If you change the perspective, it will always redraw the screen according to your input. Sometimes it has to fill in the new area with a temporary texture while it runs off to load the right one, but the response is instantaneous. As an Android user, this is one of my biggest gripes. Android just hasn't figured this out, yet, or doesn't care.
  - Gigablah 11y ago
    Unfortunately, apple seems to have regressed with the apple watch. It really feels laggy and unresponsive at times.
  - on_and_off 11y ago
    I think that Android started off the wrong way with something aimed at the existing competition at that time (so the first Blackberry, WP and Nokia smartphones). Now it is very hard to revamp Android in order to accomplish this. I just hope that the experiments made by the Dart team (they are aiming at a 120 fps lag free framework on Android) are also conducted internally in the Android team (not necessarily with Dart, but preferably not with Java).
icpmacdo 11y ago
Can I get the Hacker News recommendation on the best affordable pens and notebooks?
- Falcon9 11y ago
  I will leave specific recommendations to others, but I favor http://www.jetpens.com/ http://www.jetpens.com/ for being able to easily buy singles of many different pens and notebooks and try them out for yourself.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Pen: Jinhao X750 ($10) is a no-brainer. Or the Platinum Carbon desk pen ($12) if you like really thin lines. Notebooks: Rhodia, Clairefontaine, Leuchtturm1917, or equivalent quality. Should be around $15 depending on size. Moleskines are no-go (ink bleeds through page) Ink: Private Reserve is a nice starting point. I am particularly fond of their foam green. $11 for a 66ml bottle. Shop: I really like Goulet Pens. Good service, amazingly careful packaging. Source: personal experience and preference.
  - y2bd 11y ago
    I'd generally recommend the Pilot Metropolitan over the X750, I feel as if the Metro is a "surer bet" when it comes to QA, and it's only around five bucks more. Plus the Metro comes in fine and medium nibs so you have a bit more choice there. Source: I have $100+ pens but I'm using a Metropolitan literally right now.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      Interesting. My X750 sees quite randomly varying usage, and I really like how it's easy to "hard start" it after a couple weeks of non-usage. Is the Metropolitan similar? Edit: after reading some reviews the Metropolitan is now on my buy list. Thanks for the tip.
  - icpmacdo 11y ago
    I appreciate the reply, I have had a few Moleskines but the pages seemed relatively thin, is that your reason for them being a no go?
mentos 11y ago
input to response time is very important for VR 'I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?' -John Carmack [0] [0] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001 https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001
amirmansour 11y ago
I'm glad they are making a high-tech comeback, but anyone else here also love (or prefer) using fountain pens?
- dozzie 11y ago
  Indeed. I have a nice Schaeffer pen and I do most of my notes and plans for code with it. I would rather forget to take my tablet than to forget notebook.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  I have a handful of ancient Esterbrooks that I love to write with but I hate maintaining. It's messy work.
lewisl9029 11y ago
I have been using pen input since 2009 when I started university, and am glad that they're finally gaining traction as mainstream input devices. The only problem is most of these new pens are actively powered by the annoyingly rare AAAA battery. I haven't been able to find a rechargeable AAAA from a reputable manufacturer yet. And the very fact that they require manual battery swaps is unacceptable in this day and age IMHO. This is why my newest laptop was a HP Elite X2 1011 that I paid through the nose for, but at least has an older generation passive Wacom pen that does not require a battery. If any laptop/tablet makers are reading this, please replace the AAAA battery slot in these active pens with Li-ion batteries and allow them to automatically charge from the laptop when placed into their holders.
anotheryou 11y ago
"I can put my ‘d’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.” "
kmonad 11y ago
Suffering from RSI right now makes me think how nice it would be to code with a pen...

58 points by dpflan 11y ago

dlsx 11y ago

Wired and Microsoft... 2 dead companies with bad ideas collaborating on a get hype for pens piece. Can I just say, kek. Microsoft and it's team of "brilliant patent holding geniuses" are tired. I would rather invest in 2 random kids in a garage that think pens are stupid. Or buy the latest macbook, the space grey is more innovative than anything these group of troglodytes and their cronies will ever produce. Plastics!

dpflan 11y ago

Reminded me of Dr. Ivan Sutherland's "SketchPad" demo; here's a video of it with Alan Kay commenting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI

melling 11y ago

Better pen input would be great, especially for drawing. How about some form of chorded keyboard or glove? A chorded keyboard was demonstrated in 1968 by Engelbart: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mousesite/1968Demo.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mouses... Google's Soli project might lead to better input: http://youtu.be/0QNiZfSsPc0 http://youtu.be/0QNiZfSsPc0

dpflan 11y ago
Soli looks very interesting. There is Smarter Objects from MIT Fluid Interfaces that is similar in nature, but has a more dynamic approach. It's certainly not as simple as Soli seems because of the augmented-reality component it uses. But if Google brings back Glass and ships Soli in IoT/smart household objects, then you'd have the same result. --EDIT-- Link to MIT Fluid Interfaces Smart Objects: http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects
abawany 11y ago
I have been using Windows Tablet PC since 2003 (HP, Toshiba , and now Fujitsu). The (typically) Wacom stylus works very well and with OneNote, allowed me to take extensive class notes across two masters programs. OneNote also interprets the handwriting so it was quite the pleasant surprise to find that my scribblings were somewhat searchable.

frandroid 11y ago

How many tens of millions of dollars has Microsoft sunk in Surface, tablets and other touch technologies, only to have Apple eat their lunch? How many billions sunk in MSR every year yielding no commercial products? Microsoft has always needed to get their product vision from somewhere else, and for all of the hoopla about Nadella and open sourcing everything, that core fact about Microsoft hasn't changed. It's really sad because Microsoft has everything stacked in its favour to succeed. I mean it's not like like don't succeed on those products that they copy from others, starting from Windows all the way down to the Xbox and Bing, but when it comes to commercial innovation, that's not who they are.

ethanbond 11y ago
Microsoft seems to be perfectly successful to me, no? R&D, by virtue of being R&D, rarely makes it to the market in a recognizable form. My guess is that the lessons learned there certainly have been applied to their real profit centers.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Plus their massive patent portfolio has definitely paid off in various ways. PS - I don't personally like software patents, but you cannot deny they make money for research-based organisations.
  - frandroid 11y ago
    The patent portfolio is a good point, I'll concede that.
- frandroid 11y ago
  > it's not like like don't succeed on those products I acknowledged that they are successful. But they aren't successful in creating new markets; they succeed in invading existing ones.
melling 11y ago
I'm a bit of an Apple fan, but let's be honest, Apple isn't eating Microsoft's lunch. Apple has 18% mobile market share, and it seems that they've broken into the double-digits in desktop share: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc-market-share-ever-in-q3-2014-according-to-idc/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc...

noir_lord 11y ago

I'd love an A4 sized one of these and a screen, monochrome would be fine, I spent so much of my life drawing out code/approaches on squared pads only to leave the pad at the office. All I would want is some way of indexing them and one press to send as an email. I'd drop 200 quid on that right now.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Someone1234 11y ago
That's more or less what a Surface Pro with OneNote (and OneDrive) does. But it isn't even ballpark $200. More like $700+.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Indeed and I've considered it a bunch of times but I have a fast android tablet and a nice laptop/desktop setup running Xubuntu. $200 would be ideal, I don't need a tablet just a high quality portable digitizer rather than another tablet. Next tablet upgrade might well be a surface pro though even running Windows (which I haven't done for a decade) as I'd really like instant access to all of my sketches going back months or years. EDIT: It would be incredibly useful to pull up a sketch of an architecture against a git timestamp so I could figure out WTF I was thinking at the time ;).
  - garblegarble 11y ago
    I've got a workflow that gets close to that - I use a "smart pen" for architecture diagrams, you have to write on special paper but in exchange you get a digital version of everything you write/draw, indexed by time (and, if you want, you can record audio as you're writing/drawing and later replay the audio it recorded by pointing at some part of the text) It's quite useful for architecture diagrams, and for capturing requirements in a meeting (because you've got full audio of what the client said). The main drawback of the pen I use is it's quite bulky (I use a pen from livescribe), although I suspect there will be better-proportioned pens nowadays...

bsder 11y ago

> he’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Oh, the irony. It's Microsoft's own fault in the first place that we have an operating system that is so horribly unresponsive. And, now, umpteen years later, it's a BIG ADVANCE that we actually make computers do what we want, when we want. Just like before Microsoft.

oldmanjay 11y ago
That's almost laughably incorrect, although unfortunately popular amongst a certain segment of the tech set. The nearly-impossible-to-use computers that did very little very slowly back in the 80s (and earlier) were not nearly as amazing as your memory is fooling you into believing. Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now. And in any case, you mean "before Windows" if anything, because DOS was fast as blazes (and did pretty much nothing as a consequence).
- bsder 11y ago
  > Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now. And we had Amiga. And BeOS. And Plan9. All of which had very good latency. All of which Microsoft displaced with monopolist behavior and marketing money. Microsoft is only interested in fixing the problems they caused now that they aren't the 800lb gorilla anymore.
- jameshart 11y ago
  Essentially, when people think back to how responsive computers were "before windows", they are recalling computers which had no networking, and disks which were so slow that you would never write software which depended in real-time on getting that data from disk. You'd pre-load all the data you needed into your meager RAM and then, yes, for doing the one thing that was loaded into memory, with the data that was already in memory, the computer would be very very responsive. But when it came to saving or loading, you could go and get a coffee.

sosuke 11y ago

Reminds me of the 1ms touch delay technology also from Microsoft's applied sciences group. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

omarforgotpwd 11y ago

I cannot think of another tech company that's as obsessed with pens as Microsoft is. They've been working on and promoting this stuff for what feels like decades now.

scholia 11y ago
Indeed, I used the Pen extensions for MS DOS ;-)
brobinson 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing I remember reading that MS basically killed the nascent pen computing industry by announcing their entry into it.

ypeterholmes 11y ago

Mistaken premise here in my opinion: Think about typing the character ‘a’ on a keyboard. Fast, right? Just the one keystroke. “It is fast,” Bathiche says, “if you make some certain assumptions. That the position of the letter ‘a’ is where you intended it to be, the font is the way you intended it to be, the size of the ‘a’ is what you intended it to be.” All those decisions are made before you hit the key, and you often don’t have a choice. “But with ink, you can dictate all those things, almost simultaneously as you’re writing. I can put my ‘a’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.” I can type wayyy faster than I can write with a pen. So... yeah

gohrt 11y ago
If you don't care about font and style, yes. But if the "markup" is high relative to the character count, pens win. This is also a pronounced issue in information graphics -- the off-the-shelf stuff in Excel etc is quite limited; you can do a custom visual a lot better, easier, with a custom drawing, what is impossible or ungainly in a "smart" diagramming program.
jm_l 11y ago
His thought here resonates with me though, particularly when I'm taking the kind of notes that involve diagrams, I find that using the space I'm given exactly how I want it, whether to draw boxes with big symbols, simple graphs or sketches, is a lot quicker on paper with a pen or pencil than on a computer using a keyboard. I'm a pretty fast typer and a writer so I'll admit that there is probably some person whose speed difference is so large that this really isn't helpful, but mostly what takes up time if I want to type like a write is using the mouse to select my font size and type, click the button that tells the word processor I want to draw boxes or arrows and then drawing those boxes and arrows. Also importantly, he admits there are many cases where you really just need a keyboard (writing a long paper, composing a tweet or comment) but I think he's right that there's also many where you really need a pen.
- hug 11y ago
  To preface this, I'm a mid-20s guy who grew up with a keyboard in his hands. I type absurdly faster than I write, with handwriting harder to read than a doctor's, and the idea of carrying an honest to goodness piece of paper and pen around with me seemed archaic. Then I started my most recent job, and was provided with a Surface Pro. I'm already well embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, and I used OneNote before, but the workflow was a minor assistance to me, and I didn't get what the big deal was. You stuck some notes in a notepad, and then you could look at them later. So what? How does this help me? Now, though, I've got a pen. I take my surface with me to each and every meeting I go to, and it's made a world of difference to how meetings work for me. I can take notes that have more contextually appropriate information than just text, because I can scribble out a diagram of a process as it's being explained to me. If I'm leading a meeting, I'll project from my Surface and use it to whiteboard out ideas onto the projector (like a ghetto version of the Surface Hub). I'll note other people's contributions into the same document and then share out a fully editable version of that document into a team notebook. All of these interactions feel more "natural" than the action I'm most accustomed to, which is typing, and the end result is somehow more human-friendly (despite how horrifying my handwriting is) than my previous "list of things discussed and some dot points" method of taking notes. If the future of interaction is pen, it'll come less of a surprise to me now than it would have five years ago.

Animats 11y ago

"He’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Here, Bathiche has solved that infuriating problem where you write or draw on a screen, and the ink is always a half-second behind your finger." So few people get that. Alan Kay once wrote in the 1970s that it was as unacceptable for there to be a delay between user action and response on a computer as it was unacceptable on a piano. Now we have several gigaflops on every desktop and still can't get that right. We really need this in web browsers. Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later. Touch a link in Firefox for Android and see what happens, or rather what doesn't happen.

mtrpcic 11y ago
People often don't understand that for an action on the web (clicking a link) the user feedback and end result don't need to be the same thing. You can update the UI in a meaningful way while you wait for the end-result to come back from the server. A user should never have to sit there after doing an action and ask themselves "Did I really click that? Or did I miss it?"
bhilburn 11y ago
This is one thing Apple really 'got right' in iOS. You can especially see it in any app that allows you to zoom or pan the view. If you change the perspective, it will always redraw the screen according to your input. Sometimes it has to fill in the new area with a temporary texture while it runs off to load the right one, but the response is instantaneous. As an Android user, this is one of my biggest gripes. Android just hasn't figured this out, yet, or doesn't care.
- Gigablah 11y ago
  Unfortunately, apple seems to have regressed with the apple watch. It really feels laggy and unresponsive at times.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  I think that Android started off the wrong way with something aimed at the existing competition at that time (so the first Blackberry, WP and Nokia smartphones). Now it is very hard to revamp Android in order to accomplish this. I just hope that the experiments made by the Dart team (they are aiming at a 120 fps lag free framework on Android) are also conducted internally in the Android team (not necessarily with Dart, but preferably not with Java).

icpmacdo 11y ago

Can I get the Hacker News recommendation on the best affordable pens and notebooks?

Falcon9 11y ago
I will leave specific recommendations to others, but I favor http://www.jetpens.com/ http://www.jetpens.com/ for being able to easily buy singles of many different pens and notebooks and try them out for yourself.
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Pen: Jinhao X750 ($10) is a no-brainer. Or the Platinum Carbon desk pen ($12) if you like really thin lines. Notebooks: Rhodia, Clairefontaine, Leuchtturm1917, or equivalent quality. Should be around $15 depending on size. Moleskines are no-go (ink bleeds through page) Ink: Private Reserve is a nice starting point. I am particularly fond of their foam green. $11 for a 66ml bottle. Shop: I really like Goulet Pens. Good service, amazingly careful packaging. Source: personal experience and preference.
- y2bd 11y ago
  I'd generally recommend the Pilot Metropolitan over the X750, I feel as if the Metro is a "surer bet" when it comes to QA, and it's only around five bucks more. Plus the Metro comes in fine and medium nibs so you have a bit more choice there. Source: I have $100+ pens but I'm using a Metropolitan literally right now.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    Interesting. My X750 sees quite randomly varying usage, and I really like how it's easy to "hard start" it after a couple weeks of non-usage. Is the Metropolitan similar? Edit: after reading some reviews the Metropolitan is now on my buy list. Thanks for the tip.
- icpmacdo 11y ago
  I appreciate the reply, I have had a few Moleskines but the pages seemed relatively thin, is that your reason for them being a no go?

mentos 11y ago

input to response time is very important for VR 'I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?' -John Carmack [0] [0] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001 https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001

amirmansour 11y ago

I'm glad they are making a high-tech comeback, but anyone else here also love (or prefer) using fountain pens?

dozzie 11y ago
Indeed. I have a nice Schaeffer pen and I do most of my notes and plans for code with it. I would rather forget to take my tablet than to forget notebook.
joshuapants 11y ago
I have a handful of ancient Esterbrooks that I love to write with but I hate maintaining. It's messy work.

lewisl9029 11y ago

I have been using pen input since 2009 when I started university, and am glad that they're finally gaining traction as mainstream input devices. The only problem is most of these new pens are actively powered by the annoyingly rare AAAA battery. I haven't been able to find a rechargeable AAAA from a reputable manufacturer yet. And the very fact that they require manual battery swaps is unacceptable in this day and age IMHO. This is why my newest laptop was a HP Elite X2 1011 that I paid through the nose for, but at least has an older generation passive Wacom pen that does not require a battery. If any laptop/tablet makers are reading this, please replace the AAAA battery slot in these active pens with Li-ion batteries and allow them to automatically charge from the laptop when placed into their holders.

anotheryou 11y ago

"I can put my ‘d’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.” "

kmonad 11y ago

Suffering from RSI right now makes me think how nice it would be to code with a pen...