Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#11

Post by seemack »

philosopherNoob wrote: post #5

Spitballing an idea. I don’t use e-ink stuff but had my hands on it back when personal readers were new to the market. When scrolling arbitrary text on a computer via keyboard, I generally become mildly frustrated hitting Spacebar, PageUp, and/or PageDown because I lose continuity with what I’m reading. (Perhaps the momentary 60hz blur makes it worse?) I attribute that to having a hard time identifying where I last r…

Riffing of the predictability of an adjustable distance, a similar option might be something like a marker/inverse colour applied to a line immediately before the scroll. The marker would help orientation after the scroll and disappear after some time. You could also scan the text of course but a marker would be much faster.

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#12

Post by ianbicking »

philosopherNoob wrote: post #5

Spitballing an idea. I don’t use e-ink stuff but had my hands on it back when personal readers were new to the market. When scrolling arbitrary text on a computer via keyboard, I generally become mildly frustrated hitting Spacebar, PageUp, and/or PageDown because I lose continuity with what I’m reading. (Perhaps the momentary 60hz blur makes it worse?) I attribute that to having a hard time identifying where I last r…

I used Oberon [1] in school, and it had a bunch of funky UI ideas. One I liked it if you clicked on the scrollbar then it would scroll that position to the top. Like if you click the exact middle of the scrollbar then it would scroll up exactly half a page. Right click went the opposite direction, and middle click went to an absolute position. When reading that means you can choose a paragraph as the break point, click next to it, and that paragraph is now at the top of the page. It's nice too when you reach a heading that might be only a little way down the page, but you can reliably scroll so it's at the top of the page and feel like you are really "starting" a new section.

It could work well with e-ink because it's basically not interactive; you don't press and hold and move around to adjust it just right, instead you can confidently get an exact scroll position with one tap.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#14

Post by rafabulsing »

freeone3000 wrote: post #3

I’d focus more on print usability and readability guidelines than computer guidelines. 5Hz eink is closer to a moving newspaper than a slow computer. https://www.mediapoint.com.au/design-tips/composition-layout... might be moderately helpful. But my advice: do not count on anything refreshing ever. Do not have animations, or transitions. Preload things to the correct spaces, then fill in. Reserve fixed white areas fo…

Bret Victor's Magic Ink essay is certainly relevant here: https://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#15

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #3

I’d focus more on print usability and readability guidelines than computer guidelines. 5Hz eink is closer to a moving newspaper than a slow computer. https://www.mediapoint.com.au/design-tips/composition-layout... might be moderately helpful. But my advice: do not count on anything refreshing ever. Do not have animations, or transitions. Preload things to the correct spaces, then fill in. Reserve fixed white areas fo…

I'd kill for regular UIs that did this.

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#16

Post by ronakjain90 »

TRMNL recently open sourced a CSS framework made specifically for ePaper display [1], you can use the opensource firmware[2] and quickly hack together a good solution using off the self components.

Disclosure: I work at TRMNL.

[1] https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-framework

[2] https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-firmware

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#18

Post by blululu »

If you are just trying to get something quick and simple that works for rendering react components then this repo is solid:

https://github.com/marcomattes/epaper-components/tree/main

The Bigme is a pretty high quality eink display, but some core properties of eink are present here so I’ll offer some generic guidance:

The contrast on any epaper display is lower than on a modern lcd/oled display. So you want to avoid or modify ui systems that try to diminish contrast for stylistic reasons. Or more explicitly: maximize the contrast wherever legibility matters. It is pretty common in pretty much every modern design system for web/mobile to diminish contrast so you may just need to go in and tweak things yourself.

Second: you cannot rely on color as an accent. A lot of UI does this (submit buttons). Defining a consistent accent pattern is necessary to replace patterns that rely on color. This can be outlines/borders or inversions.

Stylistically I think that sharper content looks better on eink than smoother content, but on a 300 dpi display with 16 grays this is less of a hard point.

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#19

Post by layer8 »

ianbicking wrote: post #12
philosopherNoob wrote: post #5

Spitballing an idea. I don’t use e-ink stuff but had my hands on it back when personal readers were new to the market. When scrolling arbitrary text on a computer via keyboard, I generally become mildly frustrated hitting Spacebar, PageUp, and/or PageDown because I lose continuity with what I’m reading. (Perhaps the momentary 60hz blur makes it worse?) I attribute that to having a hard time identifying where I last r…

I used Oberon [1] in school, and it had a bunch of funky UI ideas. One I liked it if you clicked on the scrollbar then it would scroll that position to the top. Like if you click the exact middle of the scrollbar then it would scroll up exactly half a page. Right click went the opposite direction, and middle click went to an absolute position. When reading that means you can choose a paragraph as the break point, cli…

You could have a scroll-down bar on one side and a scroll-up bar on the other side that work that way (given the lack of left/right click options). That could be pretty intuitive for touch.

Re: Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

#20

Post by pshc »

I've been experimenting with a Remarkable Paper Pro.

Additive inking works pretty well. As long as I am adding black ink to the page, everything is responsive. But if I want to push other updates asynchronously, or (god forbid) erase something, then there is the danger of clobbering the user's inkwork. I don't have any deep insights here, beyond waiting for human confirmation before updating anything.

I wonder if it is possible to detect when the pen tip has "left" the proximity of the page? If I knew this, I'd know when it was safe to update the UI.

I have decided not to use any scrolling at all. I am paginating everything and positioning input areas near the vertical middle of the device for comfort.

Post reply on HN