151–160 of 208 posts
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To paraphrase Planck: technology advances with the funeral of each patent.
Maybe not originaly, but as of today it very much seems like it. Related: maybe we will be done with covid, by the time the vaccines patents run out.
Every time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable. I’m curious if there are other techniques to implement reflective(?) displays being explored that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad as to stifle most hopes of accessible solutions and broader consumer/professional adoption. Frankly, I’m quite sick of straining my eyes and circadi…
I'm not convinced the issue is patents. It might just be that eInk is great for a few nice applications, so there just isn't that much demand.
As is, it's competing against 120hz, mass-produced LED/LCD panels that can scale in price from tablets to TV screens.
It's hard for a "new" tech to have enough of an economic use case, so as to fund its own R&D, so at to become the best version of itself.
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I have a Boox Nova 2 and can mostly recommend it. It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home ( https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-... ). I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android…
What are you reading on it? I'm considering getting something for reading technical books. Do you think this would fit?
Things get a bit more complicated with PDFs on the 8" screen due to their fixed layout. KOReader has settings and accomodations to comfortably deal with many of them, but it usually requires a little tinkering. Typical A4 PDFs are just about readable with basic cropping in vertical mode and become quite easily readable in horizontally mode. There are some modes to navigate multi-column PDFs and reflow text blocks. But there can definitely be PDFs that are not comfortably readable. The situation is better the larger the screen is, so people tend to prefer 10" (Boox Note) or 13" (Boox Max) devices for heavy PDF consumption.
I would personally prefer it if people stopped publishing great looking but hard to consume PDFs as the only way to consume content.
Every time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable. I’m curious if there are other techniques to implement reflective(?) displays being explored that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad as to stifle most hopes of accessible solutions and broader consumer/professional adoption. Frankly, I’m quite sick of straining my eyes and circadi…
Here, we go again. I've only read that here (repeatedly!) on HN and blogs that then cited throwaway HN posts which never respond to my requests for at least some verifiable evidence. Have a look through my comment history.
> that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad
what moat? please tell me, I keep asking. To me, it looks like all of the people making these claims have no clue about the display industry. It would be the equivalent of me coming on a search engine forum and then alleging Microsoft of using a patent moat to prevent progress in operating systems, is that true? I have no clue but it sure sounds good even though I have 0 evidence. I hope my point is clear.
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I have a Boox Nova 2 and can mostly recommend it. It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home ( https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-... ). I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android…
I dunno. I feel like I waited a long time for a good note taking device with a eink screen. I think I'll just get an iPad Mini and pen.
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I have a Boox Nova 2 and can mostly recommend it. It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home ( https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-... ). I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android…
Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable? It works well in my experience, it can sync automatically to Dropbox and I can sync notebooks between my two Boox devices. The only thing that sucks is the text recognition IMO. But it's got templates, layers, different stroke types down. Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use.
It glitches more than I can list within the comment length limit. The highlights are:
- Glitchy panning and zooming (they're extremely glitchy by themselves and can't be done together)
- Ineffective palm rejection. No matter whether with or without a sleeve between hand and display, it always wants to zoom or pan, which takes forever to settle down. I am aware of the touch lock, but find it too cumbersome to be acceptable. Well, maybe if that was the only issue.
- Slow eraser. You have to rub around forever for it to register all strokes you want to erase. I don't know what kind of galaxy brain shit they're doing to manage this because Squid, a different note app, registers it perfectly on the same device.
- Limited canvas. You can have the canvas be something like 2x the height of the device. Well great.
- All kinds of issues with rotation and zoom (kind of important on the smaller models, no?). The right half of the canvas not being usable, strokes being misaligned with strokes, rotation being wrong after switching apps ... I finally went all Bill O'Reilly ("Fuck it, fuckin' thing sucks") when it permanently misaligned my content from the template.
There have also been instances in which it just wouldn't register any strokes until after restarting the app. The app also can't be started without using the official Onyx Launcher, which I don't (there's not only no icon for it, as far as I found there's no Activity you could call).
What a disappointment. I have watched reviews and read opinions online and apparently nobody thought to mention how terrible that app is (thanks for the latency measurements, though). I've considered having a faulty device, but really, all the strokes register fine, all the other apps work perfectly.
> Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use
Hard to be worse than the Boox Note app :-)
I dislike OneNote enough that I'm probably not going to use it (notebooks metaphor, weird cloud stuff), but wow, what a difference. At least it doesn't have any of these show-stopper bugs. It's like they've actually started it and used it once.
The way Onyx implemented the scribble mode indeed looks a bit on the low-effort side regarding the stroke thickness and style, but for how much of a hack it is (I assume they can't actually properly hook into the app itself), how reliably it works is pretty impressive.
Fun fact about that scribble mode (what enables the low-latency pen input): It keeps working until the app that enabled it also disables it again, so if you exit an app using it in the right way, it stays on and you can draw anywhere. The downside is that the screen doesn't refresh by itself anymore, so you better have a manual refresh gesture set up or you'll probably have to reboot to fix it.
Apps can also enable and disable the mode from the background. This means that you can basically enable scribble mode for all apps without even needing any special privileges. The issue is, however, that the screen stops refreshing after a stroke after a few minutes (responsibility of the app controlling scribble mode. Presumably it eventually gets suspended ("allow running in background" is enabled). I would be happy about suggestions for how this could be solved (I haven't been able to transfer the logic to a background service presumably because of surface/context issues).
If you've read this far, you may be interested in joining a Discord community of (more technical) Boox users: https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd
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I want color, to read code, I can't give up on syntax highlighting
Back in the day™ Think’s Pascal used bold, italics and underlining to do syntax highlighting because the Mac’s screen was black-and-white. It would be a compromise: you can’t encode as much information into the text’s appearance without access to color, but it could be sufficient depending on your requirements.
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Al...
http://www.algol60.org/reports/algol60_rr.pdf
(Although technically this was actually syntax, not just syntax highlighting, since that's how the reference language distinguished between keywords and identically spelled identifiers.)
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What's your budget / price-point? New devices are available for Used or displays are in the $50--$100 range, quite possibly less. Pricing depends on size, resolution, greyscale ranges (1--16 bits, 4 is common for many smaller isplays), and refresh rates.
The issue isn't the budget, it's the fact that e-ink display cost hasn't really gone down in 5-10 years. I was expecting 2022 to have $10 e-ink displays I could use to replace the 2x16 and 4x16 LCD screens in my Arduino projects. But nope, anything over 2" is tens of dollars still - as it was 10 years ago.
I would be in DIY heaven, if one could buy such foil by the meter, for a sensible price. Just imagine, what kind of displays for DIY devices one could accomplish!
The colors in the opening image look faded.