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Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

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11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#11

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]

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#12

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.

That's more or less what a Surface Pro with OneNote (and OneDrive) does. But it isn't even ballpark $200. More like $700+.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#13

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.

Have you looked at Boogie Board Sync?

http://www.myboogieboard.com/na/products/boogie-board-sync-9...

I tried it. I really wanted to like it, but the writing screen was just not bright enough for me. May be it will work for you.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#14

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.

That's more or less what a Surface Pro with OneNote (and OneDrive) does. But it isn't even ballpark $200. More like $700+.

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 ;).

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#15

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 reall…

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.

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.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#16

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.

Have you looked at Boogie Board Sync? http://www.myboogieboard.com/na/products/boogie-board-sync-9... I tried it. I really wanted to like it, but the writing screen was just not bright enough for me. May be it will work for you.

I absolutely hadn't but that looks damn interesting, thanks!

What was the delay like in actual usage?

EDIT: This is literally what I was describing and have wanted for ages, US only but some ebay.co.uk vendors have them! I'm having one of these soon!

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#17

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 reall…

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...

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#19
post #9

> 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.

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).

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#20
post #9

> 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.

If you had read further into the article (past the first two lines) you would have realised these latency issues are caused by hardware limitations rather than software. You can definitely bring latency down a decent amount in software, but as you approach 0ms the problems becomes exponentially more difficult. That's why this article is about Microsoft's pile of hardware prototypes, and how they're working on getting closer to 1ms in a table-like form factor.

The iPhone 5 just for context had a 55ms touch delay. The iPhone 6 actually increased that to 65ms (i.e. it got worse). Very few smartphones break the 50ms barrier (like one total from what I can tell).

That's what Microsoft are working on.

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