Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback • Hacker News Board

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#61

Post by quietplatypus » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 8:22 AM UTC

fizx wrote: post #24

ypeterholmes wrote: post #21

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 of…

Can you type LaTeX faster than you can write equations on a chalkboard? I can't.

I can. I used to do my math homework in LaTeX. I'm not saying I did it on paper and the final stuff was written up, I mean I was thinking in LaTeX. The PDF viewer was "check what I just did mode" and the text editor was "get thoughts down" mode.

It was proof heavy so there was a lot of English anyway. Add copy/paste for derivations with a lot of shared structure and it really pulls ahead. If you define your own macros and are good enough at programming them on the fly it's a neat though dumb Lispy symbolic math tool.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#62

Post by anotheryou » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:05 AM UTC

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

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#63

Post by dozzie » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:58 AM UTC

amirmansour wrote: post #54

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

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.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#64

Post by sneak » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:00 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #28

"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 unaccep…

Sit in a $100k Tesla and drag the fullscreen map view around on the giant touchscreen, watch it stutter and lag. It drives me up a fucking wall.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#65

Post by Gigablah » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:01 PM UTC

bhilburn wrote: post #39

Animats wrote: post #28

"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 unaccep…

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. Androi…

Unfortunately, apple seems to have regressed with the apple watch. It really feels laggy and unresponsive at times.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#66

Post by scholia » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:08 PM UTC

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #18

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.

Indeed, I used the Pen extensions for MS DOS ;-)

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#67

Post by joshuapants » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:16 PM UTC

amirmansour wrote: post #54

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

I have a handful of ancient Esterbrooks that I love to write with but I hate maintaining. It's messy work.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#68

Post by keithpeter » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:16 PM UTC

arh68 wrote: post #58

icpmacdo wrote: post #30

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

Pens are very subjective, notebook paper is not. Thicker/heavier paper is almost always better. Moleskine paper is good, Rhodia paper (80gsm) is better, Clairefontaine paper (90gsm) is great. You can buy even heavier paper (67lb, 110lb, etc), but it usually doesn't come in notebooks. Pens are all different: there are good gel pens (Sakura Gelly Roll, Pilot G2), good fountain pens (Lamy Safari, many many more), good a…

UK specific comment possibly but: try a local art materials shop. Most will have A5 hard-backed sketchbooks with around 90 to 100 g/m^2 paper in with either white or ivory finish/colour for less than a fiver. Pretty ink proof and a lot cheaper than the branded ones.

I like pencil and Muji pens, the ones that are about £5 for a 6 pack.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#69

Post by on_and_off » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:27 PM UTC

Osmium wrote: post #45

Animats wrote: post #28

"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 unaccep…

> Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later. Interestingly, Apple are really pushing this now. They've just demonstrated new predictive tech to get response time down to ~ 30 ms from ~ 60 ms on iOS devices (if I remember correctly, this is based on a publicly available WWDC talk). That said, 30 ms is still far too much. Microsoft made a…

As an Android dev, this is what I envy of iOS.

I really wish that Android would also strongly push in that direction (and I hope that Google has some internal branches where the View system is rethought).

The design direction of the platform is astoundingly great, but the implementation lags far behind the vision.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#70

Post by PopeOfNope » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:29 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #7

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.

Sony's Digital Paper does that and only that. It allows you to read and mark up pdfs with a pen and nothing more. Unfortunately, it's $800 USD.

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solu...