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

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#71

Post by on_and_off » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:33 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…

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).

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#72

Post by lectrick » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:39 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…

The Apple Macintosh did this in 1984 (with the mouse cursor). Jobs understood the importance of this... If you get a chance, find an old Mac and just move its mouse around. There is absolutely zero lag. For a while it was the #1 reason why I couldn't tolerate Windows, whose cursor by comparison was flickery and laggy. (And today it's a reason why I don't like Android.)

Apple hardware and software still prioritizes this.

Glad to see Microsoft finally caught up ;)

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#73

Post by brobinson » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:45 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.

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.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#74

Post by lectrick » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #44

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…

http://lowendmac.com/2006/vintage-macs-with-system-6-run-cir...

Vintage Macs also had 0% (seemingly) cursor lag and 0% cursor flicker. Took Windows 20 years to finally have a usable (coming from a Mac at least) mouse cursor.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#75

Post by sanoli » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #44

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…

http://lowendmac.com/2006/vintage-macs-with-system-6-run-cir...

Unfortunately, this is true. My vintage 90's Mac that runs System 7 feels faster and more responsive when word processing than my 2012 iMac.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#76

Post by ascagnel_ » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:49 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #51

sliverstorm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've made a habit of punting on latency, and not just in HID. It appears to be a hard habit to break.

Bring in some game developers. They understand latency.

Not all -- in the era of the PS2, 60FPS was common. Once the Xbox 360/PS3 generation started, 30FPS was acceptable.

Then again, that'll have to change with the advent of VR. Variable framerates can induce nausea.

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#77

Post by lectrick » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #31

oldmanjay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compute…

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 alr…

I have to say that in this case you're wrong. The Apple Mac Plus in my parents' closet, which I still fire up from time to time to play Dark Castle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkbp4wurW0), had a zero latency mouse (or at least imperceptible) with zero flicker. Took Microsoft at least 20 years to get something comparable. This is not a nostalgic mis-memory, or an exaggeration. Please find an old Mac from the 80's and simply move the mouse around.

> they are recalling computers which had no networking

The very first network games I ever played were over AppleTalk on a Mac, like NetTrek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z40VMsXtl0Y ... yes, that is digitized sound out of a 1984 machine), Maze Wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEpgfTtUYg) and the venerable Bolo! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz_gYZ5kMvc), the latter still one of the best multiplayer gaming experiences I've ever had

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#78

Post by garblegarble » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:56 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…

It's also a good idea to try out paper first if you can. I bought a Rhodia notebook which has really nice paper compared to what I normally use, but discovered I don't really enjoy writing on the paper because it's so smooth (your mileage may vary, though - I enjoy having a slightly scratchy sound+resistance when writing)

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#79

Post by garblegarble » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 1:04 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #14

Someone1234 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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...

Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

#80

Post by viewer5 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

quietplatypus wrote: post #61

fizx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 macro…

Same here, I picked up LaTeX to take notes in my computer graphics class because I didn't feel like writing it (my written equations were always pretty cramped, and my handwriting is garbage) and because it was a pain to represent equations in LibreOffice (what I'd been taking notes in before).