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In Defense Of The Stylus

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Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#11

Post by Causification »

The article was good, but it got a couple of things wrong. Fingers work perfectly well on resistive screens, even better than they do on capacitive ones which having gloves on doesn't matter. The reason styli were standard during the years of resistive screens was that the screens were too small and the resolutions too low to waste five hundred pixels and a square inch on a Yes button. Not only that, but a stylus is so much faster than a finger at almost anything that there's almost no comparison. Give me a three inch 160x160 screen, an onscreen keyboard composing less than half of that resolution, and a stylus, and I can type twice as fast as a teenager with a thumbboard. That, and people who paid three hundred bucks for their PDA aren't fond of seeing it covered in fringerprints, despite how hard today's manufacturer's have been insisting that it's normal.

Having a list composed of five items which is 600 pixels tall, and having to scroll down to see the six item would make an ex-Palm developer shoot blood from his eye sockets.

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#12

Post by Causification »

dporan wrote: post #2

Real, shipping stylus-based computers -- not just mockups or concepts like Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook -- go back to at least the late 1980s, with the GRiDPAD: http://www.pcworld.com/article/188223/the_long_fail_a_brief_... Maybe the lack of success has been due to poor implementation, but I wonder whether styluses are just inherently problematic: 1. Truly reliable handwriting recognition always seems to be just over th…

Back in the PDA days, there wasn't any switching involved. When you pulled the device out of your pocket or off your hip, you popped the stylus out. Maybe you'd put it back if you were reading an ebook or watching a movie, but it still only took a fraction of a second either way.

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#14

Post by thesash »

While I agree that the current generation of touch screens are rather superficial, I sincerely doubt that the future of interaction looks anything like a stylus.

For artists and designers, the stylus will be used for many years to come, but for casual, everyday use, it simply isn't user friendly. While it may be natural to draw or write on a screen with a stylus, jabbing at buttons on a screen with a stylus is no more intuitive or natural than jabbing at a screen with a finger, and in many use cases (scrolling, zooming, panning) is much less natural. The case for the stylus becomes even weaker in the face of technology like Siri, which elegantly solves the problem of text input.

The Bret Victor "Rant" mentioned in the article makes the case for exploring more dynamic, tactile, interactive experiences, decidedly not limited to one mode of input like the stylus. I, for one, hope for a future that is much more ambitious than the stylus, with new forms of interaction that combine hands, voice, and beyond. Things like this http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/PneumaticDis... and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x... that truly push the boundaries of human computer interaction.

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#15

Post by rafski »

Jobs understood that stylus was a psychological barrier, additional interface between user and screen.

Direct touch gave the biofeedback needed to make operating the device personal. Your touch makes things happen, rather than you touching it with an 8 inch pole.

It seems an irrelevant detail to a logical mind but this was key element to iPhone's success.

There is this good PBS documentary on psychology of marketing. If you don't have the time for the whole thing, fast forward to 0:48 and watch for one minute—it is very representative of the marketing mindset I am talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahw5ODR2Sgs

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#16

Post by sjs »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8
dgurney wrote: post #4

My main problem with the stylus is that it's so easy to lose; who wants to carry around a separate part with their device? That said, imagine if styluses (styli?) were mass produced and available as ubiquitously and cheaply as pencils. Lose one? No problem, there's another one on the table over there. In that case, I can see styluses catching on big time, and as noted in the article, their precision would give them h…

The nokia n800 had a little triangular stylus with a holder built into the device. So nothing extra to carry around. It also wouldn't be too tricky to attach the stylus to the device with a wire.

Attaching it with a wire limits your movements and has the potential to get tangled. Where does it go when the stylus is tucked away? If it retracts then does it have a button to make it retract, or does it retract automatically causing constant tension while using it?

Stylus slots are not new. All the iPaq-like PDAs had them as well, and people still complained about losing them. I never lost mine but it was a relatively common complaint. (I still have it in fact, tucked away in a drawer in my "smartphone" from 2004[1])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#17

Post by jerf »

I've had a DS now for a number of years, as have many people, and I observe that I've done an enormous number of things with it that would not have been possible with my big fingers. To the extent nobody sees a use for styli, is that because they are really useless, or because right now every program you use has been optimized for the fact that you're just sort of jabbing at the screen?

By no means should a cell phone require one, but there are vistas opened by styli that we may want to explore after the novelty of "holy cow, tablets! they finally work!" has worn off.

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#18

Post by wickedchicken »

At a company I used to work at, one of the elite hackers used an old Wacom as a mouse exclusively. Wanting to try it out, I dove in and dropped $200 on an Intuos 4 small. Combined with a Das Ultimate Silent, I have a desktop input system that rivals pretty much anything. Using a stylus for desktop computing lets you move things around with rapid speed and precision since the cursor maps directly to what your arm is doing. Scrolling involves a tiny bit more work (although the Intuos has a scroll wheel that works decently well). Another neat thing is the ability to instantly open MyPaint and jot down notes when I need it. It doesn't hurt that my entire desk is jet black :).

Going from a stylus back to a touchpad feels like going from pens to finger paint. Mice feel clunky as well. Try it out!

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#19

Post by wickedchicken »

sjs wrote: post #16
yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nokia n800 had a little triangular stylus with a holder built into the device. So nothing extra to carry around. It also wouldn't be too tricky to attach the stylus to the device with a wire.

Attaching it with a wire limits your movements and has the potential to get tangled. Where does it go when the stylus is tucked away? If it retracts then does it have a button to make it retract, or does it retract automatically causing constant tension while using it? Stylus slots are not new. All the iPaq-like PDAs had them as well, and people still complained about losing them. I never lost mine but it was a relat…

The best system was the Samsung Omnia. You attached the stylus to your keys (it telescoped so was quite small when stored). I keep my keys on me all the time, so I always had my stylus. The unfortunate part was it looked like a little thing of mascara which (as a dude) I thought was awkward.

Re: In Defense Of The Stylus

#20

Post by dnquark »

The lack of adoption of stylus-based input is very disappointing. I'm always floating in random scraps of paper with notes, derivations, etc. I've always found note-taking, especially when math is involved, much more natural with a pen than with a keyboard. The article does a good job of outlining why that is. I'm not alone; just think of the likely penetration rate of Moleskines among HN readers.

On the other hand, it's ridiculous that the only way to digitize these notes is by scanning, or typing them in, or using linux-unfriendly Livescribe pens that require special paper. For centuries we've interacted with documents using styluses. For doing math, for marking up papers, for scribbling notes in the margins, and for countless other activities it is simply _the_ right tool for the job. People like Steve Jobs declared unilateral war on styluses because they were being used to design suboptimal interfaces. Jobs had a point, but in rejecting the stylus outright, he threw the baby out with the bathwater.

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