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New Kind of Paper

mlajtos.mu

41–50 of 127 posts

Re: New Kind of Paper

#41

I find the current state of the art on stylus text entry so disappointing. I made a hacky prototype 7 years ago (!) and this kind of direct interaction remains a dream: https://youtu.be/So4x3Cu4WI0 I had a glimmer of hope when Apple started selling styluses, that they might succeed where Microsoft failed. But instead, they're putting mouse cursors on iPads, and the stylus is still a niche tool for artists.

I do this on the iPad. And it works way better than on the video (latency, hand-resting, ...).

Re: New Kind of Paper

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what the iPad supports now. So not a dream anymore.

And I'm still not sure what the point is, its still easier for me to type using the magic keyboard. Maybe for some people its easier to write with the pencil than to use the touch keyboard.

It depends, for short input you're right. But if you're filling a whole form with multiple inputs the pen definitely helps.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#44
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know about Scribble? It was new to iPadOS 14, and works everywhere you can write with the keyboard.

I do -- the Mac has had that feature since forever (if you plugged in a tablet like a Wacom). A shame Apple doesn't seem to respect the Mac any more -- it's a great example of a use case that went from the Mac to the iPad. I prefer to take notes with a pen. The built in Notes app seems to think you write in a notebook the way you type into one: that each line contains one topic. But in fact when writing notes I tend…

> Notability and Soulver and most other apps don't recognize the pencil at all.

I may have misunderstood your comment, but Notability uses pen-pressure to regulate stroke width, so it must know the pen is there. Conversion from handwritten strokes to text is very far from perfect (unusable for code snippets and math formulas), but it is good enough for writing "human speak", like say forum comments or a CV intro.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#45
post #43

Nobody writes asterisks like that in handwriting - is that to help the ocr? We just use an × for multiplication, really.

Are you sure about "nobody"? As a corollary, I've only ever used × to indicate the cross product of two vectors. For scalar multiplication, ⋅ is the standard symbol in my country (and many others).

Re: New Kind of Paper

#46
post #43

Nobody writes asterisks like that in handwriting - is that to help the ocr? We just use an × for multiplication, really.

Depends on the country. In Poland it's usually nothing for multiplication:

    (x+3)(10-y)
then dot, then asterisk. Nobody writes "x" for scalar multiplication cause it's easy to mistake it for the variable x. What do you mean by 2xy? 2 * y or 2 * x * y?

Another cultural difference is how 7 and 1 is written - in USA you write 7 with 2 strokes and 1 with 1 stroke. In my country 7 is always crossed (always has 3 strokes) and 1 has 2 strokes.

And variable z is usually crossed in equations to distinguish it from 2 (but that varies regionally).

Re: New Kind of Paper

#48
post #43

Nobody writes asterisks like that in handwriting - is that to help the ocr? We just use an × for multiplication, really.

At least in some European countries we use a dot instead (which doesn't look like a variable named "x").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_operator#Notation_and_term...

Re: New Kind of Paper

#50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same with h which can either mean hour or the planck constant. units(1) does this right where one symbol corresponds to one unit only

Mmm, true. I started using units(1) quite recently, and “h” being the Planck constant rather than hours keeps on tripping me up. The built-in abbreviation “kph” for km/hr isn’t comfortable either. (mile/hr may be commonly abbreviated as “mph”, but km/hr is conventionally “km/h”). Ah hah! There, just created ~/.units containing `h hr`, now this will bother me no more (since I’m unlikely to ever want to use the Planck…

> Pity it doesn’t use XDG paths

Yes!! Can we all just agree to make that illegal? If a developer writes an app that automatically defaults to having configs right in the home dir or if they don't separate their cache from their persistent data, they go to jail for a week to think about what they did.

All joking aside, it really is a shame so many things don't stick to the standard. The ability to just copy .config to another machine and have it be pretty much a carbon copy of the original would be really useful. I guess I should just finally switch ti Nix, huh?

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