I really would like to see TC just gone. It didn't use to be this bad, but they've been going downhill since... forever, really.
This is suddenly very reminiscent of John Mulaney describing Back to the Future...
It's also worth considering, when thinking about why it hasn't been banned, whether or not the main value from the threads (assuming the perfect source) would be from the link or the comments.
For some types of submission, it's the link: personal blog updates, academic papers, interesting technical achievements, detailed research, so on.
For others, it's the comments: company updates, interesting world news, most things happening in real-time, obituaries, so forth.
For others still, it's tied: blog posts on historical subjects, 'Show HN:' posts, submissions about different ways of doing things than mainstream methods.
Product launches, from my perspective, fall in the "Value in Comments" category. So then you have to decide whether it's worth the trade-off. By banning TechCrunch, would the site lose comment value?
Looking at this one, you'd really be missing some good comments by getting rid of TechCrunch links; there are all sorts of anecdotes about the product in this thread, and there are a bunch of interesting anecdotes about competing products as well.
This isn't even a review. This is someone writing from the press release.
"If this URL looks like an ad or a press release, please consider finding an original source for the information."
Occasionally I'd go from regular work (notes on a project file), to a business or client meeting (pull up notes from past meetings, update with new notes), to a volunteer meeting after work (pull up the previous week's training notes). At each point I had all the information I needed without having to juggle binders or loose-leaf papers.
And I love that I can rework my notes as I write them. So, during a meeting, first draft is just scribbling stuff down, then while people are busy listening to themselves talk, I can drag my scribbles around into priorities and tasks, add a diagram, clean a few things up. This is a completely different workflow from either plain paper or laptop/tablet, and it really works for me.
I've tried a few things in the last couple of years to take my note taking electronic, and it turns out that delay is important - if there's too much delay I end up not jotting down the couple of quick notes I need to write. Wunderlist opens very quickly on my Android phone and I ended up unconsciously using it to write down quick things. OneNote (an otherwise great tool) take an age to open and get to the right page, so I end up not using it except at my desk.
In the first mode, it comes back in about 1 second. It's enough that there's a bit of a lag and I don't like it if it happens right in the middle of something, but I haven't run into this very much.
In the second, it takes a few seconds to spin up, so I got into the habit of doing that before a meeting or whatever started. It takes about as much time to get it started up and navigate to the appropriate file as it would to fish a binder out of my bag and open it up to a blank page.
The only things I would like are slightly longer battery life and more options for syncing with other services like Dropbox etc
> The company is claiming a 3x boost to battery life, using the same 3,000 mAh battery, based on performance improvements throughout and a more efficient (but more powerful) dual-core ARM processor. That means two weeks of use and 90 days of standby. This is welcome news, because frankly the battery life and power management on the last one were not great.
I'd love to have an e-ink tablet for hand writing and sketching ideas, but I'm not crash hot on it all being locked in to some closed ecosystem.
There has been an FCC leak: https://fccid.io/2AMK2-RM110 showing a machined aluminum back, which the motherboard is affixed to. To me this looks good.
Disclaimer, I pre-ordered V2 today and am an owner of V1.
Also, how often do you need to buy new tips, or do they not wear out? I'm asking because the ones for DPT family are designed in such a way that they wear out. I guess I've always been more on the DPT side, because it's made by Sony, which gives me a feeling of confort, you know, a company with long history.
If price wasn't an issue, which would you prefer. rM2 does look much more refined and it is half the price of DPT-RP1 (the Sony website does list the price at ~600$ but sadly the reality is that if you want to buy that in the EU the price is approximately:
EU_price = base_price + (base_price*0.22))
And of course the shipping...
I really hope rM2 turns out to be an amazing product, because the digital paper market feels very stagnant at the moment.
I would love to hear more of your experiences with the device. Thank you,
Lots of Love Mortuus
But as soon as I get the email for RM2 I pre-ordered again. To your point, it is the product the digital paper market has been waiting for.
I am an avid hand-writer. I have been a Levenger Circa user for more than 20 years, and basically had a subscription to the Circa paper for the last several years, as I went through so much of it. It took me a while to adjust my workflow and so forth, but I am now a full convert to the RM and think the device and the ecosystem have enormous potential, especially for developers.
The RM folks are very dev friendly, though their docs and so forth are poor at present. I take this to be a function of focus/resources rather than intent. The architecture of the software on the device is very good and dev oriented, and the code (what they've released) is well written. The device can run a webserver! The APIs- community documented- for the server-side of the RM platform are minimal but well structured. I was fairly quickly able to dig into them and write some utilities, which work reliably. So I am very optimistic about the ecosystem around these devices.
To your questions- I write on the order of 20-30 "pages"/day on the RM, and go through 1 tip maybe every 2 weeks. The writing experience is very comfortable. Adding an "eraser" to the premium RM2 pen addresses the main ergonomic inconvenience. I also use the device for reading PDFs. There are some ergonomic nits there but on the whole it works well.
Yes, RM is a new, small biz, but to my eyes they have a great product, a great approach, solid operations, and are developer friendly. I have not used the Sony device, and can't compare it, but I see nothing but good things ahead for RM.
The software had improved dramatically- they seem to be doing a good to exceptional job at getting incremental features out on a regular tempo without breakage, no simple task- but I think a certain amount of "hammock-time" plus increased awareness of non-digital pain points was necessary for a new perspective to flip into place. (This is re: seemingly small things like using distinct per day notebooks and per week folders, rather than a single monolithic notebook with paper-like day headings etc)
And my workflow is still limited- I am not using the writing recognition at all as yet- and there are plenty of use cases I come up constantly that it doesn't address- smart task lists, various kinds of copy paste, maps (!!!). If one has any kind of paper-based or digital habits adopting the device will be a challenge and involve frustration until it clicks, and probably even after.
But I have confidence both in the device's trajectory and moreover in the ergonomics of a community developer's engagement with the org. There is a lot of open space for patient, flexible developers to build cool stuff in. Cheers.
To be fair, Sony are a company with a long history of absolutely amazing hardware crippled by comically bad software. The DPT series doesn't even show you the PDF table of contents, last I looked.
One marker nib lasts me about 10 weeks, but it seems to be very individual. Some people can write hundreds of pages on a single nib, others need a new one weekly. In any case, I wouldn't say nibs wearing out is a major concern. It would be nice if they didn't wear out, of course, but the design of the nibs seem to be crucial for giving that excellent writing feeling.
And yes, these devices are expensive. I'm in the EU myself, and some 400€ is rather steep for upgrading the rM to rM2.
Everything just felt better on the Sony- not just the hardware or the software, but the whole product. With some minor fixes (ex: moving the icon from the dropdown menu to the empty space on top of the screen) it could move from outstanding to just perfect.
There is a “send to kindle” function which allows you to either use a desktop application, or set up an email address you can send .mobi files to!
Highly recommended if you get tired of plugging in - thats why I swapped from my old Kobo to a Kindle.
The rM is best thought of as a pen and paper notebook, except of effectively infinite size. There are no apps. The UI (the only user-facing program) has minimal features, most of which are there just to mimic what you can do with an actual paper notebook. There are only a few exceptions, like being able to drag your notes/scribbles on the page. The device won't integrate with any 3rd party services, it doesn't have search, etc. If a physical notebook doesn't have it, then the rM probably also doesn't.
That definitely makes the rM a very niche device, but I'm getting great use out of mine, while I never managed to get much good use of an iPad.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWY_bwFMxro&feature=youtu.be...
The conversion relies on some kind of cloud service (possibly Google's Cloud Vision API). So you need to be connected and there are privacy/security implications. And, it's very dependent on your handwriting. I cannot get coherent results with that feature, but my handwriting is as readable as base64-encoded Perl. I've seen it produce impressively good results when other people try it.
The process itself is indeed smooth, select an item in the menu and a few seconds later you have the text, which can then be emailed.
Just to make this bit clear: with effectively infinite number of pages. One would imagine that panning around infinitely large pages would be a possibility with a product like this, but the feature is not there.
Both physically and mentally this device has changed how I use tablets/devices. It feels like real paper to me, and without all of the glorified app icons and notifications screaming at me I feel more focused on the task at hand. Purpose-driven devices reduces distractions and has helped me grow professionally and I'll even go as far as saying reduced some stress and anxiety.
I am seriously considering buying a dumb phone (minimalist interface) thanks to the impact the rM1 has had on my productivity.
The only issue I had was waiting on shipping from Germany.
It's also pretty good IMO for taking meeting notes, because the only things one can do is listen to the meeting, take notes, and doodle (which has been shown to improve attention and detail recall [0]).
Of course, that also applies to a paper notebook and a nice pen.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-thinking-benefits-of...
https://youtu.be/SWY_bwFMxro?t=73
Made out of aluminium, so I don't think there should be worries about give. I think bendgate is still fresh in people's minds.
Short papers are just fine. Long documents, as long as you read them mostly sequentially, are IMHO just fine as well. But trying to read something where you need to flip around a lot is painful.
One of the use cases I had in mind when buying rM was reading stuff like IEEE 802 standards, programming language standards, hardware references, etc. But with these documents, the table of contents itself can have 10s of pages. The tools for searching and moving around are there, but the high latency of the e-ink makes them frustrating to use. And hyperlinks in PDFs are not active. And you can't bookmark something to create your personal collection of pages that you often need, which would somewhat alleviate the abovementioned frustration.
I use rM daily, but just not for reading manuals. It's just not a good use case for the device.
Does it support ePub format ebooks or just PDFs?
One could imagine hacking something like this tablet to have a true interactive Squeak like environment on it. Or, better yet, a Squeak-like environment designed from the ground up specifically for epaper displays...
Downvoters: yes, you deserve the truth! :-)
However, if you are using an emissive display in an environment with constant and even lighting, you can set the brightness correctly and it will be just as good. Many people in such lightning conditions configure their displays wrong and mistake the misconfiguration for an inherent disadvantage of emissive displays.
The surroundings might not be lit enough for the health of eyes. This is the usual case and one of the prime issues why dead tree books and e-paper tablets lead to weak eyes.
Cheap, modular, long battery life, effective.
It's a very niche device but I've owned mine for nearly two years and am a big advocate. In some ways, the first model was proof of concept. Excellent hardware and writing experience, but the early versions of the software were horrible, and the device itself is very ugly. The software has improved dramatically in the time I've owned it, going from horrible to bad, then to almost acceptable, and now it's decent.
I'm happy to see the company is doing well enough to make a second generation reality. Looks like it will be an overall improved experience, with a magnetic marker, a slick-looking device and overall incremental improvements. I'd like to see some kind of trade up program though, it's expensive (and 50$ more for a marker with one extra sensor is ridiculous) and I can't justify paying that much for an incremental upgrade.
My only concern about the new specs would be the thickness, or rather the sturdiness. The first generation is thick by modern standards, but it's very sturdy. I've dropped the device, I've dropped the bag with it, I've bumped into things with it - not a scratch. Very refreshing in the age of fragile devices. Hopefully the rM2 doesn't sacrifice much sturdiness to be thinner.