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I can't help it, this makes me think of joke engineering documentation for everyday items.
Tech quote of the freaking year.
Unclench, already.
On a separate note, I can't believe the poor quality of apps available to scientists. Papers, the citation manager, can't run a release to save their lives, is expensive, and not impressive. I use it because it's better compared to the rest, but still not great software. Their iPad note taking is horrible compared to notability, so my PDFs are scattered between the two apps. It's a giant mess and waste of time I rather spend on research.
Microsoft's own Fresh Paint app is another one that could benefit from this. One thing to note is that all of the Bluetooth styli released so far on iOS are exclusive to Apple's platform. An exception is Hex JaJa, which is cross-platform between iOS and Android, but it's not a Bluetooth stylus either - it utilises high-pitch sounds delivered via microphone.
I don't own a tablet yet. But procreate, Paper, and the various stylus available are now very tempting.
I am just as happy now to watch the ipad market undertake the design market, as OS9 and NT did against IRIX. Watch us do more with more accessible consumer tech.
(or is it actually truly an echo of an xkcd joke here?)
Mighty, meanwhile, he actually described as "cloud pen". Please stop. I need a great pen for a tablet. I don't need it dependent on your hosted services. It's driving me crazy how the cloud, an enabling technology, is being crammed down our throats as a feature in and of itself.
(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).
The NSA wins again.
There are a number of high-end stylus makers that offer app developers SDK integration with their tools:
https://github.com/Adonit/JotTouchSDK http://www.tenonedesign.com/t1pogomanager.php http://www.hex3.co/pages/developers http://us.wacom.com/en/developerrelations/ios
And many drawing apps have taken advantage of them, such as the professional-level Procreate app, which allows one to use any of the pressure-sensitive styli listed above interchangeably.
To build larger abstractions on top of these things, we need looser coupling. I want to draw and erase with Pencil, but use a manual dial to set the pressure because I do very precise architectural drawings. I want to draw with Pencil but use Mighty to make my lines snap to a grid and some other French Curve thing I hacked together with some dials for snapping to curves. I want to use two Pencils at once on two separate iPads and draw together with someone. I want my LeapMotion to understand my hand gestures to rotate data in an Excel pivot table and project it into a graph.
Yes, I want crazy things. But abstractions work to build crazy, unexpected text-oriented programs in Unix. So what are the abstractions we need to build arbitrary crazy programs with UIs and hardware peripherals?
I don't have high hopes for abstractions on pressure-sensitive styli.
You should expect to hear more around this when Mighty ships.
(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).
With an SDK they can only sell more products, whether that is apps, hardware, or both.
Where they should limit their SDK use is in branding — they probably wouldn't want poor quality or badly designed apps advertising (or even using) the Pencil SDK. It would reflect badly on their product. So they need to maintain control in those cases.
They shouldn't allow "any kind of app." They should allow "any kind of app that meets their standards for quality."
Edit: on the other side, we have Rasperry, Arduino etc..
If you like this, also look at the demo video for Adobe's project Mighty/Napoleon, a pen and drafting tool combo that is pretty incredible: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/17/adobe-xd-mighty-napoleon-...
What I think is sad about both of these products is that they are tied to specific apps. These closed ecosystems get to be more powerful instead of becoming tools on top of which larger things can be hacked together. I don't blame 53 or Adobe for that: making open hardware with open standard communication is probably incredibly hard, and getting it to interact with a tablet operating system through anything other than your one app is perhaps impossible.
But it's still sad.
With the growing popularity of hardware hacking, it's only natural that developers will start making our own physical tools the same way we write our own software tools. Unix makes this easy by providing abstractions like pipes, sockets, etc. for getting small programs to work together using common interfaces.
What are the OS-level abstractions that will make it easier to build, combine, and reuse our own hardware tools? The current methods for using device drivers, detecting wireless devices, or sharing them across a network are not very open to reuse and sharing.
What is the way forward where we can use something like this pencil with its smart palm rejection and erase, hack together our own physical drafting tool, and plug them both in to existing software by writing a little adapter?
It makes me wonder whether we need to go back and steal some of the bits of plan9/inferno: a single abstraction around sharing both data and devices, a natural way to multiplex input and output streams, and transparent network sharing of everything.