Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by noir_lord on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:37PM (#9848271)

I'd love an A4 sized one of these and a screen, monochrome would be fine, I spent so much of my life drawing out code/approaches on squared pads only to leave the pad at the office.

All I would want is some way of indexing them and one press to send as an email.

I'd drop 200 quid on that right now.

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Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by solutionyogi on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:56PM (#9848374)

Have you looked at Boogie Board Sync?

http://www.myboogieboard.com/na/products/boogie-board-sync-9...

I tried it. I really wanted to like it, but the writing screen was just not bright enough for me. May be it will work for you.

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Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by noir_lord on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:02PM (#9848403)

I absolutely hadn't but that looks damn interesting, thanks!

What was the delay like in actual usage?

EDIT: This is literally what I was describing and have wanted for ages, US only but some ebay.co.uk vendors have them! I'm having one of these soon!

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Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by PopeOfNope on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @08:29AM (#9851085)

Sony's Digital Paper does that and only that. It allows you to read and mark up pdfs with a pen and nothing more. Unfortunately, it's $800 USD.

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solu...

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Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by Someone1234 on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:55PM (#9848367)

That's more or less what a Surface Pro with OneNote (and OneDrive) does. But it isn't even ballpark $200. More like $700+.

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Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by noir_lord on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:57PM (#9848381)

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 months or years.

EDIT: It would be incredibly useful to pull up a sketch of an architecture against a git timestamp so I could figure out WTF I was thinking at the time ;).

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Re:Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback by garblegarble on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @09:04AM (#9851236)

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...

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