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Comment by warfangle | Hacker News Reader

There's one reason I'd want a stylus on the iPad (or any other tablet device), and it's not for handwriting.

It's for sketching. Diagrams, wireframes, or just a squirrel in the park. Give me a simple sketching program - think Painter Light. Let it synch to a repository on my desktop. Let me use the tablet as an actual tablet via bluetooth when I'm actually at my desk.

I would probably pay bank for that.

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You can get stylus' for apple's touch devices, I recently ordered one for my iPad.

It's called a Pogo Sketch

I plan to use my iPad for doodling and whatnot of a night time in bed, aswell as reading and general media consumption - its really my "bed time" screen device.

I have the Pogo stylus. The problem with it, or rather with ArtStudio, Sketchpad, Brushes and all the stylus note-taking apps is the same: you cannot rest your hand on the screen. It registers touches from the hand instead of the stylus. That makes all of these apps pretty much useless as far as I am concerned: it is quite inconvenient to draw or write using these applications, even though some of them are extremely impressive otherwise. This, frankly, boggles my mind - granted the screen sensor API is closed, but is it not possible to do velocity distribution thresholding on different touch events, or maybe something more sophisticated, a Kalman filter or something, to distinguish these touches and ignore the 'stationary' ones?

I use a SmudgeGuard with my Wacom Cintiq - I suppose the same thing would work for the iPad. I haven't received my iPad yet to test it out.

EDIT - link

http://www.smudgeguard.com/

Thanks, I will try it. Application-level solution would still be preferable, I think, and is an interesting problem, aside from the immediate usability benefits.

cheap way to solve that problem is just to wear one of those gloves with holes cut out for the fingers... I use my bicycling gloves and they work great. I don't think we need to use fancy technology to solve this simple problem :-)

The Pogo sketch works pretty well with the ArtStudio app. I can even get some "brush" effect. (No pressure sensitivity. I think it's all a software trick.)

Art Studio tapers from the start and to the end of a stroke over time of the stroke. So a faster stroke looks thinner, as more of it is drawn within the tapered times. Quite a few line strokes look quite pleasing due the effect. It's very neat.

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