Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I share this sentiment. Way back when Plastic Logic killed themselves by trying to bite off too much of the ecosystem, their legal pad sized 'Plastic reader' was something I could see replacing both printouts and faxes.

I came at this way back in the epaper epoch by getting an Illiad2 from IRex Technologies (a large epaper device with a watcom digitizer), I've since gone through an iPad, iPad Pro, and currently use a Surface Pro 4 for this function.

The essential bits are exactly smooth drawing on it and for wide market penetration low cost. I have been really impressed with Microsoft's ASIC which makes drawing on Surface almost lag free.

Sony on the other hand has a history of weak business models, I was amused by their selling of the books made available by the Gutenberg project for their original e-book (as an example).

The product I would find really interesting (and would buy at least one of :-) Would be an e-paper tablet that I could draw on at a reasonable PPI (200+) that was US standard paper drawing area, built in wireless network and presented to my computer as a 'printer' on the network. I would use it by printing to it from my phone or my laptop and I would use it to review things and write notes on them (sort of like Drawboard PDF) and then either push the annotated prints into an archive or delete them once I was done with them.

Something that might fulfill your interests would be the BoogieBoard Sync[0]. It can bluetooth connect to your phone (iOS and Android), where it will upload what you write in a PDF format. The device can be connected to a PC via USB, and the data can also be pulled off in PDF format. You cannot pull up what you write on the device itself though.

I don't think it's quite US Standard Paper (I don't have mine with me at the moment to check), but it is quite a decent size.

It takes only a moment to save what you've written, and clearing the screen takes a split second. You do have to use a special stylus it comes with to write to the device though, other strokes won't be saved. The battery life is supposed to be ~7 days of run time, if you were writing continuously. It is quite slim, and very light weight.

From what I've read, the PDFs store your pen strokes. They claim this is optimal for OCR, but I've never tested that claim.

[0]: https://myboogieboard.com/ewriters/sync

I think I have 5 or 6 BoogieBoards around my lab, one of them is a 'sync'. The challenge with the boogieboard is that they are like writing with a very fat marker. (and its a bit smaller than standard paper.

If you compare what you can do with that vs a Surface Pro 4 pencil and Drawboard PDF the contrast is fairly startling (and expected given order of magnitude difference in price).

I asked the inventor of the Boogieboard at Makerfaire if they had ever considered making a large whiteboard sized one (that would be pretty useful in my lab). He said they would consider it but there were technical issues with the surface area vs the erase mechanism (something like generating a very strong electric field across a very large area like that).

    I would use it by printing to it from my phone or my laptop and I would use it to review things and write notes on them

Uh...interesting! I'd honestly be quite happy with just PDF functionality, but this would also be an interesting workflow. I could totally see myself finding either documentation, tutorials, or other things to print to then be able to write notes on top of.

Very interesting. This is a workflow I could get behind of.

A number of my colleagues print to paper for code review. They find it easier to read and markup in that format.

I personally can't stand the idea of using that much paper, but I dig the future-y idea of printing to a read/markup slate, and automatically posting the markup to phabricator.

I imagine legal and other business functions that are review heavy could similarly benefit.

>A number of my colleagues print to paper for code review. They find it easier to read and markup in that format. I personally can't stand the idea of using that much paper

That's why I like to print code in an ultra-small font with 4 pages per sheet, duplex.

The idea of it registering as a printer is ingenious.

I use the "Print to OneNote" feature for this a surprising amount. I can "Print to OneNote" on my Desktop, wait for it to sync to my Surface and draw/markup there, for example.

Funny, we are currently building exactly this (incl. CUPS driver) for a research project, using an ESP8266 and a Pervasive Displays 10.1" panel.

I love the idea of registering it as a printer.

Right now I do something similar (but more cumbersome) with my iPad Pro: I print to PDF, save the PDF in iCloud Drive, and then open it in Preview on the iPad, which lets me annotate it with the Pencil.

What I really wish I could find is some way to do the same for e-books. Amazon, if you're listening, it'd be a game changer if you could support this in the Kindle app.

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