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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to shallowly dismiss this, but it's frankly pretty shallow. It's just OCR as a service: blog posts, but you don't have to type, and you have to write really carefully so it doesn't accidentally make you look illiterate. I believe that even the people to whom this appeals will quickly become disenchanted.

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Apple has shown us that a little integration and UX consideration goes a long way. Just because you could put together two existing technologies doesn't mean you did, or would, and it especially doesn't mean that a nontechnical person could or would.

If I liked writing things by hand in notebooks (I don't), then I'd definitely be interested in the integration here.

I agree with what you've said about integrating technologies and improving the user experience. I'd agree with what you say about this particular instance if it were a) more seamless, and b) more reliable. The flow of writing, photographing, adding headers, adding images, styling: I don't think that's been well thought-through as a user experience. And the requirements for writing so as to ensure a clean result from OCR: get good, heavyweight paper, write large and neat, make sure all the lines line up on the left — it doesn't sound like an experience of "Just write!" Gotta have a good camera too, which a lot of people who prefer to avoid typing may not be inclined to value.

That was my feeling too. Calling it “magic” might be stretching things just a bit.

Apple calls a mouse that you can't use while charging "magic", I don't see why this can't be described as such.

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