Comment by dporan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dporan | Hacker News Reader

Real, shipping stylus-based computers -- not just mockups or concepts like Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook -- go back to at least the late 1980s, with the GRiDPAD:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/188223/the_long_fail_a_brief_...

Maybe the lack of success has been due to poor implementation, but I wonder whether styluses are just inherently problematic:

1. Truly reliable handwriting recognition always seems to be just over the horizon, and I wonder whether it always will be. Honestly, I often can't read my own handwriting. Sure, you can store handwriting as "ink," aka a bitmap, but that's like choosing a fax as your file format.

2. Switching from stylus to finger to (possibly) keyboard is awkward. You need someplace to put the stylus, and it makes one-handed operation pretty difficult.

That said, I actually think I'd enjoy having a stylus for input sometimes. I hope that someone eventually figures out how to put all the pieces together. (Too bad that Microsoft Courier didn't make it.)

I've actually been pleasantly surprised by the recognition in Windows 7 and 8. But it needs to be more flexible - who wants to write in a little field? Note-taking should stay rich, it should transcribe in the background, make the text searchable, and keep the layout and such in a bit of simple hidden html or the like.

But yeah switching is a pain. and the interaction vocabulary has to be rewritten for stylus input.

Have you tried OneNote? It's the one program that really highlights the benefits of a (pressure sensitive) stylus based tablet. To this date, it's one of the things I miss about my old Toshiba M200. OneNote allows for freeform handwriting, audio recording and transcribes both to make them searchable and copyable. When writing papers and such in college it was great to be able to search for a phrase in either my notes or the lecture and get the full context. The Windows 7 upgrade made the handwriting recognition was rather impressive as well.

Stylus adds a lot of accuracy both in where your pointing and how hard your pointing at something. This is great for artists, but unless your creating art getting withing 5 pixels of what you mean is plenty for most interface tasks. So, when job's said how poor styluses are his context was cellphones which nobody uses to create art and using a stylus is painful. In those rare cases where someone actually wants to sketch something out on a cellphone you can zoom in a lot which is not efficient but hey your using a cellphone get over yourself.

As to iPad's the same issues shows up, using a Stylus on top of a screen is less accurate than using a separate tablet, not to mention it's resolution is terrible for creating real art. Sure, it's better than a cellphone, but fingerprinting is plenty for most people's level of artistic talent.

PS: My sister is a graphics artist and she get's sub-pixel accuracy with a cheap qualcom tablet. Covering up part of the immage your working on is reasonable, but when using pen on paper she often rotates the paper to minimize the effect which slows things down with clunky computer controls.

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