Quill: The E-Ink UI framework | Hacker News Reader

Quill: The E-Ink UI framework

quill-ui.com

38 pointsbpierre26 comments

Looks nice, but why is there nothing there but a bunch of pictures and a "book a demo" form? Who is the intended audience here?

Looks like B2B - "Get in touch" or "book a demo" usually means you will be connected with a sales representative.

It also means it's expensive. Not "corporate expensive", but "average-jane expensive".

pre-empting the standard HN response: if you don't like this, they don't want your business. your getting upset means their strategy is working. they want price-insensitive and enterprise customers only, likely because they don't have the support staff or internal work flows to deal with individuals or smaller cash-strapped businesses.

Or... it's simply not feasible to declare pricing up front because it's going to involve some negotiation -- not just around price but support and terms. I think you're hinting at that, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's stupid-money expensive.

In general we've all been spoiled by open source. Someone likely put a lot of work into this. If I were building a device like this, I'd hate to have to hire staff to build this for me, and while it could be "fun" to build, money/time would likely to be better spent elsewhere.

All of that is totally fine for them as a strategy. But it means the HN post here is nothing more than sales promo, which is against the submission guidelines. There’s zero information here.

I can't speak to whether it violates submit guidelines, I think it's interesting that a library like this exists, and I wouldn't agree there's "zero" information.

There's often threads on here bemoaning the lack of adoption of E-Ink screens. So clearly the community here has an interest in it.

Sometimes an "existence proof" works to kick off new projects inspired by the thing being shown off.

The core idea here would seem to be a UI library optimized for e-ink, that uses TypeScript to do the actual UI:s but then relies on a Rust runtime for the actual on-target execution, or something like that. I didn't click on the page, so perhaps I got the details wrong.

Plot twist: in the actual fact their prices may be affordable and/or you can haggle with them, but they put on the glamor to appeal to maybe a few fat businesses that will pony up the cash no questions asked.

You lost me at haggling.

You do run into this sometimes. Flip dot displays can be pretty pricey, new or used, big and small, but after some chatting with the sales team I found out that they'd be happy to sell me a small refurbished panel (not listed in the pricing info they sent me) for a decent discount off what a brand new one would cost to play around with.

Oh, I love that ratteling clicking sound of flip dot displays.

100% same, I thought it'd be interesting to see how many distinct sounds I can get by flipping dots. Flipping a whole row at once has a nice sharp snare-like sound, just one dot is a gentle hi hat tap, I might be reaching on this one but a fast sequential flip isn't too far off from a kick, maybe I could get some generative 7x7 shifting patterns going synced up with interactively made rhythms.

If that’s true, they’ve muddied their marketing.

They specifically mention the hardware being low-cost (ESP32s are ~$6USD)

So they market to producers of e-readers/tablets, I guess.

And if you're a startup looking to ship 10k units in your first Kickstarter round, this library will probably be low-cost compared to your other expenses. But I have no illusions that I'll be able to afford it for a one-off hobby project.

This is just m5paper with the claim of developer friendly environment [1]

1 - https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...

That's clearly not what's being advertised here and this seems remarkably dismissive and incorrect. It's a library to do e-ink graphics -- which have different characteristics than standard raster rendering, so something like this makes sense.

It does that rendering on the class of devices you're referring to, and that's where the intersection ends.

I've built a simpler version of part of what they advertise (also with Rust and on an esp32, https://imgur.com/a/NoTr8XX) and have a lot of experience with traditional GUI toolkits, and I would agree there's a decent value prop in what they describe.

There's enough things in an e-ink UI stack to optimize and watch out for that standard toolkits leave some gaps to fill when someone is looking to build an e-ink based product on the quick, and the tech has now gotten cheap enough there's finally a minor Cambrian explosion of those. It's a nice little startup idea.

At the moment, quite a lot of the higher-end e-ink embedded products are built with Qt, by suitable experts who know how to wrangle it for that purpose and some tricks in the stack below Qt to compensate for sub-optimal behavior by the toolkit. An experienced team can do this well, but there's a wider audience wanting to build these products.

Wonder if they did drivers for external controllers as I did, or do the waveforms directly from the MCUs, or both. I should book a demo and ask!

> Great API documentation

This sounds great, would like to see a link to this documentation.

Minor note, or question maybe, I'm not sure why this needs to be in typescript though. Eink is often accompanied by low power devices, Python and C are the usual choices for these cases.

I'm not sure what this is. Are you selling the hardware or are you selling the software to render the UI?

There are no links to documentation or any information beyond a snippet of code.

Not sure of the usefulness of this post. Might be too early to be here.

Code can be simplified. Change:

  linkTitles.map(title => Link(title))

  linkTitles.map(Link)

Only teasing. In all seriousness this looks really nice and reminds me that I want to get a new e-ink reader! It's been like 8 years since I last used one so I imagine the technology has come a long way.

Anyone here recommend a reader if money is no object? I want the highest quality one on the market that will last years. Primarily for reading, but perhaps also some note taking.

I’m pretty happy with the Kindle Scribe if you don’t mind being part of the Amazon ecosystem. It supports sideloading epub and PDF fine, and you can use email to sideload files which is convenient when on the road. I haven’t played with exporting the notes yet. The large screen is very comfortable for reading.

Thank you!

About 3 months ago I spent a month trying to get Quill working without various, automation flow destroying issues. I gave up. TinyMCE to the rescue, and the FOSS version too.

This is totally different than “Quill the rich text editor”. This post is about an E-Paper framework - read the link!

I've got an M5Paper laying around and something I've always wanted to build for it (for myself), but I never quite figured out a good dev setup or starting point for development. If this had some sort of personal use version it would be perfect, but I understand well enough that there's no money in that.

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