Ink Pen Records Handwriting and Creates Digital Copies | Hacker News Reader

Ink Pen Records Handwriting and Creates Digital Copies

zdnet.com

10 pointsmarctuinier14 comments

I worked for Livescribe from 2008 to 2010. The author of this article describes the Nuwa Pen as a "game-changer" but, as others have pointed out in this thread, other products have done the same thing for a long time. Livescribe's pens captured both handwriting and audio, which was great for meetings and lectures. For a while they also supported an app ecosystem, though the apps' usefulness was never successfully demonstrated to be more than a gimmick.

I still believe there is a niche where a product like this would be very much at home, but Livescribe's smartpens in particular were undone by a combination of bad internal decisions combined with a market that changed from underneath them. Who knows, maybe the Nuwa Pen will be able to target that niche market more successfully. I could certainly find a use for one, given the right combination of price/features.

Adding to this that before Livescribe there was the Fly pentop computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_(pentop_computer)

> This process can take a few seconds and up to a few minutes, depending on connectivity

A pen that records everything you write and uploads it to some compute cloud sounds less interesting than the title made it sound :/

The article and the FAQ (https://nuwapen.com/en-us/pages/faqs) on their site don’t include details regarding where or how the data is being stored, unless I’ve missed something?

I bought a LiveScribe out of curiosity ages ago and I never quite managed to fit it into my daily rhythm. Maybe it was that the software was too clunky or the fact that I needed to use special paper. Either way, the idea turned out to be less revolutionary than I thought it would be. I also think that multimodal LLMs are slowly inching us towards a future where we can auto index our notebooks using a standard cell phone camera.

The underlying tech is a little different, but Livescribe has been doing this for almost 20 years.

So this is Livescribe but without the special paper?

This sort of thing always seems to be held back by software --- it's been decades now, and Apple still hasn't made a device I want to buy since killing off the Newton, and while I carry and use my Kindle Scribe pretty much constantly, it's mostly for reading and sketching, not for the extensive notes integrated into my writing which my Newton MessagePad, NCR-3125, and Wacom ArtZ attached to my NeXT Cube and all cabled together w/ DB-9 serial cables made workable.

About three years ago I switched from an office full of paper, where I would print and write my notes, to an iPad with an Apple Pencil and the app Noteshelf. It worked remarkably well. There are screen protectors that mimic types of paper, and tactile resistance pretty well. Slowly paper disappeared from my office and I stopped printing all together.

I have been trying voice notes recently instead of writing, using nebulanotes.ai I mostly used to scribble notes as i went through my day, but it’s been so much faster to just talk. (disclaimer, i work for the company that makes nebulanotes)

I can't stand the click of an Apple Pencil, and it annoys me that it only works on specific iPads, and I do not need yet another battery/capacitor to manage in my life (refuse to use wireless keyboards/mice).

Currently, all of the devices I use support Wacom EMR:

- Samsung Galaxy Note 10+

- Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360

- Kindle Scribe

- Wacom One 13 (gen one) display attached to my MacBook Pro (sometimes it gets switched to a Linux box)

and unfortunately, that's not possible w/ an all-Apple eco-system (because they haven't made a replacement for my Newton MessagePad (which had a stylus which did not need a battery)).

Pretty much the only paper I use is for grocery lists (and if Amazon or someone would make a small e-ink device which used a Wacom EMR stylus which I could leave in the kitchen and which would synch to the cloud, even that would stop) or for sketches/diagrams which want to be larger than the Kindle Scribe allows.

Click? I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you mean the tap of the tip on the screen? I haven't really noticed that, just the tactile feedback of writing on a smooth surface.

These types of products have been around for a long time. I sued to have one a decade ago. It wasn't LiveScribe. Wacom also had a product like for this type of use.

I'll take one in fountain pen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com