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Comment by apparent | Hacker News Reader

I find his dismissal of iPad writing to be unconvincing. He talks about how we have calibrated our writing utensils over centuries to involve the proper amount of friction, and how that knowledge goes out the window when you're writing on an iPad.

That may be true, but it's not like you can't just re-acclimate to the experience of writing on an iPad. Most people don't handwrite much, period, so if they start handwriting again they're going to have to have an adjustment period either way.

I personally would think that the the benefits of digital writing (searchability, portability, infinite canvas, handwriting cleanup, digitization) would outweigh his friction quibbles. I personally don't find it to be tiring to write on an iPad, even without a screen protector (which some people use to increase friction). Also, e-paper devices tend to have more friction-y feedback, but he doesn't address this at all when dismissing all "gadgets" outright.

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I went down the physical-writing-digital-capture system over a 10 month period. Bought the right stylus tips, the paper-like screen cover, etc.

Ultimately went back to my moleskine that fits in my back pants pocket and I don't have to worry about battery life.

Perhaps the biggest reason why my experiment failed was that I found it difficult to look back at digital written notes beyond a week. There is no physical flip...

Equally important though, I didn't retain information quite as well when writing against a screen. I can't explain it. I wanted the system to work, but it didn't. Maybe I tried to write too verbose, more carefully than I would a paper page... hoping my more careful writing would be captured by OCR better. I don't know but it was different. Intended focus matters.

Less effort = more retention to me. Digital writing, at least at that time, was more effort to me it seems

My issue with the iPad is that it just does not have the fine-fidelity or response time of real ink, and it's not something that never fails.

It's so frustrating to be so pregnant with an idea, to open ones iPad, and to find out the battery is low, Procreate isn't working, the Notes app is confusing to navigate, oh no you're writing but your palm has slid on the screen, etc.

I've spent a lot of time searching for a digital alternative, but IMO we're at least a decade away from digital handwriting being even close to on-par with paper, even ignoring friction and feel.

I do find the iPad battery drain to be annoying and inexplicable. When they first came out, iPads held a charge for weeks in standby. New ones drain in a few days, even when background app activity and such are disabled. And you're right that it is frustrating to pick up your iPad and discover that the battery is near-dead, which happens with surprising frequency.

That critique doesn't apply to Remarkables or Kindle Scribes though.

I shut my iPad down when I’m not using it because the passive drain is absurd. I don’t need my iPad to do literally anything when it’s screen off. I have a phone for notifications.

Find my, most likely

Turning that off, or using automatic airplane mode (eg in shortcuts set a schedule to turn on airplane mode daily)

Huh, will give both of these a try. But man, I would not be thrilled if the only way to have decent battery life is to make my iPad not-findable, or to have to turn on wifi whenever I want to use it (I couldn't really set much of a schedule).

Seems like the Find My bit could be taken care of by not updating location until the gyros are triggered. Honestly I'd be happy to have it in airplane mode when not being touched as well. IDK what they could call the setting, maybe an Airplane When Idle Mode?

It got really bad a few years ago: telegram notifications, homekit and find my were the culprits.

Just check battery stats, it will show what drains the most.

But after one point in time I gave up and just set up airplane mode automation every 6 hours

I agree. My iPad 2 could last a month or more in standby. My iPad 8 maybe one to two weeks.

The study he cites is also specifically using digital pens

> Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard

kinda funny.

It's also not clear from this study that there is actually any benefit to "more brain activity". Of course doing more complex motor tasks requires more brain activity but nobody guarantees that this helps with remembering things.

i had no science, but in college for shorter works i always thought handwriting, typing, and reading it aloud was my allowing my brain to hit a problem in three different (not more, different) ways before / even if ever being in front of another human being (or now their non-union AI equivalent)

i still feel writing something down helps with memory formation, in part because i remember the act of writing it down. cocktail napkins and whiteboards way better than ipads also

i remain obsessed with Pilot v5 rolling ball extra fine; i would say Pilot g2s are for proles but the outcome if you leave it in the dryer is far less severe

I have a "paper-feel" screen protector and a metal nib on my Apple pencil. The combination provides a comfortable amount of friction for me, and the fact that it's matte cuts down on reflections.

Friction is also variable, with pen and paper type. Although the iPad is a bit too slick, it gets very fatiguing (I did most of my HW in college on the iPad)

It may be the case that the iPad is slicker than ideal for some people, but even if that's the case it doesn't relate to his point about centuries of adaptation or whatever. In the past, we were limited by the laws of physics and the materials available in our environment. If people could have had whiteboards 200 years ago instead of chalkboards, they would have taken them (easier to erase, no chalk dust). But they didn't have them, so they didn't use them.

The problem with digital writing is that you loose spatial orientation because of panning and zooming. At least I think this is the reason why I sometimes prefer pen and paper.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees with this statement and it makes your comment seem a bit reductive. It's not so much a dismissal of writing on a particular product (iPad) as much as the article is about optimal writing by hand, the best materials, and some of the reasoning as to why.

While you may be convinced writing on a screen or tablet is objectively superior to doing things the "old way" there is literature on the topic indicating otherwise you might want to consider - that being said, everyone is different in their preferences and anatomy. I for one can't stand to write on a plastic/glass surface with a stylus, the ergonomics feel wrong and my retention for journaling is significantly worse.

iPad is terrible for hand-writing. It's (relatively) heavy, so you can't hold it and write on it. It's slippery, and the friction between the pen and stylus is bad.

The pen itself also produces gigantic strokes.

Not only is it heavy, but it's stiff and rigid. If I lay my notepad over my deskmat and not all of it is on it, that's no big deal, the notepad just conforms to the surface. But the ipad is going to rock back and forth.

It's also that I'll often not have my entire notepad on the desk, I might not have room, might only have the top corner on it, or just quickly jotting something down. An ipad, that's too precarious and unstable, no a notepad, it just works.

I often have like an inch of the notepad hanging off of my desk, when my arm is across it, the notepad just flexes and it's fine, if I do that to an ipad, it's cutting into my arm.

It's not just the ipad, I've also tried a remarkable and a kindle scribe and they all suffer from the same issue. Notepads are just more flexible, both literally and figuratively.

The stroke size is highly customizable. What do you mean "the friction between the pen and stylus is bad"? As others have pointed out, you can get screen protectors and nibs for Apple pencils.

The problem is that the screen surface and the pen are fairly far apart, so the stroke appears "floating". This makes it harder to do fine drawing.

Try to "dot i-s" in a long word and see for yourself. It's just awkward. So people compensate by using thicker strokes that hide that "floating" effect.

I'm studying Chinese, and writing the characters is pretty much the only way to learn them. So far, the only device that semi-worked for me was a reMarkable 2 tablet. But its software is too shitty to be useful.

So I just switched to paper completely.

Agree that it would not be best for fine drawing (although the new Pros have the proximity feature that perhaps helps with this. And I agree that Chinese characters could present similar issues in terms of legibility, given how much precision is required.

But for writing in English and many other languages, it seems like this doesn't present a huge challenge. I am particularly interested in (but have not yet tried) the handwriting cleanup feature. This seems like a nice middle ground between full digitization and leaving chicken scratch as-is.

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