Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs only really meant that if you need a stylus for most tasks on your device, you're doing it wrong. But I think pens with active digitizers can be very useful for certain tasks, and if Apple were smart about this, they'd enable it in a future iPad and sell such pens as accessories to the iPad.

They know very well that they have a ton of artists using iPads in their userbase, and a lot of drawing apps, too. I don't think they have a good reason for not making active digitizer pens for their iPad other than the fact that they don't want to seem like hypocrites after Steve Jobs' comment. But hey - it's already too late for that. They've already made a 7" tablet, too - so they are hypocrites - and might as well do this, too.

I think we'll see Samsung expand on the pen idea in the coming year (rumors point to Galaxy S4 having a stylus, too), and I intend to buy a next-gen Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet next year, as well as recommend one for a fashion designer friend. I wish they were Google-blessed Nexus devices, so I don't have to deal with the Samsung-only custom apps for the S-pen, but it doesn't look like Google cares too much about active digitizer pens right now, and Samsung's Note devices and their S-pen are currently the best on the market for this.

Steve Jobs, like the CEO of every other major tech company, just bad-mouthed whatever the competition had that they didn't have. When people like him or Ballmer make a statement that some piece of tech isn't good, it carries no information.

It goes back to Job's argument about cars v trucks. For the majority of what people want to do, car are fine. But some people need trucks. The iPhone is a car. A touchscreen with a stylus is a truck. It's a similar dichotomy to laptops for consuming web content, and workstations for editing video.

As what I would describe as a "semipro" artist, I would not use an ipad to draw, because the latency isn't good enough yet. People might play with it, but no professional can use it until the latency is about 10 times better than it currently is.

How does the Note range compare in terms of latency?

I've never tried it, but I can speculate that it's similar to the 100+ms latency of comparable devices. It needs to be more on the order of 5-10ms for it to truly viable, and then the screens need to be bigger to make it feasible to do a lot of good work on them. It'll get there, I know there's work being done in this direction, but it's not there yet.

Some would beg to differ: http://ipadsinart.weebly.com/professional-ipad-artists.html

It's not exactly precision art is it? It's only even mildly interesting because it's art under a heavy constraint. You could paint a picture using a 3' log instead of a paintbrush if you want to, but that doesn't make 3' logs a particularly good artistic instrument.

That's one of those things where the medium is itself the interesting part of the art, not the final product.

It's 'good art' precisely because the artist is so hindered by the iPad.

They probably have some kind of deal with Wacom which prevents them from having any kind of high quality stylus support.

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