Moleskine X Adobe | Hacker News Reader

Moleskine X Adobe

moleskine.com

41 pointsriffraff49 comments

Being a PhD CS student, I find it professionally disappointing that this technology arises mainly for graphic artists where the translation from ink to content is basically dot per dot. Or dot per vector, but in this case already arcs have some internal order that vectorization misses (have characters on a different layer than background, etc).

I understand the targeting -- there's vastly more doodlers (professional or amateur) than scientists with cash in their pocket for gadgets. [1] Generating LaTeX from handwriting [2] is still in the distant future, ebook readers for people with A4 needs have gone stagnant since 2010 (although there is the extremely expensive Sony DPT-S1 [3] ).

The main advances I see in science is making faster use of the technology of yesteryear -- streaming classes and conferences on YouTube, arXiv being near mandatory now in CS, and so forth.

[1]: I am currenly a person in that exact group -- the university where I am a PhD student has a surplus of equipment funds every year. Every December, I am asked whether I want a laptop, a tablet, or anything else (with the implied condition that it should be purchasable in Central Europe, which rules out several products such as the DPT-S1 [3] or the Microsoft Surface). I have so far always declined as there's nothing that I can imagine improving my productivity.

[2]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/what-is-the-sta... (2010)

[3]: https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-DPTS1/?PID=I:digitalpa...

It's not exactly TeX from handwriting, but the developers at MyScript [1] seem to be doing a pretty good job at parsing basic TeX for notetaking. I met some a few years ago at the MWC and talked a little about TeX "recognition" and well, it got added to their flagship handwriting app. Still far from perfect (won't get you a \mathfrak) but usable enough for taking quick course/lecture/ideas notes.

[1]: http://www.myscript.com/

Myscripts math demo for android, while just a toy calculator [1], really impressed me. With that I can easily and smoothly draw complicated calculations, then draw a square root symbol on top of it and see it recognize it, draw a line underneath and divide the whole thing by something, -no problem.

The notepad thingy that was supposed to be a real product was a real disappointment in comparison imo.

[1]: It see s to use floats internally and doesn't make any attempt at hiding it. Try sin(360)

ebook readers for people with A4 needs

I don't understand what you mean by this. Could you explain?

reading PDFs and other stuff with a fixed page is a pain on a kindle, it's ok on larger tablets but then those don't have ePaper.

Many people would love to be able to read PDF for books, scholar articles and journals in an ereader with a size big enough for an A4 sheet.

Maybe we shouldn't be using a document format based on a fixed size of a page then... I even know about a good alternative...

But then we still have the cramped screen, imagine scrolling between equation A10 and A15 on a Nook GlowLight!

The only tech I see from the MoleSkine side is the positioning of dots on the page. Adobe use these as guide marks for scanning, sizing and rotating. I'm wondering how easy it would be to just draw the dots in the right place, and have the App scan your picture correctly.

I bet there is a design patent on the exact placement of the dots, preventing competing notebooks.

How easy do you think it would be to acquire just a single page of these and replicate it was an inkjet printer? $35 for a paper notebook isn't worth it- I tend to make a hundred drawings for every one I actually vectorize and use as is, so it this wouldn't be practical. Anyway, an expensive notebook is always intimidating, I go for cheaper ones with tear out pages so I don think about being wasteful when I'm creating

Indeed, this is just a new application using a very old idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker

A quick search brings up a lot of patents related to using these for image digitisation, but most of them are for methods using something more complex than 1,1,1,2 dots - since this dot-based version can only correct for linear distortions.

33 EUR for a notebook with a few dots printed on its pages?

http://store.moleskine.com/aut/de-de/catalog/detail/smart-no...

I'll stick with my leuchtturm link[1] notebook. Seems more flexible, and I don't see it as a real advantage to directly tie the image to adobe's stuff vs. dropbox/email.

[1] http://www.leuchtturm1917.com/en/content/whitelines-link-%C2...

But but but... that doesn't have the 5 orientation dots like the Moleskine smart book! How could you possibly snap a picture of your work and vectorize it? How? How? Imposiblu!

There actually are orientation patterns in the corners - and they do seem to help it do a good job of un-stretching the page.

Generally speaking, kudos to Moleskine for capitalizing on a mundane product & average quality but nothing beats japanese brands when it comes to fine paper. Also, you might give Whitelines[1] a whirl for scanning sketches.

[1](http://whitelines.se)

> nothing beats japanese brands when it comes to fine paper

Any recommendations?

Maruman Mnemosyne e.g. http://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-Notebooks/ct/765

Any more suggestions? (That looks good but I'm hoping to find something I'd never heard of but readily available in the UK)

There's http://www.thejournalshop.com in the UK; not sure about their JP stuff. Midori might be a cheap choice but they're turning more and more into a Moleskine-like brand.

Arches Paper from France is a personal favorite. Hot pressed, so it's smooth but not quite as smooth as Bristol, it still has some tooth for dry media

Surely this is just the existing Adobe Shapes app rebranded?

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/adobe-shape-cc-capture-creat...

Actually, I just released this to a test batch of artists: https://www.instapainting.com/projects/5465aa8b90f1f8845d8b4...

It uses automatic detection without corner markers shown in the video, so it can actually work with any book/paper. This example: https://www.instapainting.com/projects/546ade9890f1f85d2a8b4... is actually with a moleskine notebook, although I had to draw a black line in the fold to help it detect it.

Not really sure what we're seeing in your links - I'm assuming you've created an app that uploads images to instapainting? Would be good if they were whitebalanced.

I'm guessing the pages you link are tailored to a particular browser that's not FF as those pages look appalling on FF ;0)

It's actually an app that lets you take photos of artwork and it automatically crops and aligns them like the adobe app, but you can use it to create seamless time-lapse.

Thanks for the FF heads up.

The title seems to imply a dispute between them when in fact it's a partnership.

"×" seems to be the hip way to denote a collaboration these days :)

"x" in Italian (Moleskine is an Italian company) stands for "per", which means for. It's shorthand for partnership round here.

‘×’ is used to signify a crossover product in Japan too.

And the cross-product in maths! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_product

I think here "x" may be intended in the botanical meaning of "crossed with"

I couldn't figure out what the X meant at all, until reading the replies to your comment. You're saying that to you it means a dispute? Where have you seen it used that way?

"Where have you seen it used that way?"

Sports results are sometimes noted like that: 2x0 for example

Any (cheaper) alternative to this? Not that it is that expensive,but I want to offer 5/10 of these as gifts,so I wonder if there are cheaper alternative systems available in Europe.

Looks great anyway.

I was tempted to get one of these digital pens http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wacom-Inkling-Digital-Sketch-Pen/dp/...

But I've read slightly mixed reviews about them? Anyone used one?

It seems to me Adobe has been much more innovative now that they have their Creative Cloud service. I wonder if this is a result of increased revenues from Creative Cloud or part of their efforts to get everyone to upgrade to the subscription service.

Very much the latter. We're a shop with 60 creatives pushed hard over to CC. I believe the regular recurring licensing model is better business for them over the long term.

Naive question : is there an equivalent application that would allow to quickly transform my handwriting into unicode ?(Basically OCR but maybe with some learning mechanism)

Livescribe has been doing this with handwriting for awhile: http://www.livescribe.com/

I have looked a bit into it, it seems it exports the writing sessions in a kind of proprietary format. Thanks for the recommendation, it looks like an interesting solution anyway.

The problem with these products is in 3-4 years it will not be sold anymore.

As far as Moleskine partnerships go, this doesn't top Evernote's.

I think you're missing the key difference. It converts the image to an SVG. I see zero mention of that with the Evernote version. This is HUGE for anyone who wants to actually use the image rather than just have a cloud based copy of it.

i don't see how this is different from just vectorising any bitmap image?

I love Moleskine...

And Moleskine's contribution to this "technology" are the 5 dots printed on every page. Wow.

I've seen better joined marketing campaigns.

Marketing campaigns are evaluated on their impact to the top line, not on "contribution to technology".

Two separate observations there, buddy.

What observations? You say that it's not good marketing, because moleskine did not contribute some 'grand technology' to the project.

I say you can't possibly know if it is good or not, because you don't have the research and data behind it, and you most definitely cannot predict how it will affect their revenue and/or brand loyalty.

My opinion is that it will pan out really great for them. I would tell you what position I hold and the size of the company, but I'm sure that will only lead to some "appeal to authority" comment on your part.

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