Been thinking of getting a Remarkable / Onyx Boox ...
# thinking-togetherh
hamish todd
05/16/2022, 1:17 AMBeen thinking of getting a Remarkable / Onyx Boox / general note-taking/drawing tablet, intended as a serious replacement for my mechanical-pencil-and-paper-notebook setup. I'm using it as an opportunity to think about these devices as thinking/coding tools.
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Chris Knott
05/16/2022, 5:31 AMRemarkable 2 has replaced notepads for me. I love it and I would recommend it but I believe they recently went to some kind of subscription model. I was grandfathered in without paying because I was an early pre-order. I think they are all pretty similar. They all use the same e-ink screen.
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Konrad Hinsen
05/16/2022, 7:10 AMI have an Onyx Boox Note 2. No longer available but the successors are overall similar. For me it's mostly a reading device which I appreciate enormously because of reduced eye strain compared to standard tablets. I use the stylus mainly for annotating stuff I read, not so much for note taking. It may be very good for that, but I didn't try. Habits...
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Oleksandr Kryvonos
05/16/2022, 9:23 PMI got for my self Samsung Tab S6 Lite, comes with stylus, still not using it properly as a thinking tool though
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/17/2022, 2:03 AMI've been (slowly) trying to implement a Smalltalk-78 interpreter (enough to run one of the images on the Smalltalk-zoo - https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/HOPL-St78.html) for my PineNote, and then I plan to redesign the core UI to work with pen input. It feels like an almost bare-metal Smalltalk (I am just leveraging a minimal linux system to handle the screenbuffer and the basic hardware) will give me a 'small-enough' system to be able to experiment with new 'digital-paper' like interactions
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/17/2022, 2:06 AMIt feels like a lot of the ideas from Alex Obenauer's Lab notes (https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/) provide a design space for building this kind of full-object based personal system
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/17/2022, 2:14 AMI love the thinking behind Ink&Switch's crosscut system, but it feels hampered by the fact that experimenting with any new ideas needs the full edit/compile/upload cycle, instead of being able to make changes directly to the system live. One comment from Dan Ingalls that has stuck with me is that while the PARC systems that Alan Kay's LRG group built were slower than software from other groups (like the Bravo editor, which was written directly in BCPL), their turnaround time for experimentation was so quick that it more than made up for the slower system speed. Now with computers as powerful as they are now (even the PineNote boasts a 64 bit 1.8 Ghz quad core chip with 4Gb of memory and a GPU), there is no excuse not to have live editable systems directly on the devices we use.
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Konrad Hinsen
05/17/2022, 9:54 AMThe risk of using a live programming system is that once you are used to one, you just don't want to get back to edit-compile-run cycles.
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Konrad Hinsen
05/17/2022, 9:55 AMAnd yes, I'd love to have Smalltalk-on-e-ink with a good touch interface!
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 12:54 PMi work on software for the remarkable tablet, mostly focused on using handwriting as a ui element or input. so far i've released https://github.com/bkirwi/folly, but also have a text editor and other things in various stages of completion
Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 12:57 PMfolly is a text adventure / interactive fiction interpreter, so not exactly FoC's bread and butter, but i started it as a way to experiment with some adjacent ideas like the read-eval-print loop, and using handwriting both as a visual element and as a command for the machine.
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 1:00 PMpersonally i find i think differently with a pen+paper metaphor than on a laptop / similar, and i'm curious about better ways to leverage that - most existing software for these tablets uses either a paper metaphor (with no interactivity aside from drawing lines etc.) or a mobile-device metaphor (very interactive, but doesn't take advantage of the text/ink-heavy visuals the hardware is good at)
Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 1:02 PM@Naveen Michaud-Agrawal - i'd be curious how your system differs from existing smalltalk implementations / why one might need a new interpreter for e-ink stuff and not just a new ui
Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 1:06 PMi've thought a bit about the interface side of programming on e-ink (eg. where the syntax doesn't need to be ASCII, but does need to be maximally visually distinct for the handwriting recognizer) but almost not at all about the implementation
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 1:23 PM@Ben Kirwin Folly looks interesting, thanks. The pinenote doesn't quite yet have the level of support for 3rd party applications yet, so i've been prototyping using an interpreter on my desktop.
Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 1:26 PMMy approach is less about needing a new interpreter, but more that the Smalltalk-76/78 system feels small enough to be fully approachable (compared to Squeak/Pharo/GT). In addition, those systems all start with a UX system built around keyboard and mouse, and I'd like to explore UI ideas where the pen input is first class
Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 1:33 PMAlthough I do vacillate between using my own interpreter and trying to get smalltalk-vm running on the quartz64 chip
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Chris Knott
05/18/2022, 2:14 PM@Ben Kirwin That looks great! Gonna try it out this weekend
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Konrad Hinsen
05/18/2022, 2:16 PM@Naveen Michaud-Agrawal You might also check out Cuis Smalltalk, which is more modern that 76/78, but has the explicit goal of remaining small and understandable. https://www.cuis-smalltalk.org/
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 3:25 PM@Konrad Hinsen thanks, I forgot about Cuis. Although I'm looking for non-modern, the current smalltalk vms feel like they are way beyond my comprehension
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 3:51 PMthat makes sense! i've never really spent much time with smalltalk; i forget sometimes how deeply intertwined the language and ui are.
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Konrad Hinsen
05/18/2022, 4:38 PMFrom the user's point of view, they are, but fundamentally, they are not. You could create a Smalltalk with no UI other than an input text stream. In fact, GNU Smalltalk is almost at that level. Given such a Smalltalk, you could then build different UIs on top of it. It's not fundamentally different from other dynamic languages. The real difference is that the Smalltalk community has since the beginning valued good UIs and development tools.
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 4:45 PMoh, also related to taking advantage of the medium, if anyone hasn't seen: https://omar.website/posts/against-recognition/
(i don't 100% agree with it, but found it thought-provoking)
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 4:47 PM@Ben Kirwin yes it's a good read. What parts don't you agree with?
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 5:01 PMmostly: i like recognition! it's why i'm using a computer instead of paper.
i really agree with a lot of the specific criticisms of the tablet ui, and how it goes too far to make the input legible to the computer at the expense of expressivity etc.
but there are other places where i wish the ui did a little bit more recognition... for example, searching for a particular phrase in my notes
and i think you really do end up wanting to use the whole spectrum of legible-to-human/legible-to-machine for different tasks / in different contexts
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 5:02 PMAh agreed
Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 5:06 PMI do like Omar's point that the recognition shouldn't erase the original input, instead just annotating with the computer readable information
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 6:31 PMi've seen a little bit about the rand tablet, but not a proper demo - thanks for the link!
Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 6:35 PMand yeah, that was definitely an inspiration for how folly does it
though really it could take it much farther - eg. letting users take notes and things in the margins, or allow editing old commands
in the next version maybe!
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Chris Knott
05/18/2022, 8:14 PMI actually just tried Folly now so here's some snap reactions;
ā¢ The general write input, get more text interaction loop is really compelling, it really made the reMarkable feel like a different device.
ā¢ My handwriting is quite bad and it struggled to understand (3 attempts at "novice mode off"). It would have been helpful to see what it thought I was saying so I could get an idea of what letters I was doing wrong
ā¢ I feel like there's cool stuff to explore in the UI. For example, how about just circling words in the prompt to interact with those items. How about just drawing an arrow pointing up for "Go north". This is something that you can do that keyboard driven IF can't do
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 8:28 PMhey, thanks for the feedback!
in case it's helpful as you mess around: the "folly tutorial" will repeat what it thought you were saying if it wasn't able to make sense of it.
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Chris Knott
05/18/2022, 8:30 PMOh right whoops I jumped straight into Bronze š¤¦āāļø
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Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 8:33 PMunderstandable! one thing that's been tricky to balance is that gesture-/handwriting-based ui feels less discoverable, since there's fewer affordances on-screen. right now i'm leaning on the tutorial to fill some of the gaps, but it feels like there should be a better way to integrate that into the app itself...
Ben Kirwin
05/18/2022, 8:36 PMand yep, definitely agree on the ui opportunities
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Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 8:38 PMI've always thought it would be interesting to do a "Marauders Map" (Harry Potter reference) type UI for a story game on an ePaper device
Naveen Michaud-Agrawal
05/18/2022, 8:38 PMLike the device is some sort of magical artifact that you interact with
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