Seems like this company should be an insta-cquire for Apple any day now. They display Apple's core values more than any other company I know (outside of Apple).
Since it's Bluetooth it seems to be a great way to get probably close to 100% accurate palm detection which has always been the most annoying part of stylus usage on iPad for me. Genius.
Isnt't it ironic that the cofounders actually came out of Microsoft R&D. They were among the Courier team, for those who don't know. Courier was a pre-iPad tablet device with amazing untapped potential.
Sigh, and now it's one of select demo apps in every Apple store. It alone almost made me buy an iPad. Way to go Bill Gates shutting down Courier, well done.
If you look just at the journal parts of the video, the parts Paper can duplicate, most of them are not in Paper at all. Paper is just a special type of drawing app.
That's just a concept video. Paper can't do most of what is shown in the journal parts of the video, so I'm guessing they were no where close to making Courier a reality.
On the other hand, Apple is surprisingly anti-stylus. Perhaps they feel it represents a barrier between the user and machine, or maybe they feel it differentiates the iPad from the stylus-based tablets that came before.
Regardless, styluses seem to be one of the few tablet accessories that you can buy in almost any electronics store except an Apple store.
It took me until they started describing USB port when I realized that this is not a page making fun of shitty iPad accessories, but an actual shitty iPad accessory.
Naming their products on such a broad term effectively establishes them as the "category killer" -- a competitor will never be able to find a name that's more effective[1].
I might have hit the wrong arrow, not sure but sorry if I did.
And yes, I also had a hard time telling if they capitalized Pencil and Paper just to parody apps and products overriding common words, or if there really was something behind.
I am on a phone so I skipped the video, and it would have really helped to have a big 'this is a bluetooth accessory for your phone/tablet/computer'. Because I am genuinly intersted in the product, it's really something I've been waiting for a long time, but the 'parody' feeling hasn't quite faded yet.
The music also gave me that feeling. Apple-style advert to the Nth degree. You'd think we were watching a time lapse of a baby gestating or the universe expanding.
Yea--me too. As a former Carpenter, I always found Carpenter pencils awkward. They were inprecise. Yes,
finish Carpenters are required, on many jobs to be within
1/16 th on an inch. I know this pen is for cpmputer art--
which I still have a hard time accepting. And I know Boris
Whatever is pretty impressive, but for myself it's still
2H pencils, with soft and hard erasers, and never drawing--
just shadowing.
No, it does not seem to be. But, I'm not sure why it's not pressure sensitive. It seems like that is something that they could have added using the bluetooth connection. I'm guessing that functionality would have made it too expensive or fragile.
That's my reaction too. Without pressure-sensitivity, how is it different from any other capacitive stylus? The palm-detection and the eraser? That's kinda weak.
It's unfortunate that Apple is so devoted to purely-consumer hardware and that other companies lack Apple's dedication to quality. The Galaxy Note's hardware makes this kind of system look like a children's toy... but then you're stuck with Samsung software.
Does it require a dedicated piece of hardware, though? Can't any multi-touch system do palm-detection or does the capacitive touchscreen get too overwhelmed by the whole palm to detect the little point of the stylus?
The Galaxy note's pen is also quite weak. I tried the Lenovo Tab 2 and Galaxy Note 10 because I wanted to replace my notebook I bring to meetings, but I was left unsatisfied and I returned both of them.
The Galaxy Note 10 requires some "training" to use, as the pen is not as responsive or sensible as a Wacom Intuos tablet, and the Samsung apps simply suck (Papyrus is the only Android drawing app I would actually consider). I write pretty fast, and I will definitely not slow down for inferior technology.
The pen is also ridiculously small, which becomes a pain to use after a while. The good thing is that you can have several Wacom-compatibile pens that you can "steal" from other brands. I opted for a Toshiba tablet pen (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Toshiba-GENUINE-Stylus-Tablet-PC-Pen...) because is much more comfortable to use. The pen from the Toshiba Exel Write also looks decent, but never tested it personally. The classic pen from the HP laptops is also "good enough", but it's not compatible.
The Lenovo Tab 2 was quite similar, but the responsiveness of Win8 in general (compared to the Note) makes a lot of difference. The Tab 2 is actually much more close to what could replace paper.
Both of these tablets also unfortunately lack tilt sensors, which would be nice to have for an artist. Like I said previously, I also own a couple of Wacom drawing tablets (intuos 5, several pens, a bamboo touch large, etc). If you have ever drew, you know that controlling pressure alone is not enough, tilt is very important. Nobody seem to have exploited the axial rotation yet, which I use a lot to control stroke size in addition to tilt while drawing lines with a soft pencil.
My biggest put-off tough is still the glossy screen. Whereas I can doodle anywhere with paper, in any position; I had to slightly tilt the tablet to get the office light reflection off my eyes in so many cases.
I'll stick with my notebook and Pilot DR 0.3 for some more months before re-evaluating again..
While it may not be mechanically pressure sensitive, Paper has a really smart algorithm for drawing pressure. It's not a 100% substitute but it's noticeably better than the majority of sketching apps - stylus or not.
Pencil looks really cool!! but that video made my stomach turn a bit. As someone who used to edit videos, I can't image working on that, I would have puked for sure.
The thing is the Android market is much bigger. Maybe history will repeat itself?
* Company makes a great innovative product on iOS
* Competitor gets to Android first, embracing the platform
* Company finally releases an half-assed Android port with iOS look and useless back buttons while Competitor is already established on Android
=> After the Android launch failure, Company publishes numbers comparing iOS and Android sales and claim "See, no profit to be done on Android!"
The number of android devices is much bigger but because most of those devices are at the extreme low end, especially in tablets, the market for Android software and accessories is much smaller.
Has this happened? It does make sense to me and seems like a good opportunity for a competitor but I can't think of a case where a very popular iOS app lost out to an android alternative.
Didn't they just raise a $15m series A funding round?
I don't think this is to do with limited resources, I suspect the real reason is around fragmentation and whether / where the market is for Android. Fragmentation is a real issue and most of the things being done to improve it don't feel like they'd help an app like Paper where I suspect that they're doing some fairly low level things to get it to behave the way it does.
That applies doubly for Pencil - do they really want to try and get their hardware to work with every shitty bluetooth stack on every cheap Android tablet? It the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was selling by the bucket you could see why that might be an appealing market, but that's very different to the Android tablet market. They're only supporting five out of the seven iPads that have been made...
Fuck 'em. Someone should clone Paper on Android and take all the market share before the original developers port it. If this happens with enough iOS-only apps, the developers will start learning.
Learn that there is a much bigger market out there than the hipsters and Apple fanbois using iOS devices. The first step might be to spend some time outside San Francisco and wear looser jeans.
A guy politely telling the posters that the company is focused on iOS, but offering a job opportunity to someone to port to Android? That seems completely positive to me.
notice he isn't offering a job to work on an android port. He is offering a job to a top developer who is up for the challenge. But since there is no budget allocated to it ("there is not specific android job listing"), then this new top developer will work on iOS for awhile.
If you're hired to port a system to a new platform, it may not be a bad idea to spend time working on it on the current platform(s). Especially since iOS <-> Android conversions aren't always straightforward. If they developed it in Objective-C using Apple's supplied libraries for GUI, network IO, etc, they'll be doing less porting and more rewriting. From then on they'll be maintaining two code bases, not just a fork that replaces certain segments with Android specific patches.
Paper is the only "entertainment" app I actually installed on my iPad. (I don't have games, news or social media apps.) On its own, Paper is already a very interesting experience. The content is simple but provides tons of possibilities.
I also own a Wacom stylus that I never use. Pencil seems to solve the main issues of a stylus: being able to rest your palm, to erase easily, and to keep it close at hand (by snapping it to the iPad cover).
It's a perfect example of software / hardware synergy.
What I think is sad about both of these products is that they are tied to specific apps. These closed ecosystems get to be more powerful instead of becoming tools on top of which larger things can be hacked together. I don't blame 53 or Adobe for that: making open hardware with open standard communication is probably incredibly hard, and getting it to interact with a tablet operating system through anything other than your one app is perhaps impossible.
But it's still sad.
With the growing popularity of hardware hacking, it's only natural that developers will start making our own physical tools the same way we write our own software tools. Unix makes this easy by providing abstractions like pipes, sockets, etc. for getting small programs to work together using common interfaces.
What are the OS-level abstractions that will make it easier to build, combine, and reuse our own hardware tools? The current methods for using device drivers, detecting wireless devices, or sharing them across a network are not very open to reuse and sharing.
What is the way forward where we can use something like this pencil with its smart palm rejection and erase, hack together our own physical drafting tool, and plug them both in to existing software by writing a little adapter?
It makes me wonder whether we need to go back and steal some of the bits of plan9/inferno: a single abstraction around sharing both data and devices, a natural way to multiplex input and output streams, and transparent network sharing of everything.
One of the most insightful comments I've read on HN. Love your idea of taking the Unix approach to hardware - don't know enough about hardware hacking to know if that's doable but I like the idea!
The current trends in mobile apps, and smartphones pushed such "silos" of functionalities not open to other devices, forget hacking. It's time for someone to develop an open source hardware and make all the protocol open, and maybe call it "finger"..
Edit: on the other side, we have Rasperry, Arduino etc..
Why would you even say that? It makes no business sense for them to disallow competitors with their eventual SDK because they will still be selling much more expensive hardware to those people.
With an SDK they can only sell more products, whether that is apps, hardware, or both.
Where they should limit their SDK use is in branding — they probably wouldn't want poor quality or badly designed apps advertising (or even using) the Pencil SDK. It would reflect badly on their product. So they need to maintain control in those cases.
They shouldn't allow "any kind of app." They should allow "any kind of app that meets their standards for quality."
the older and more experienced I get I increasingly see that pattern: those who don't really know/understand Unix, vi or Lisp seem doomed to reinvent them, typically poorly, more expensively, more convolutedly, more bureaucratically/monopolistically, etc. Not to say they're perfect in all ways, or 'complete', only that I've lost track of the number of times where someone went with a much more complicated/expensive/indirect/expensive solution when they would have been better off with something provided/encouraged or exemplified by the patterns of Unix, vi or Lisp.
>>What I think is sad about both of these products is that they are tied to specific apps. These closed ecosystems get to be more powerful instead of becoming tools on top of which larger things can be hacked together.
There are a number of high-end stylus makers that offer app developers SDK integration with their tools:
And many drawing apps have taken advantage of them, such as the professional-level Procreate app, which allows one to use any of the pressure-sensitive styli listed above interchangeably.
I understand this, but it doesn't solve the problem. Imagine if someone said: "the developers of grep have come out with an SDK so that other text-oriented programs can integrate text matching!" The idea of grep-as-library is great, but it doesn't replace having pipes so that you can use grep with arbitrary programs, most of which have no idea they're being used with grep.
To build larger abstractions on top of these things, we need looser coupling. I want to draw and erase with Pencil, but use a manual dial to set the pressure because I do very precise architectural drawings. I want to draw with Pencil but use Mighty to make my lines snap to a grid and some other French Curve thing I hacked together with some dials for snapping to curves. I want to use two Pencils at once on two separate iPads and draw together with someone. I want my LeapMotion to understand my hand gestures to rotate data in an Excel pivot table and project it into a graph.
Yes, I want crazy things. But abstractions work to build crazy, unexpected text-oriented programs in Unix. So what are the abstractions we need to build arbitrary crazy programs with UIs and hardware peripherals?
Yes, this is like the old DOS days where e.g., your games had to be programmed with your specific make of sound card or you would have no sound (or PC speaker only). What we need is an OS-level API that allows apps to be mostly agnostic about what device is giving the input. And device manufacturers won't need to release app integration SDKs -- just code the OS driver.
Many OS's/PC's can even get laptop trackpads right, and we've been making those for over a decade: and shipping tens of millions. Apple gets it right, because they write their own drivers and OS.
I don't have high hopes for abstractions on pressure-sensitive styli.
Surface already comes with Wacom's digitizer technology so you can get pressure sensitivity and all that good stuff. You probably just need to buy the stylus.
Sketchbook Pro is a desktop-only app; you are probably thinking of the metro version of Sketchbook Express.
Microsoft's own Fresh Paint app is another one that could benefit from this. One thing to note is that all of the Bluetooth styli released so far on iOS are exclusive to Apple's platform. An exception is Hex JaJa, which is cross-platform between iOS and Android, but it's not a Bluetooth stylus either - it utilises high-pitch sounds delivered via microphone.
Yes, I was simply saying it'd be nice to use this stylus on Windows with Photoshop because of its physical/aesthetic characteristics. It doesn't add much technically over the Wacom stylus, might even be slightly inferior, but it will feel different in the hand.
I hope Notability takes advantage of this. I'm a scientist and I use my iPad and Notability to take notes on research articles. I would love to use Pencil's features for this.
On a separate note, I can't believe the poor quality of apps available to scientists. Papers, the citation manager, can't run a release to save their lives, is expensive, and not impressive. I use it because it's better compared to the rest, but still not great software. Their iPad note taking is horrible compared to notability, so my PDFs are scattered between the two apps. It's a giant mess and waste of time I rather spend on research.
The obvious choice is procreate! I was a studiopaint die hard, now I only draw in my freetime (which is much better), and settled on mypaint a few years ago.
I don't own a tablet yet. But procreate, Paper, and the various stylus available are now very tempting.
I am just as happy now to watch the ipad market undertake the design market, as OS9 and NT did against IRIX. Watch us do more with more accessible consumer tech.
I wonder if the eraser could be used in more complex (if less elegant) apps such as AutoDesk Sketchbook or ProCreate to invoke a menu instead of erasing.
I too was fooled by this line, I did a CTRL+F for iPad on the page and nothing came up so I thought it must be a joke... then I saw the apple app of the year logo and got confused...
Wait -- you set up an entire system of metaphor, and then the most fundamentally associated of these doesn't work together? Even with the beautiful product videos to convince me of how well this skeuomorphism will complete me? I mean, not to be a naysayer, but you must have had interoperability in mind. Right?
(or is it actually truly an echo of an xkcd joke here?)
Napoleon is a really neat marriage of software and hardware. It's one of those rare things that's both new and familiar.
Mighty, meanwhile, he actually described as "cloud pen". Please stop. I need a great pen for a tablet. I don't need it dependent on your hosted services. It's driving me crazy how the cloud, an enabling technology, is being crammed down our throats as a feature in and of itself.
While it is not dependent on the cloud, it does leverage it to do things such as copy and paste between apps / tablets, and storage of assets for the pen.
That's full blown derp. Computers managed to do inter app copy and paste for how many decades before anyone though it would be sensible to send local data over the internet to another app on the same device?
It's pretty natural in a new niche for there to be experimenting before it settles down to a standard. Either the OS makers pick it up and we get standard API's in Android and iOS, or someone organizes a standards effort for the vendors to get behind. But standards committees are slow and negotiating a new standard isn't what you do when you're trying to ship 1.0.
Hardware abstraction is like the Holy Grail in the test and measurement world. Things like the IVI have been implemented but have not gained traction. Once you have a feature that is slightly different than other instruments what do you do? Least common denominator in feature set has been the solution so far. Not saying a way for OS-level abstractions isn't bad, but there are niche areas in computing that have tried and failed at solving this problem.
If you really care about a stylus on a tablet, a tablet with a real digitizer seems to be a much better choice -- and there are some good, reasonably priced non-Apple options out there like Samsung's Note series of products, the Surface Pro, Thinkpad Tablet 2, etc.
It's not that there are no comparable products - there are. It's more that I thought this particular implementation, at this price, looked really interesting.
Paper is one of my favorite app on ipad. Pencil looks innovative and promising . But I was using the app effectively with stylus, also palm detection is something which can be done at application level.
The web site misses one obvious sentence: "Pencil is a ...". I spent 60 seconds on the web site, did not understand what the heck is this thing, and closed the web site. Will never open again I guess.
Videos (normally) run in realtime and unless you want to miss something by skipping, you have to watch from start to finish - ie: in the video creator's timeframe.
Maybe I'm a control freak, but I want to scan a few paragraphs at a speed that suits me rather than be 'forced' to sit through a promo video from end-to-end.
It's the same reason why I'd rather read a tech article than listen to a podcast.
Maybe I'm stupidly jaded, and it's one of the things that has steadily pushed me out of the Apple ecosystem, but this trend for overly emotional marketing of stuff, especially in the hipster end of the market, grates enormously. This is like a sort of tech-etsy.
It's got to the point I can't actually take products like this seriously without getting annoyed by them going on about artisanal wood carvings. Like the owning of the object itself is more important than what you're supposed to do with it . . .
I must say the video is most definitely over emotional no to mention it made me sea sick with the over use of shaking. The product looks great and interesting.
>It's got to the point I can't actually take products like this seriously without getting annoyed by them going on about artisanal wood carvings. Like the owning of the object itself is more important than what you're supposed to do with it . . .
i agree with you on your point but it also has upsides, design was forgotten and every electronic device we owned was either matt black or white (think of all the VCR's, home audio, laptops). So now that a sense of design has returned we rebel against it 'being' hipster. Its a delicate balance i guess.
This is the big differentiation, for me. Good design does speak for itself. Marketing bullshit ("An artisanally crafted tool"-these are most certainly not handmade, it's just bullshit) just cheapens the whole thing. It's like explaining the punchline to your joke. Copy like this just ruins a lot of the design for me. Marketing copy hyperbole has been a problem since the 60's. After 50 years it's gotten to where marketing copy is essentially meaningless.
I disagree that there was ever a lack of sense of design - apart perhaps from the humble PC. Home audio and VCRs were black because it was "cool", not because the designers couldn't be bothered.
Even in the world of computing there was design before the iPhone came out - the Silicon Graphics workstations particularly spring to mind. Lenovo/IBM laptops have always had a very strong design - albeit not the graceful/sleek brushed metal of a modern Apple product.
I agree. Much of the copy on that page is simply comical. For instance, the marketing describes the Bluetooth pairing process as "as easy as falling in love."
I don't understand how companies can publish copy that is this absurd and expect people to do anything but laugh at them.
I sort of thought that for a moment too. But then I realised that this was HN so they're likely actually selling some kind of technology that I'm too uncool to know about. So they're talking about "Pencil" and "Paper" not pencil and paper as I understand it. Of course with their super cool, new age design website, actually finding out what they're talking about requires watching a video or something. Simply stating what something is and how it fits with pre-existing things is far too uncool.
From what little I know about Bluetooth LE, pairing is radically simplified - there's even a "Just Works" mode for app-level communication without pairing.
Most marketing isn't targeted at the niche of crotchety, critical, cynical HN readers. I would guess the majority of the greater Apple demographic would hardly bat an eye at the copy.
I'm a software engineer with a CS degree and over 22,000 karma on HN. I actually liked that part! I like things that show wear over time for two reasons. First, it communicates how people use it. The wear patterns create some context, so the object feels familiar as soon as you see it. Second, designing a product to wear well means it can stand up to some abuse and isn't a victim of planned obsolescence.
On the other hand, "as easy as falling in love" is definitely over the top ;)
You got this offended at a nice, aesthetic product? I for one, love it. I like the design. All this fuss about the word "artisan", who cares? It's marketing.
That's the point of marketing. What is silly is being a poseur, like many people on HN, and pretending you are above all this. Different people just respond to different styles of marketing.
Have you never seen or heard of political advertising? Any form of marketing which creates comparisons tries to create a lesser impression of the thing which isn't being peddled.
And my point is that some very smart people work in marketing. People who think they can avoid being influenced are delusional.
I'm just glad they didn't use the word "Gorgeous".
At some point I imagine my son will see his wife doing something beautiful, illuminated by a golden sunrise, and when he tells her she looks gorgeous, she'll say "What? Like a fucking app or something?"
I know this is an unpopular opinion among the tech elite, but I absolutely consider the aesthetics of a device to be as important as what you're supposed to do with it. I'm glad that the electronics / software industry is moving away from the "functional is ugly" paradigm of pre-2000 to a more balanced approach of form balanced with function.
While I agree, its like all marketing (and having a degree in marketing makes me more jaded). It's no different than a group of friends having fun after popping a Coke can, or women being attracted to Axe body spray. They're selling a stylus - and trying to make it an experience, and have failed in my opinion.
And I need to create a filter so the word "artisanal" never appears in my browser
How do you even draw any conclusions about their failing? I am amused that some HN commenters judge the efficiency of the product marketing using their personal take on aesthetic qualities. No-one except the company has the data if their strategy is working. I guess some just like to bash 'hipsters'.
Don't you think they[company team] did user experience tests, A/B copy tests, product tests, customer research? Do you think that they are utterly incompetent and didn't think about the 'over-the-top' factor?
I think if you're feeling really cynical you might believe the company share the opinion I've originally expressed here, but know that they are merely exploiting a very lucrative market through this approach. I happen to believe in this case they are sincere, but sincerely annoying :).
For those shopping for a Pencil type device, their site might be really effective.
In my opinion they have failed at creating an experience, it just comes off as ridiculous - marketing a stylus like this. I might still buy the device if I ever needed a quality stylus, it's interesting, it's just pretentious marketing. So product may not be a fail, but artisanal positioning is.
I thought this was some sort of parody until I saw the electronic guts near the end. A pencil made of wood with an eraser that writes on paper. I didn't realize it was a "Pencil" that writes on "Paper".
> Like the owning of the object itself is more important than what you're supposed to do with it
Welcome to the world of consumerism. Where we've long produced more than we need and without manufactured desire the high-gear economy would collapse. Companies can't market products anymore cause we all have too much. Instead the market "an experience".
Pencil seems like an fairly interesting idea, but it's priced in a really odd way. The $50 price point puts it well out of reach consumer and hobbyist users. Despite this, Pencil and Paper are not as robust as, nor ate they priced comparably to, professional digital drawing tools like Wacom's system.
Pencil precludes the casual demographic who just wants to doodle in their free time or take notes with its high price, but does not cater to the group of elite professionals who would be willing to cough up a substantial amount of money for drawing tools.
I would argue that it is. What portion of iPad owners have ever spent any money on software or peripheral devices? Probably less than half. Now, what portion of them would be willing to shell out $50 for a stylus? I just can't imagine that a non-negligible proportion of iPad owners would be willing to spend that much on an accessory.
Also keep in mind that the current price point is "introductory" and will increase in the future.
Selling high-end accessories to Apple users is an existing market. There's whole companies focused on that, for instance twelve south (http://twelvesouth.com/).
Artist equipment is very expensive, and $50 is less than you'll pay for a decent water color brush. The last one I got was about twice that expensive, and I don't even use it anymore. I use Paper. If it works as advertised, Pencil is a steal.
The gigantic tip and the lack of pressure sensitivity guarantees that this stylus won't work any better than the ones you can buy from amazon for a dollar.
It sure looks like its well made, but take a look at the end of it and explain to me how writing/drawing with it isn't going to be a horrible experience?
Now, what portion of them would be willing to shell out $50 for a stylus?
This is an irrelevant question, because most iPad owners would not spend even a single dollar on a stylus. A better question to ask is what percentage of iPad owners would spend, say, $20 on a stylus but not $50? I suspect that the $20 to $50 jump is not that large for most people who are actually willing to pay for a stylus.
How about the other $829 it would cost me to replace my 64GB iPad 2 with 3G? It's a niche product. I have a $10 stylus that works well enough with the 2. If I wanted a real drawing solution, I'd look at something with an actual WACOM digitiser, like a Surface Pro or similar.
Anecdote: I've paid more than 100$ in styluses for the ipad just to find the one that would work good enough for note taking. precision would be great, but it's really speed and reliability (your letters are not skipped when writing too fast or too angled). If this products clears this too points better than the other styluses, I'd fork the 50$ and forget about real pencils and papers for the rest of my life (until the battery runs out, the Paper app crashes and lot of other likely things)
Did you find one you're satisfied with for note taking?
There are a few that look promising in the $20-30 range (Adonit Jot Pro, Musemee Notier V2, etc) and $90-100 range (Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus, Adonit Jot Touch 4, etc), where the more expensive ones are pressure sensitive.
Writing small print quickly and small, precise diagrams seem enough different from illustration and drawing that it is difficult to tell from the descriptions which products would work well.
Anyone use a Galaxy Note day to day to take notes in meetings? Half my notes are diagrams and sketches; I don't understand why reviewers always gloss over the stylus as unnecessary and quote (a wrong) Steve Jobs.
I disagree. The price point is perfect. Not overly expensive, but not "cheap". $50 is in the perfect range where you can get one as a gift for any family member.
I'd never buy one, mainly because my handwriting is atrocious and I'm not anything close to an artist. That said, I can think of a bunch of people that would love this.
Did an artisan craft it? No, it looks to me mass-manufactured to spec by someone or something who doesn't have a say in its design or the ability to individualize it. You mean "made of wood," but that's the most you can squeeze out. Please don't try to steal the thunder of actual artisans.
> "unique built-in eraser"
> "unique sensor lets you flip Pencil to erase"
Yeah, the crappy Wacom knockoff I bought in 1998 had the same thing. Wacoms have the same thing. If you are like all the other, most popular, long-existing things, you are not a unique thing.
If they're delusional about this, what else are they delusional about? Why would I spend money to support hubris? Because I'll have some minor extension of my abilities within a double-walled garden?
While I don't agree with the comment you've replied to, I equally don't agree with your comment. Why should someone not comment on HN if their opinion is not representative of the majority of users on HN? They should be free to express their opinion, even if the majority of people don't agree with it.
No, it's that it's easy/common to install apps from places other than Google Play. Sure there's a closed market, but the development platform is more-or-less open.
Huh? All you have to do is toggle a setting and you can install apps from anywhere on an android phone. They could be from some random website or even from a dirty usb flash drive you found in some back alley in Jakarta.
This is monumentally different from the state of things with iOS.
I think they're selling this as a product for tablets. I haven't seen a capacitive stylus for tablets that supports erasing from the other side. I believe they're taking the type of product that has existed with Wacom-type tablets for a while and bringing it to the portable capacitive tablet world, with a tablet many consumers -- including many artists -- already own.
Actually I went and did some searching and even found a few roundups of dozens of styli and didn't find any with an eraser for iPads/regular Android devices. So I think you're right.
They aren't taking the type of product that has existed with Wacom type tablets and bringing it to the portable capacitive world. This is going to be terrible in comparison.
Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon.
>> Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon.
Which is why I think Apple needs to offer a version of the iPad with a Wacom-style digitizer.
Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation, but it doesn't apply for a lot of other use cases, including the ones that Pencil is trying to address.
> Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation
I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. Jobs' stylus ban did serve as a useful forcing device: with a stylus available, pre-iPhone developers of touch UIs tended to fall back to producing bad ports of the WIMP concept, complete with buttons of minute size. But at the same time it would certainly have been possible to produce a good smartphone/tablet UI that was stylus-enabled. In fact I think you could, for example, port the original iPhone's UI to a stylus-only basis fairly smoothly. You'd need a couple of extra physical buttons for call accept/reject and other instant-response actions, and you'd need some alternatives for the few places where two-finger pinch/spread gestures are really important, but otherwise it would be a pretty straightforward port with, I think, a very usable result: only slightly less appealing than the finger-touch original. Overall it seems pretty similar to Jobs' ban on cursor keys on the original Macintosh, which probably helped make early Macintosh software more Mac-native but was rolled back without difficulty later.
Agreed that the lack of proper stylus support is an increasingly glaring lack in the iPhone/iPad line, the largest iPads in particular.
I've used one that worked like a pen. It had a small plastic disk at the tip that swivelled so it would keep contact and not slip. I never found out who made them though. It didn't feel like a giant cumbersome crayon though.
I've used one of those and I found it to be an equally terrible experience. Not sure if they fixed them, but the first few generations of that product left scratches on the screen.
It's a marketing page. They took an existing product, and (assuming it works, which is a safe assumption based on their other products) made it simple and beautiful. Most successful companies do this.
You don't have to buy it. I use Paper, though, and I can't wait to get my Pencil in the mail.
I don't think they lied. Like someone said below, "artisanal" is used for everything now. It's become more of a marketing term. It may not be right, but don't blame 53 for this.
> "artisanal" is used for everything now. It's become more of a marketing term.
I don't think these 2 concepts are unrelated, nor do I believe one excuses the other.
> It may not be right, but don't blame 53 for this.
I disagree. I don't care if a million other companies are doing it, if it's incorrect then it is still incorrect, whether they were the first or the thousandth.
That's like saying don't hate the player, hate the game. Fuck that. Every person who writes marketing copy like this is partially responsible for creating the sea of cognitive bullshit we all have to wade through every day. It's gross.
Artisanal, Reluctant Branding Pioneer, Dies at Age 474
He is survived by his wife, Organic, and their two small boys, Natural and Green, as well as his cousin Hipster, though the two had fallen out in the '70s and were no longer on speaking terms.
While marketing is not an excuse for incorrect claims, any text on a salespage is assumed to be copy. Copywriting by definition, is persuasive (biased) and meant to influence you to buy the product. I think this sales page is pretty good.
In the age of plastic, wood becomes unique and interesting. I'd love to see more components made with a beautiful wood casing rather than unfriendly plastic.
It's marketing. They are going after the Apple iPad crowd.
This type of marketing speaks to that crowd as its similar to Apple's.
Most people that have an iPad and want to do writing on it, have likely gone through at least a couple of stylus's or even more to find one that works well for their needs.
I would say I am one of these people so I find this product useful. Will I buy it? Don't know yet but the marketing is effective for their market.
Initially I thought it was a simple parody piece "pencil" "paper" ... har-har.
Wasn't until I saw the component break down image that I realised it was for an actual product.
Completely agree that "artisanally crafted" means that an actual person manually engaged with the item to create a unique form. If it was cut by a computer running a machine then it definitely doesn't count.
The video is a brilliant piece of marketing - they are selling not the product called 'pencil', but the life-style/idea of a genuis artisan. Buying the product will make you become what you've always wanted - creative, expressive, artsy.
It uses the same tactics as apple marketing copywriting - don't sell the product, sell the life-style the product implies. I bet it's working, because i also felt great watching the video.
Or perhaps i m now overly cynical about all marketing.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadSince it's Bluetooth it seems to be a great way to get probably close to 100% accurate palm detection which has always been the most annoying part of stylus usage on iPad for me. Genius.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpftPSuXe4
Its rather like the Winklevoss twins - if Microsoft could have invented the iPad, they would have invented the iPad.
The question is really how much of what leaked was functional versus what they hoped it was going to do.
Regardless, styluses seem to be one of the few tablet accessories that you can buy in almost any electronics store except an Apple store.
I thought this would be some kind of parody at first...
Naming their products on such a broad term effectively establishes them as the "category killer" -- a competitor will never be able to find a name that's more effective[1].
[1]: http://www.igorinternational.com/process/silk-naming-consume...
Then I realized that they were actually serious.
And yes, I also had a hard time telling if they capitalized Pencil and Paper just to parody apps and products overriding common words, or if there really was something behind.
I am on a phone so I skipped the video, and it would have really helped to have a big 'this is a bluetooth accessory for your phone/tablet/computer'. Because I am genuinly intersted in the product, it's really something I've been waiting for a long time, but the 'parody' feeling hasn't quite faded yet.
It's unfortunate that Apple is so devoted to purely-consumer hardware and that other companies lack Apple's dedication to quality. The Galaxy Note's hardware makes this kind of system look like a children's toy... but then you're stuck with Samsung software.
The Galaxy Note 10 requires some "training" to use, as the pen is not as responsive or sensible as a Wacom Intuos tablet, and the Samsung apps simply suck (Papyrus is the only Android drawing app I would actually consider). I write pretty fast, and I will definitely not slow down for inferior technology.
The pen is also ridiculously small, which becomes a pain to use after a while. The good thing is that you can have several Wacom-compatibile pens that you can "steal" from other brands. I opted for a Toshiba tablet pen (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Toshiba-GENUINE-Stylus-Tablet-PC-Pen...) because is much more comfortable to use. The pen from the Toshiba Exel Write also looks decent, but never tested it personally. The classic pen from the HP laptops is also "good enough", but it's not compatible.
The Lenovo Tab 2 was quite similar, but the responsiveness of Win8 in general (compared to the Note) makes a lot of difference. The Tab 2 is actually much more close to what could replace paper.
Both of these tablets also unfortunately lack tilt sensors, which would be nice to have for an artist. Like I said previously, I also own a couple of Wacom drawing tablets (intuos 5, several pens, a bamboo touch large, etc). If you have ever drew, you know that controlling pressure alone is not enough, tilt is very important. Nobody seem to have exploited the axial rotation yet, which I use a lot to control stroke size in addition to tilt while drawing lines with a soft pencil.
My biggest put-off tough is still the glossy screen. Whereas I can doodle anywhere with paper, in any position; I had to slightly tilt the tablet to get the office light reflection off my eyes in so many cases.
I'll stick with my notebook and Pilot DR 0.3 for some more months before re-evaluating again..
http://support.fiftythree.com/customer/portal/questions/8218...
* Company makes a great innovative product on iOS * Competitor gets to Android first, embracing the platform * Company finally releases an half-assed Android port with iOS look and useless back buttons while Competitor is already established on Android
=> After the Android launch failure, Company publishes numbers comparing iOS and Android sales and claim "See, no profit to be done on Android!"
I don't think this is to do with limited resources, I suspect the real reason is around fragmentation and whether / where the market is for Android. Fragmentation is a real issue and most of the things being done to improve it don't feel like they'd help an app like Paper where I suspect that they're doing some fairly low level things to get it to behave the way it does.
That applies doubly for Pencil - do they really want to try and get their hardware to work with every shitty bluetooth stack on every cheap Android tablet? It the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was selling by the bucket you could see why that might be an appealing market, but that's very different to the Android tablet market. They're only supporting five out of the seven iPads that have been made...
IMHO a Wacom tablet, costs less than 50$ and you can find them for as low as 20$, is a better alternative (more levels and the stylus is more precise)
I also own a Wacom stylus that I never use. Pencil seems to solve the main issues of a stylus: being able to rest your palm, to erase easily, and to keep it close at hand (by snapping it to the iPad cover).
It's a perfect example of software / hardware synergy.
If you like this, also look at the demo video for Adobe's project Mighty/Napoleon, a pen and drafting tool combo that is pretty incredible: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/17/adobe-xd-mighty-napoleon-...
What I think is sad about both of these products is that they are tied to specific apps. These closed ecosystems get to be more powerful instead of becoming tools on top of which larger things can be hacked together. I don't blame 53 or Adobe for that: making open hardware with open standard communication is probably incredibly hard, and getting it to interact with a tablet operating system through anything other than your one app is perhaps impossible.
But it's still sad.
With the growing popularity of hardware hacking, it's only natural that developers will start making our own physical tools the same way we write our own software tools. Unix makes this easy by providing abstractions like pipes, sockets, etc. for getting small programs to work together using common interfaces.
What are the OS-level abstractions that will make it easier to build, combine, and reuse our own hardware tools? The current methods for using device drivers, detecting wireless devices, or sharing them across a network are not very open to reuse and sharing.
What is the way forward where we can use something like this pencil with its smart palm rejection and erase, hack together our own physical drafting tool, and plug them both in to existing software by writing a little adapter?
It makes me wonder whether we need to go back and steal some of the bits of plan9/inferno: a single abstraction around sharing both data and devices, a natural way to multiplex input and output streams, and transparent network sharing of everything.
Edit: on the other side, we have Rasperry, Arduino etc..
You should expect to hear more around this when Mighty ships.
(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).
http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/19/fiftythree-pencil/
With an SDK they can only sell more products, whether that is apps, hardware, or both.
Where they should limit their SDK use is in branding — they probably wouldn't want poor quality or badly designed apps advertising (or even using) the Pencil SDK. It would reflect badly on their product. So they need to maintain control in those cases.
They shouldn't allow "any kind of app." They should allow "any kind of app that meets their standards for quality."
There are a number of high-end stylus makers that offer app developers SDK integration with their tools:
https://github.com/Adonit/JotTouchSDK http://www.tenonedesign.com/t1pogomanager.php http://www.hex3.co/pages/developers http://us.wacom.com/en/developerrelations/ios
And many drawing apps have taken advantage of them, such as the professional-level Procreate app, which allows one to use any of the pressure-sensitive styli listed above interchangeably.
To build larger abstractions on top of these things, we need looser coupling. I want to draw and erase with Pencil, but use a manual dial to set the pressure because I do very precise architectural drawings. I want to draw with Pencil but use Mighty to make my lines snap to a grid and some other French Curve thing I hacked together with some dials for snapping to curves. I want to use two Pencils at once on two separate iPads and draw together with someone. I want my LeapMotion to understand my hand gestures to rotate data in an Excel pivot table and project it into a graph.
Yes, I want crazy things. But abstractions work to build crazy, unexpected text-oriented programs in Unix. So what are the abstractions we need to build arbitrary crazy programs with UIs and hardware peripherals?
I don't have high hopes for abstractions on pressure-sensitive styli.
business AT fiftythree DOT com
Microsoft's own Fresh Paint app is another one that could benefit from this. One thing to note is that all of the Bluetooth styli released so far on iOS are exclusive to Apple's platform. An exception is Hex JaJa, which is cross-platform between iOS and Android, but it's not a Bluetooth stylus either - it utilises high-pitch sounds delivered via microphone.
On a separate note, I can't believe the poor quality of apps available to scientists. Papers, the citation manager, can't run a release to save their lives, is expensive, and not impressive. I use it because it's better compared to the rest, but still not great software. Their iPad note taking is horrible compared to notability, so my PDFs are scattered between the two apps. It's a giant mess and waste of time I rather spend on research.
I don't own a tablet yet. But procreate, Paper, and the various stylus available are now very tempting.
I am just as happy now to watch the ipad market undertake the design market, as OS9 and NT did against IRIX. Watch us do more with more accessible consumer tech.
Unclench, already.
I can't help it, this makes me think of joke engineering documentation for everyday items.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/9/
Tech quote of the freaking year.
(or is it actually truly an echo of an xkcd joke here?)
Mighty, meanwhile, he actually described as "cloud pen". Please stop. I need a great pen for a tablet. I don't need it dependent on your hosted services. It's driving me crazy how the cloud, an enabling technology, is being crammed down our throats as a feature in and of itself.
(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).
The NSA wins again.
crosses fingers
Oh, bugger. It's Apple-only.
If you really care about a stylus on a tablet, a tablet with a real digitizer seems to be a much better choice -- and there are some good, reasonably priced non-Apple options out there like Samsung's Note series of products, the Surface Pro, Thinkpad Tablet 2, etc.
[1] http://shop.fiftythree.com/ (System Requirements at the bottom)
Maybe I'm a control freak, but I want to scan a few paragraphs at a speed that suits me rather than be 'forced' to sit through a promo video from end-to-end.
It's the same reason why I'd rather read a tech article than listen to a podcast.
"Pencil is the most natural and expressive tool for getting ideas on Paper"
iPad + Pencil + App = most expensive expression tool I know too !
It's got to the point I can't actually take products like this seriously without getting annoyed by them going on about artisanal wood carvings. Like the owning of the object itself is more important than what you're supposed to do with it . . .
>It's got to the point I can't actually take products like this seriously without getting annoyed by them going on about artisanal wood carvings. Like the owning of the object itself is more important than what you're supposed to do with it . . .
i agree with you on your point but it also has upsides, design was forgotten and every electronic device we owned was either matt black or white (think of all the VCR's, home audio, laptops). So now that a sense of design has returned we rebel against it 'being' hipster. Its a delicate balance i guess.
Even in the world of computing there was design before the iPhone came out - the Silicon Graphics workstations particularly spring to mind. Lenovo/IBM laptops have always had a very strong design - albeit not the graceful/sleek brushed metal of a modern Apple product.
I don't understand how companies can publish copy that is this absurd and expect people to do anything but laugh at them.
On the other hand, "as easy as falling in love" is definitely over the top ;)
so making it out of wood, which chip easily, is designing it to wear well?
The brushed aluminium is probably better than the wood.
I care.
My point is that if you're letting a marketing decision come between you and a great product, you're shortchanging yourself.
And my point is that some very smart people work in marketing. People who think they can avoid being influenced are delusional.
At some point I imagine my son will see his wife doing something beautiful, illuminated by a golden sunrise, and when he tells her she looks gorgeous, she'll say "What? Like a fucking app or something?"
And I need to create a filter so the word "artisanal" never appears in my browser
Don't you think they[company team] did user experience tests, A/B copy tests, product tests, customer research? Do you think that they are utterly incompetent and didn't think about the 'over-the-top' factor?
In my opinion they have failed at creating an experience, it just comes off as ridiculous - marketing a stylus like this. I might still buy the device if I ever needed a quality stylus, it's interesting, it's just pretentious marketing. So product may not be a fail, but artisanal positioning is.
Welcome to the world of consumerism. Where we've long produced more than we need and without manufactured desire the high-gear economy would collapse. Companies can't market products anymore cause we all have too much. Instead the market "an experience".
Safe to say this is the only one that will be supported.
Pencil precludes the casual demographic who just wants to doodle in their free time or take notes with its high price, but does not cater to the group of elite professionals who would be willing to cough up a substantial amount of money for drawing tools.
I just don't understand who this is for.
Also keep in mind that the current price point is "introductory" and will increase in the future.
It sure looks like its well made, but take a look at the end of it and explain to me how writing/drawing with it isn't going to be a horrible experience?
This is an irrelevant question, because most iPad owners would not spend even a single dollar on a stylus. A better question to ask is what percentage of iPad owners would spend, say, $20 on a stylus but not $50? I suspect that the $20 to $50 jump is not that large for most people who are actually willing to pay for a stylus.
There are a few that look promising in the $20-30 range (Adonit Jot Pro, Musemee Notier V2, etc) and $90-100 range (Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus, Adonit Jot Touch 4, etc), where the more expensive ones are pressure sensitive.
Writing small print quickly and small, precise diagrams seem enough different from illustration and drawing that it is difficult to tell from the descriptions which products would work well.
Oddly enough, the expensive styluses seem to be cheaper than buying a moleskine notebook every month or so at $15+ a pop.
Anyone use a Galaxy Note day to day to take notes in meetings? Half my notes are diagrams and sketches; I don't understand why reviewers always gloss over the stylus as unnecessary and quote (a wrong) Steve Jobs.
I'd never buy one, mainly because my handwriting is atrocious and I'm not anything close to an artist. That said, I can think of a bunch of people that would love this.
Did an artisan craft it? No, it looks to me mass-manufactured to spec by someone or something who doesn't have a say in its design or the ability to individualize it. You mean "made of wood," but that's the most you can squeeze out. Please don't try to steal the thunder of actual artisans.
> "unique built-in eraser" > "unique sensor lets you flip Pencil to erase"
Yeah, the crappy Wacom knockoff I bought in 1998 had the same thing. Wacoms have the same thing. If you are like all the other, most popular, long-existing things, you are not a unique thing.
If they're delusional about this, what else are they delusional about? Why would I spend money to support hubris? Because I'll have some minor extension of my abilities within a double-walled garden?
Aim higher.
This is monumentally different from the state of things with iOS.
That's dangerous.
/just sayin'
That being said, the carpenter pencil shape is not one I'm overly fond of.
Those styluses are also about 1/2 the price of Pencil.
Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon.
Which is why I think Apple needs to offer a version of the iPad with a Wacom-style digitizer.
Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation, but it doesn't apply for a lot of other use cases, including the ones that Pencil is trying to address.
I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. Jobs' stylus ban did serve as a useful forcing device: with a stylus available, pre-iPhone developers of touch UIs tended to fall back to producing bad ports of the WIMP concept, complete with buttons of minute size. But at the same time it would certainly have been possible to produce a good smartphone/tablet UI that was stylus-enabled. In fact I think you could, for example, port the original iPhone's UI to a stylus-only basis fairly smoothly. You'd need a couple of extra physical buttons for call accept/reject and other instant-response actions, and you'd need some alternatives for the few places where two-finger pinch/spread gestures are really important, but otherwise it would be a pretty straightforward port with, I think, a very usable result: only slightly less appealing than the finger-touch original. Overall it seems pretty similar to Jobs' ban on cursor keys on the original Macintosh, which probably helped make early Macintosh software more Mac-native but was rolled back without difficulty later.
Agreed that the lack of proper stylus support is an increasingly glaring lack in the iPhone/iPad line, the largest iPads in particular.
I don't disagree, that's why I used "might" as a weasel word.
It's a marketing page. They took an existing product, and (assuming it works, which is a safe assumption based on their other products) made it simple and beautiful. Most successful companies do this.
You don't have to buy it. I use Paper, though, and I can't wait to get my Pencil in the mail.
I don't think these 2 concepts are unrelated, nor do I believe one excuses the other.
> It may not be right, but don't blame 53 for this.
I disagree. I don't care if a million other companies are doing it, if it's incorrect then it is still incorrect, whether they were the first or the thousandth.
He is survived by his wife, Organic, and their two small boys, Natural and Green, as well as his cousin Hipster, though the two had fallen out in the '70s and were no longer on speaking terms.
http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2012/05/artisanal-reluc...
You must be new to planet earth. ;-)
Which product has been simplified? Presumably not a pencil :P
or that the wood will degrade over time too. I don't want wood. I want metal, unbreakable metal.
Please get the joke, please get the joke.
This type of marketing speaks to that crowd as its similar to Apple's.
Most people that have an iPad and want to do writing on it, have likely gone through at least a couple of stylus's or even more to find one that works well for their needs.
I would say I am one of these people so I find this product useful. Will I buy it? Don't know yet but the marketing is effective for their market.
Wasn't until I saw the component break down image that I realised it was for an actual product.
Completely agree that "artisanally crafted" means that an actual person manually engaged with the item to create a unique form. If it was cut by a computer running a machine then it definitely doesn't count.
It uses the same tactics as apple marketing copywriting - don't sell the product, sell the life-style the product implies. I bet it's working, because i also felt great watching the video.
Or perhaps i m now overly cynical about all marketing.