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?
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
>>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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
Pros:
- easy to get started or back into drawing
- easy to sketch UI concepts and send them around
- easy for my daughter to play with
Cons:
- fixed canvas size; you can scale an are a tiny bit but not much
- no layers
- customer support has shown an indifference to existing technogy (with pressure and palm detection) even for the styli they support.
- customer support seems to have a (IMO) arrogance in how they respond to things on the forums.
- including the upgrades makes Paper 2x as expensive vs Procreate which has more drawing fools and the abity to customize and save my own tools.
It was a good app to have and my daughter still uses it. But for my own doodling or quick UI concepts at work I switched to procreate. The wacom creative (http://intuoscreativestylus.wacom.com/en/) stylus was on my Xmas list u until I saw the adobe tool mentioned. I'll be checking that out.
I wonder why so few people complain about the speed.
I tried to use Paper and while I love the results I can get (nice-looking drawings even if you are not artistically inclined), I can't stand the slowness, and the fact that I can't properly dot my i's.
I switched to Upad for all my tech drawings. It works great, and is very responsive. No, my drawings do not look as cool, but at least they get drawn.
My problem with Paper is the undo/rewind function. It really is frustrating to use and often doesn't work as intended. There is a long thread on their forums about it but they insist this is a minority problem and they know best.
I get the feeling that much of the development is focussed on concept over function.
Then there is the price gouging. You can't blend unless you buy their stylus. And their 'active' stylus doesn't even have pressure sensitivity even though they claim they have been developing it for over a year. All you get for your $50 is palm rejection, blending, and a novel eraser functionality.
I think I will stick with my simple Bamboo stylus which I already own and doesn't require charging and lament not being able to blend/smudge.
I also own Bamboo Paper, and Procreate - while I have gripes with Paper's business practice, I can't get the same results with either of the other products. The watercolour, pen, and pencil are superior in Paper. I can't even get an effective watercolour in Procreate at all.
Hmm, that's unfortunate since my biggest use case would be able to have a large canvas that I can move text around on. What's the syncing like? Is there some way I would be able to access my images via a desktop or web interface?
Did anyone else read this at first as a very well executed parody website explaining all the benefits of using traditional paper and pencil? I sniggered when I read "Our adaptive palm rejection instantly knows whether it’s your hand or Pencil touching the page." It took me some time to realize that this was a real product...
Yet another product that expects EVERYONE to own an iPad. W-T-F? Try this. Control + F, search for "ipad". Nothing. Search for "apple", nothing. Search for "android". NO-THING. What's wrong? Is the iPad the definitive standard and everyone is now born with one?
It says "Paper" all over it, and Paper already requires an iPad. Requiring an iPad would be redundant. Edit: Also at the bottom they actually mention Apple once, in tiny print in an image lol
Honestly, I read the whole page and I have still no idea what this is. It says it is a Pencil which works with Paper, both pencil and paper with uppercase letters which seem to indicate that they mean something else then a carpender pencil and a peace of paper to write on, so does the price and that you can load some battery and connect to something unspecified with bluetooth.
Could someone tell me what this is for and why they have a beautiful website which doesn't tell me what the product is for?
It's a bluetooth smart stylus for iOS devices, especially tablets, which integrates with their existing graphic design app "paper".
The reason it's non-trivial and potentially interesting is because it doesn't just rely on the limited resolution of the capacitive touch screens of iDevices, it has its own sensor which improves on that. If it were just an ordinary capacitive stylus it wouldn't have the precision to be very useful for drawing or even hand writing.
Can any artists on HN comment on how useful styli are with tips this thick? I suspect the added thickness is required for capacitive touch screens, but I always thought my fingertip was far too thick for accurately initiating thin lines or dots (e.g. in games like Draw Something). Something like this seems like it would require far less erasing:
For drawing, you can get away with larger tips, but I cannot understand how can people use those soft-rubber tips for capacitive screens, where the center-point of contact is actually moving as you scrub the screen. For comparison, I use a Wacom Intuos 5 large, and I'm already noticing that the pen tilt affects the position of the cursor (a 45' angle moves the point up to 0.5mm in the direction of tilt).
I saw several people taking notes with those pens though, but the note-taking applications offer a large "writing" area where you can write text as big as 4cm in height. I honestly cannot write efficiently at that size.
The "Pencil" here also has such a large tip that clearly covers the area of contact even if you use it with the short side up. I assume you will be able to figure out the point of contact after a while, but I would have chosen a normal pen design, not an "artisan pencil" at all.
The added thickness is to compensate for the fact that the iPad touch screen has a reasonable distance between sensors. You cannot get pixel-perfect accuracy on the iPad touch screen, and a pointed stylus would make that extremely apparent. So instead the trend is for larger tips, to encourage users to bump up their line thicknesses and to obscure the lack of pixel-perfect accuracy. Think marker, not pen.
I have a couple thick-point styli. I hate 'em. I just got a fine-point Adonit Script, which is not without its problems (no pressure sensitivity, not much app support yet) but oh man I can actually DRAW with the damn thing instead of scrawling with a big crayon.
That said I'm still finding myself just reaching for a traditional sketchbook and a cheap pen when I want to do some quick drawing, and opening up the laptop to run Illustrator when I want to do Serious Work.
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 will never understand the stylus-on-capacitive-screen thing. The lag, the limited accuracy, the interpolation of your movements, it's all very opposite to the idea of a stylus as an input. I'm glad others find it useful, but every stylus I've ever used on a capacitive screen has immediately struck me as, to me, worthless.
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.
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.
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.
Does pencil provide any additional drawing resolution or pressure sensitivity? Genuinely curious. Didn't see any mention of those on the site, but I saw a battery required and wondered if that did more than power the eraser.
As someone who has done a decent amount of digital art, this is a far inferior solution to existing Wacom products. Not only are there issues with using such a large "pencil", but the iPad simply doesn't have the ability to differentiate between different levels of pressure like the Intuos or even the much cheaper Bamboo tablets.
Is there anyone who has used one of these who can comment on the amount of lag? The website makes a lot of claims about almost everything except lag. High accuracy (claimed) is nice and all, but it really throws you off if you're drawing a curve and what's showing up on the screen is precisely half a second behind your hand!
Low latency is crucial for a stylus. Absolutely crucial. It's what separates tools from toys.
I like the whole idea of well-crafted products, but in the end this is nothing but a crappy, laggy, low fidelity finger-simulator/crayon. Writing any text with it is probably clumsy, and certainly impossible to do as well as with any other pencil on paper.
Pass. Apple needs to get out something with a proper active digitizer so that all these satellite companies start making nice pens that also work well.
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.
[+] [-] diydsp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sanoli|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dag11|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yapcguy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkoberger|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fidotron|12 years ago|reply
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 . . .
[+] [-] asolove|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wmorein|12 years ago|reply
business AT fiftythree DOT com
[+] [-] toddmorey|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] footpath|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mesh|12 years ago|reply
You should expect to hear more around this when Mighty ships.
(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).
[+] [-] taylodl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminish|12 years ago|reply
Edit: on the other side, we have Rasperry, Arduino etc..
[+] [-] mkramlich|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarcusA|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baumgarn|12 years ago|reply
I thought this would be some kind of parody at first...
[+] [-] hippee-lee|12 years ago|reply
Pros: - easy to get started or back into drawing - easy to sketch UI concepts and send them around - easy for my daughter to play with
Cons: - fixed canvas size; you can scale an are a tiny bit but not much - no layers - customer support has shown an indifference to existing technogy (with pressure and palm detection) even for the styli they support. - customer support seems to have a (IMO) arrogance in how they respond to things on the forums. - including the upgrades makes Paper 2x as expensive vs Procreate which has more drawing fools and the abity to customize and save my own tools.
It was a good app to have and my daughter still uses it. But for my own doodling or quick UI concepts at work I switched to procreate. The wacom creative (http://intuoscreativestylus.wacom.com/en/) stylus was on my Xmas list u until I saw the adobe tool mentioned. I'll be checking that out.
[+] [-] jwr|12 years ago|reply
I tried to use Paper and while I love the results I can get (nice-looking drawings even if you are not artistically inclined), I can't stand the slowness, and the fact that I can't properly dot my i's.
I switched to Upad for all my tech drawings. It works great, and is very responsive. No, my drawings do not look as cool, but at least they get drawn.
[+] [-] monkeynotes|12 years ago|reply
I get the feeling that much of the development is focussed on concept over function.
Then there is the price gouging. You can't blend unless you buy their stylus. And their 'active' stylus doesn't even have pressure sensitivity even though they claim they have been developing it for over a year. All you get for your $50 is palm rejection, blending, and a novel eraser functionality.
I think I will stick with my simple Bamboo stylus which I already own and doesn't require charging and lament not being able to blend/smudge.
I also own Bamboo Paper, and Procreate - while I have gripes with Paper's business practice, I can't get the same results with either of the other products. The watercolour, pen, and pencil are superior in Paper. I can't even get an effective watercolour in Procreate at all.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] d23|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|12 years ago|reply
I understand that you're trying to "highlight the product", but causing nausea in your customer isn't the best way to do that.
[+] [-] a3_nm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omegote|12 years ago|reply
Sick.
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeena|12 years ago|reply
Could someone tell me what this is for and why they have a beautiful website which doesn't tell me what the product is for?
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
The reason it's non-trivial and potentially interesting is because it doesn't just rely on the limited resolution of the capacitive touch screens of iDevices, it has its own sensor which improves on that. If it were just an ordinary capacitive stylus it wouldn't have the precision to be very useful for drawing or even hand writing.
[+] [-] VMG|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deltaqueue|12 years ago|reply
http://www.wacom.com/en/us/everyday/bamboo-stylus-feel-samsu...
*edited for clarity
[+] [-] tenfingers|12 years ago|reply
I saw several people taking notes with those pens though, but the note-taking applications offer a large "writing" area where you can write text as big as 4cm in height. I honestly cannot write efficiently at that size.
The "Pencil" here also has such a large tip that clearly covers the area of contact even if you use it with the short side up. I assume you will be able to figure out the point of contact after a while, but I would have chosen a normal pen design, not an "artisan pencil" at all.
[+] [-] eridius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|12 years ago|reply
That said I'm still finding myself just reaching for a traditional sketchbook and a cheap pen when I want to do some quick drawing, and opening up the laptop to run Illustrator when I want to do Serious Work.
[+] [-] bdegman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruswick|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devindotcom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epaga|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] srik|12 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpftPSuXe4
[+] [-] jcl|12 years ago|reply
Regardless, styluses seem to be one of the few tablet accessories that you can buy in almost any electronics store except an Apple store.
[+] [-] abbot2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warrenmiller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaoma|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beloch|12 years ago|reply
Low latency is crucial for a stylus. Absolutely crucial. It's what separates tools from toys.
[+] [-] celerity|12 years ago|reply
Pass. Apple needs to get out something with a proper active digitizer so that all these satellite companies start making nice pens that also work well.
[+] [-] davb|12 years ago|reply
crosses fingers
Oh, bugger. It's Apple-only.
[+] [-] slantyyz|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] liminal|12 years ago|reply