Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin 2024-06-13 17:41:45 iPadOS "math notes" brings some spreadsheet/Calca mechanics to handwriting:
youtube.com/live/RXeOiIDNNek?si=D0I3FnVdzoCgV8em&t=2790
Oh, and they even added Bret Victor style variable "scrubbing".
(Desktop also got builtin Math Notes, minus handwriting, briefly flashed 51:57 — looks very much like Calca.io / Soulver / NoteCalc etc.?)
So, are we "Magic Ink" yet? (I'm not so much thinking of Bret Victor's essay as Ink&Switch's experiments like inkandswitch.com/inkbase, CrossCut & Untangle ...)
On one hand nothing revolutionary, spreadsheets had much more power for decades.
And yet a solid chunk of useful functionality is starting to move into taken-for-granted "this is just how futuristic paper naturally works" territory 👏.
I expect long term it might make such "what-if" explorations accessible¹ to more people, and more importantly prepare people for more complex interactions on top?
¹ well, once/IF it waters down to lower-end hardware. Good-enough stylus tech remains expensive enough to be niche, not evenly distributed 😞
Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin 2024-06-13 17:51:44 P. S. compared to Math Notes, the main matrix-of-keys screen of the scientific calculator looks painfully chaotic.
There is a whole bunch of complex powers-and-logs things like "3rd root ∛x" — with some duality between the 2 rows yet no explanatory visual metaphor...
Same for whole bunch of trig functions.
And the "Memory Clear / M+ / M- / Memory Recall" buttons are stupidly low-level legacy — a limited interaction with a single hidden register, while they have a visible history of prior calculation results on the left!
Oleksandr Kryvonos 2024-06-14 06:52:37
Good-enough stylus tech remains expensive enough to be niche,
not
evenly distributed
Samsung Tab S6 lite has pretty decent Wacom stylus
Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin 2024-06-14 08:05:52 Sure, it exists, but a simple way to measure it is: when you go buy a device, which fraction of them have a digitizer at all? Slightly varies by form factor, but only a minority.
So there must be non-negligble price and/or screen engineering tradeoffs...
I shopped for a laptop recently, and even knowing my wife could use a backup device with stylus for lectures, I gave up on digitizer models because the only options with the specs wanted for myself were 30% more expensive.
It wont call it "evinly distributed" until majority of devices people already have include some digitizer, and it's just a matter of getting a stylus.
(Capacitive styluses - even with pressure side channel like SonarPen + glove to simulate palm rejection - are just not good enough for significant amount of writing.)
Alex McLean 2024-06-14 14:45:53 I always thought field was well ahead of its time. Prefigured a lot of Bret Victor's demos and future of coding work that followed in 'real world' use.. Happy to see it is still active. Has anyone used it?
