In Defense Of The Stylus

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/in-defense-of-the-stylus/

by aaronbrethorst • 15 years ago

55 30 15 years ago

dporan• 15 years ago

Real, shipping stylus-based computers -- not just mockups or concepts like Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook -- go back to at least the late 1980s, with the GRiDPAD:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/188223/the_long_fail_a_brief_...

Maybe the lack of success has been due to poor implementation, but I wonder whether styluses are just inherently problematic:

1. Truly reliable handwriting recognition always seems to be just over the horizon, and I wonder whether it always will be. Honestly, I often can't read my own handwriting. Sure, you can store handwriting as "ink," aka a bitmap, but that's like choosing a fax as your file format.

2. Switching from stylus to finger to (possibly) keyboard is awkward. You need someplace to put the stylus, and it makes one-handed operation pretty difficult.

That said, I actually think I'd enjoy having a stylus for input sometimes. I hope that someone eventually figures out how to put all the pieces together. (Too bad that Microsoft Courier didn't make it.)

devindotcom• 15 years ago

I've actually been pleasantly surprised by the recognition in Windows 7 and 8. But it needs to be more flexible - who wants to write in a little field? Note-taking should stay rich, it should transcribe in the background, make the text searchable, and keep the layout and such in a bit of simple hidden html or the like.

But yeah switching is a pain. and the interaction vocabulary has to be rewritten for stylus input.

andrewjshults• 15 years ago

Have you tried OneNote? It's the one program that really highlights the benefits of a (pressure sensitive) stylus based tablet. To this date, it's one of the things I miss about my old Toshiba M200. OneNote allows for freeform handwriting, audio recording and transcribes both to make them searchable and copyable. When writing papers and such in college it was great to be able to search for a phrase in either my notes or the lecture and get the full context. The Windows 7 upgrade made the handwriting recognition was rather impressive as well.

Retric• 15 years ago

Stylus adds a lot of accuracy both in where your pointing and how hard your pointing at something. This is great for artists, but unless your creating art getting withing 5 pixels of what you mean is plenty for most interface tasks. So, when job's said how poor styluses are his context was cellphones which nobody uses to create art and using a stylus is painful. In those rare cases where someone actually wants to sketch something out on a cellphone you can zoom in a lot which is not efficient but hey your using a cellphone get over yourself.

As to iPad's the same issues shows up, using a Stylus on top of a screen is less accurate than using a separate tablet, not to mention it's resolution is terrible for creating real art. Sure, it's better than a cellphone, but fingerprinting is plenty for most people's level of artistic talent.

PS: My sister is a graphics artist and she get's sub-pixel accuracy with a cheap qualcom tablet. Covering up part of the immage your working on is reasonable, but when using pen on paper she often rotates the paper to minimize the effect which slows things down with clunky computer controls.

dgurney• 15 years ago

My main problem with the stylus is that it's so easy to lose; who wants to carry around a separate part with their device?

That said, imagine if styluses (styli?) were mass produced and available as ubiquitously and cheaply as pencils. Lose one? No problem, there's another one on the table over there.

In that case, I can see styluses catching on big time, and as noted in the article, their precision would give them huge inherent advantages over fingers.

jbermudes• 15 years ago

It's possible that just as pencils have erasers, that in the future were the stylus more ubiquitous pens might have their opposite side designed to be a touchscreen stylus

suivix• 15 years ago

It's much more likely that there will be almost no pens or styluses.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

The nokia n800 had a little triangular stylus with a holder built into the device. So nothing extra to carry around. It also wouldn't be too tricky to attach the stylus to the device with a wire.

sjs• 15 years ago

Attaching it with a wire limits your movements and has the potential to get tangled. Where does it go when the stylus is tucked away? If it retracts then does it have a button to make it retract, or does it retract automatically causing constant tension while using it?

Stylus slots are not new. All the iPaq-like PDAs had them as well, and people still complained about losing them. I never lost mine but it was a relatively common complaint. (I still have it in fact, tucked away in a drawer in my "smartphone" from 2004[1])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel

wavephorm• 15 years ago

Apple filed a patent a while back for a ballpoint stylus for the iPad. I think we'll be seeing the stylus make a big comeback.

snowwrestler• 15 years ago

About 10 years ago I was working for a consultant and ran a research project on pen-based computing.

We learned that most people who were happy with pen-based computers had gotten them at a steep discount. They felt that the products had shortcomings but that was ok because they were so cheap.

The only two exceptions--pen-based computing products that had found significant success at their MSRP--were Wacom and Palm/Handspring.

The key to the mystery was handwriting recognition. 100% recognition is impossible, even for humans. But while we accept human misses, there is pretty much no tolerance for misses in a computing interface. With a miss, the value of the pen input (speed and natural feel) is lost in the need to correct.

Wacom succeeds because it does not even try to do handwriting recognition.

Palm/Handspring succeeded by inventing new motions for per-letter entry that people had to learn (called Graffiti). This reversed the user expectation: if the recognition failed, many users would assume it was their own fault for not doing the Graffiti entry properly. They wouldn't blame the machine, so their opinion of its value did not suffer.

Styluses are still hugely popular for animators, artists, and some graphic designers. Wacom is still going strong. But any computer that relies on a stylus for text entry is probably doomed to fail.

msutherl• 15 years ago

This is an interesting project to develop external devices that allow new forms of input to existing capacitive touch screens: http://www.spike5000.com/

thesash• 15 years ago

While I agree that the current generation of touch screens are rather superficial, I sincerely doubt that the future of interaction looks anything like a stylus.

For artists and designers, the stylus will be used for many years to come, but for casual, everyday use, it simply isn't user friendly. While it may be natural to draw or write on a screen with a stylus, jabbing at buttons on a screen with a stylus is no more intuitive or natural than jabbing at a screen with a finger, and in many use cases (scrolling, zooming, panning) is much less natural. The case for the stylus becomes even weaker in the face of technology like Siri, which elegantly solves the problem of text input.

The Bret Victor "Rant" mentioned in the article makes the case for exploring more dynamic, tactile, interactive experiences, decidedly not limited to one mode of input like the stylus. I, for one, hope for a future that is much more ambitious than the stylus, with new forms of interaction that combine hands, voice, and beyond. Things like this http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/PneumaticDis... and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x... that truly push the boundaries of human computer interaction.

rafski• 15 years ago

Jobs understood that stylus was a psychological barrier, additional interface between user and screen.

Direct touch gave the biofeedback needed to make operating the device personal. Your touch makes things happen, rather than you touching it with an 8 inch pole.

It seems an irrelevant detail to a logical mind but this was key element to iPhone's success.

There is this good PBS documentary on psychology of marketing. If you don't have the time for the whole thing, fast forward to 0:48 and watch for one minute—it is very representative of the marketing mindset I am talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahw5ODR2Sgs

backprojection• 15 years ago

Depends on what kind of work you're doing.

I'm a grad student in math. If I'm taking notes for a class, I prefer to have my laptop and LaTeX the notes on the fly.

If I'm working on my research, I find working with pen and paper is a psychological help: it's a good interface for working on math. The only problem is that pen and paper is a bad system generally, for a couple of reasons:

1) most of the notes ends up being crap/scratch work, it'd be really nice to be able to copy and paste the good stuff out easily.

2) Paper is heavy, I always have to decide which of my notes to carry around.

3) It's easy to loose your notes.

I'd love to have a tablet with a stylus good enough to write mathematics with.

jerf• 15 years ago

I've had a DS now for a number of years, as have many people, and I observe that I've done an enormous number of things with it that would not have been possible with my big fingers. To the extent nobody sees a use for styli, is that because they are really useless, or because right now every program you use has been optimized for the fact that you're just sort of jabbing at the screen?

By no means should a cell phone require one, but there are vistas opened by styli that we may want to explore after the novelty of "holy cow, tablets! they finally work!" has worn off.

wickedchicken2• 15 years ago

At a company I used to work at, one of the elite hackers used an old Wacom as a mouse exclusively. Wanting to try it out, I dove in and dropped $200 on an Intuos 4 small. Combined with a Das Ultimate Silent, I have a desktop input system that rivals pretty much anything. Using a stylus for desktop computing lets you move things around with rapid speed and precision since the cursor maps directly to what your arm is doing. Scrolling involves a tiny bit more work (although the Intuos has a scroll wheel that works decently well). Another neat thing is the ability to instantly open MyPaint and jot down notes when I need it. It doesn't hurt that my entire desk is jet black :).

Going from a stylus back to a touchpad feels like going from pens to finger paint. Mice feel clunky as well. Try it out!

dnquark2• 15 years ago

The lack of adoption of stylus-based input is very disappointing. I'm always floating in random scraps of paper with notes, derivations, etc. I've always found note-taking, especially when math is involved, much more natural with a pen than with a keyboard. The article does a good job of outlining why that is. I'm not alone; just think of the likely penetration rate of Moleskines among HN readers.

On the other hand, it's ridiculous that the only way to digitize these notes is by scanning, or typing them in, or using linux-unfriendly Livescribe pens that require special paper. For centuries we've interacted with documents using styluses. For doing math, for marking up papers, for scribbling notes in the margins, and for countless other activities it is simply _the_ right tool for the job. People like Steve Jobs declared unilateral war on styluses because they were being used to design suboptimal interfaces. Jobs had a point, but in rejecting the stylus outright, he threw the baby out with the bathwater.

rayiner• 15 years ago

I too use pencil and paper when I really need to "think", but I think for most things a stylus is the wrong sort of input for what you want to do with a portable device.

For consumption tasks, browsing the web, etc, a touch interface is far preferable. For those tasks where touch isn't sufficient, a stylus isn't at all better. A stylus just doesn't work without the tactile response of paper (which the textured Wacom tablets can offer but a portable device can't).

dnquark2• 15 years ago

That hasn't been my experience (I've been using a tablet PC for the last 3 years). With a precise digitizer and good software, stylus-on-screen writing isn't very different from that of pencil on paper. The convenience of permanence/editability/easy sharing vastly outweighs somewhat inferior tactile feel.

6ren• 15 years ago

Is it possible to use a stylus on a capacitive touchscreen? (perhaps by ensuring it has the same capacitance as a finger - a small finger).

I found editing maddening on an iPad because of the inaccuracy. You can roll your finger to adjust the cursor position, and the magnifying window helps, but it's not as good as simple cursor keys (disclaimer I was just trying it out in an apple store, so there may be ways around this problem that I don't know of).

d_r• 15 years ago

You can. For example, this one by Wacom: http://www.amazon.com/Bamboo-Stylus-for-iPad-CS100K/dp/B004V...

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried it yet. Would be interesting to hear others' feedback.)

chc• 15 years ago

Although they make them, I'm pretty sure capacitative screens don't have the kind of precision you want from a stylus.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

I'm dying for an accurate stylus for my iPad. I do too many notes and visual mockups that upi epwant more precise that the big rubber blobs give. I'd be willing to pay $50 for this if it lasts and works as advertised.

No luck so far!

john61• 15 years ago

The smartphone N900 has a very sensitive touch screen and a stylus. Altough it would be possible to live without it, it would be a big regression. People just said ohhh that's so old fashioned. Sinve my phone is not a fashion item but a work horse, I never understood the irrational fashion the drop of the stylus by the fashion industry.

pfraze• 15 years ago

You know what I would like? A tablet with a stylus input for one hand, and a kinect facing up off the left side for the other. I'd write with my right, and hover my left to make small gestures that manipulate the screen space. Drop the stylus, both hands are making gestures.

forgottenpaswrd• 15 years ago

Mr Jobs dedicated their last days of his life to draw and ketchup things on paper on the hospital.

Does the reporter honestly think that he hated the stylus?. Of course not, he just realized that it was not practical at the time, it was not practical to carry pounds of extra weight for using stylus as you need a backplane active matrix that consumes battery all the time.

In the video you see Atmel people drawing and the enormous lag it has, this was unacceptable for Jobs of course.

I made my own homebrew software for the DS lite that used the stylus, for instant(no perceptible lag)sketching, with antialiasing and 3d. It worked very well, but after a month of using it, the screen wore out because the screen is resistive and plastic. A little expensive note pad!!

thanos2014• 15 years ago

hi :) Is it possible to share the app?

tripzilch• 15 years ago

> Third, you can see what’s under the stylus. This is essential to artists, of course, but it also completes a simple visual feedback loop in which you can tell what you’re touching.

When I first got my Wacom drawing tablet, it took me about an hour of trying out handwriting in GIMP to get used to this. As long as you hover the stylus only a few millimeters above the tablet, you can even see the mousecursor move around to where you're pointing (takes a little bit of practice, that).

So, while nice, it's definitely not strictly necessary that seeing what's "under" the styles happens on the same plane as you're drawing on.

In Defense Of The Stylus

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