Pencil

http://www.fiftythree.com/pencil

by xuki • 13 years ago

882 360 13 years ago

epaga• 13 years ago

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.

srik• 13 years ago

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpftPSuXe4

CmonDev2• 13 years ago

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.

Touche2• 13 years ago

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.

jcl• 13 years ago

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.

nilliams• 13 years ago

Paper is the only app I've ever used that makes me wish I had a bigger tablet than my iPad 2 (because I love it).

baumgarn• 13 years ago

"Pencil is the most natural and expressive tool for getting ideas on Paper"

I thought this would be some kind of parody at first...

gonzo• 13 years ago

you are not alone in this.

mherdeg• 13 years ago

Yeah, I thought this was a Web page advertising an actual pencil.

VintageCool• 13 years ago

I thought that the whole HN userbase was going along with the joke.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Good 'ol Poe's Law (the other way around this time)

Grue3• 13 years ago

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.

applecore2• 13 years ago

Genius, in my opinion.

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...

davexunit• 13 years ago

I thought this was making fun of all of the useless products that are marketed with these flashy web pages.

Then I realized that they were actually serious.

hrktb2• 13 years ago

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.

RankingMember• 13 years ago

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.

smrtinsert3• 13 years ago

Most products on iOS seem to be self parodies.

marincounty• 13 years ago

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.

kylereeve• 13 years ago

Didn't help that most of the features they describe are found on a real pencil.

midgetjones• 13 years ago

Amazing what a difference capitalising two words can make..

applecore2• 13 years ago

Awesome scrolling effect on the Pencil in the Crafted For Creativity section.

gulbrandr• 13 years ago

The script for the scrolling effet: http://www.fiftythree.com/js/pencil.js

aasarava2• 13 years ago

Ah! I didn't see it happen on Chrome, so I missed it. Went back with Firefox after I saw your comment and now I get it. Very nice.

consonants• 13 years ago

Obnoxious is more like it.

gbog• 13 years ago

Looks interesting. I must have missed the part where they explain with which tablets and apps this pencil is compatible.

jnardiello• 13 years ago

No, it's clearly stated that this pencil is compatible with Paper. Paper is an iOS app, therefore this product is compatible with the iPad family.

sharmanaetor• 13 years ago

See the Frequently Asked Questions at http://shop.fiftythree.com/

girvo• 13 years ago

It's compatible with Paper, the iOS app. I didn't get it at first either, but then it clicked.

brettz• 13 years ago

Took me awhile. Not having an iPad, I had no clue what "Paper" was until 5 minutes ago.

colinramsay• 13 years ago

Is this pressure sensitive?

TruthSHIFT2• 13 years ago

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.

tenfingers3• 13 years ago

Then, there is no point in buying this particular pen at all.

timmins• 13 years ago

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.

mikeg8• 13 years ago

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.

CmonDev2• 13 years ago

We asked for Android support and this is what we get instead?

http://support.fiftythree.com/customer/portal/questions/8218...

wriq2• 13 years ago

It is that surprising? When you have limited dev resources it's smart to focus on the platform that would garner the most attention and profit.

smrtinsert3• 13 years ago

Exactly, grandma needs her new Christmas present!

eloisant• 13 years ago

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!"

Tyrannosaurs• 13 years ago

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...

sp3323• 13 years ago

The last comment says We are being very careful while building our company, so it’s not merely a financial issue.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

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.

anu_gupta• 13 years ago

Learning what? I suspect they already know that the world is full of angry, immature, entitled people.

BitMastro• 13 years ago

Maybe starting from this https://code.google.com/p/markers-for-android/ and improving.

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)

henderson1012• 13 years ago

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.

mempko• 13 years ago

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.

bbx• 13 years ago

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.

asolove3• 13 years ago

This is wonderful and beautiful. I don't want to knock it. I'll probably buy one and love it.

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.

taylodl• 13 years ago

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!

diminish• 13 years ago

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..

mesh3• 13 years ago

I wouldn't assume that Adobe's Mighty will only work with Adobe apps. It is in Adobe's interest that it works with as many apps as possible.

You should expect to hear more around this when Mighty ships.

(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).

asolove3• 13 years ago

Ooh, truly good news. I will be very interested to see how it works on other apps in iOS.

nobodysfool• 13 years ago

But "Pencil" probably won't work with Adobe apps, am I right?

mkramlich• 13 years ago

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.

footpath2• 13 years ago

>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:

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.

asolove3• 13 years ago

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?

wmorein2• 13 years ago

Pencil isn't designed to only work with Paper. Anyone who is interested in an SDK for Pencil should let us know what they are thinking about.

business AT fiftythree DOT com

jessedhillon3• 13 years ago

I would love to see Windows Surface drivers so I could use this with Photoshop.

vsbuffalo• 13 years ago

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.

mathnode• 13 years ago

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.

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

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.

ris• 13 years ago

Just document the protocol.

Unclench, already.

kbenson• 13 years ago

Pencil isn't designed to only work with Paper. Anyone who is interested in an SDK for Pencil...

I can't help it, this makes me think of joke engineering documentation for everyday items.

niels_olson• 13 years ago

Pencil isn't designed to only work with Paper. Anyone who is interested in an SDK for Pencil should let us know

Tech quote of the freaking year.

hoprocker• 13 years ago

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?)

toddmorey3• 13 years ago

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.

mesh3• 13 years ago

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.

(Disclosure, I work for Adobe).

skybrian• 13 years ago

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.

MarcusA• 13 years ago

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.

beauzero• 13 years ago

meh

davb2• 13 years ago

Tell me it's not Apple-only. Tell me it's not Apple-only...

crosses fingers

Oh, bugger. It's Apple-only.

slantyyz5• 13 years ago

Why's that a big deal?

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.

hadem• 13 years ago

It's a big deal because they are interested in the product and it requires you to have an iPad...

davb2• 13 years ago

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.

nat• 13 years ago

I actually laughed out loud when I scrolled past the exploded view of its innards. Best use of parallax scrolling I've ever seen.

chrismonsanto• 13 years ago

This is the only example of parallax scrolling I have ever liked.

acron0• 13 years ago

Gutted it's only for Retina & Mini (i.e. not the iPad 2) [1] devices as well :( This would have been an amazing Christmas present for my wife.

[1] http://shop.fiftythree.com/ (System Requirements at the bottom)

jakebellacera• 13 years ago

The iPad 2 does not support Bluetooth 4.0, unfortunately.

linux_devil• 13 years ago

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.

parthoghosh86• 13 years ago

This is so wonderful and amazing....

jlebrech• 13 years ago

My pencil is paper compatible also.

abbot22• 13 years ago

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.

warrenmiller• 13 years ago

watch the video

abbot22• 13 years ago

Watched 40 seconds. Don't have sound. Understood nothing.

linker3000• 13 years ago

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.

decasteve• 13 years ago

Reminds me of a prototype I had seen a few years ago, Conté, after the artists crayon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDqT_oKM7j8

smrtinsert3• 13 years ago

These product vids are ripe for a funnyordie parody.

kepano• 13 years ago

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6905817/every-tech-commerc...

blackdogie• 13 years ago

That video made me a little dizzy. it was a fun effect, highlighting the pencil in the middle of the shot, but I had to turn it off.

"Pencil is the most natural and expressive tool for getting ideas on Paper"

iPad + Pencil + App = most expensive expression tool I know too !

fidotron4• 13 years ago

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 . . .

3327• 13 years ago

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.

fidotron4• 13 years ago

To be clear, I'm definitely in favour of good design, but good design can often speak for itself.

mogrim2• 13 years ago

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.

ruswick3• 13 years ago

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.

briandear• 13 years ago

I actually thought that it was advertising a real pencil! It made a swell parody, although still a cool product.

zimpenfish2• 13 years ago

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.

resu_nimda• 13 years ago

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.

isnotchicago• 13 years ago

Well, that's fair; falling in love is not very easy.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

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.

igravious• 13 years ago

No. Not at the product; at the effusive, over the top, false in places - absurd in others, marketing copy.

I care.

bluthru3• 13 years ago

It's a bit silly to allow the marketing to influence you in a positive OR negative manner.

epo2• 13 years ago

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.

awakeasleep• 13 years ago

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?"

lfuller• 13 years ago

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.

Kluny• 13 years ago

It'll pass. It's just a marketing trend.

adamio2• 13 years ago

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

vdaniuk• 13 years ago

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?

Brashman• 13 years ago

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".

njharman• 13 years ago

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".

sudont• 13 years ago

Explains why they prevaricated on other Bluetooth styluses: http://support.fiftythree.com/customer/portal/questions/1461...

Safe to say this is the only one that will be supported.

ruswick3• 13 years ago

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 just don't understand who this is for.

cmicali• 13 years ago

I don't think a $49 price point is "well out of reach" for consumer and hobbyist users.

ruswick3• 13 years ago

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.

henderson1012• 13 years ago

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.

hrktb2• 13 years ago

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)

rz2k• 13 years ago

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.

jaynos• 13 years ago

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.

Groxx• 13 years ago

When it's for an iPad, which is $300+? I don't think $50 is out of reach.

diydsp• 13 years ago

"artisanally crafted" (grammar)

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.

dag112• 13 years ago

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.

bane2• 13 years ago

The Samsung Note stylus supports an eraser if I'm not mistaken as does the Surface stylus.

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.

asadotzler2• 13 years ago

The Surface Pro has had this since its release.

phaus3• 13 years ago

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.

gkoberger2• 13 years ago

Wait, what?

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.

nawitus2• 13 years ago

Marketing is not an excuse for incorrect claims.

estel• 13 years ago

made it simple and beautiful

Which product has been simplified? Presumably not a pencil :P

sanoli• 13 years ago

"Each Pencil has a unique character that will subtly change with years of use" > it's made of wood and wood has grains on it.

aasarava2• 13 years ago

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.

chii6• 13 years ago

it's made of wood and wood has grains on it.

or that the wood will degrade over time too. I don't want wood. I want metal, unbreakable metal.

wnevets• 13 years ago

artisan is used to sale everything from string cheese to dunkin donuts sandwiches these days. Singling these guys out for using it seems kinda silly.

yapcguy2• 13 years ago

The term for breathless marketing is "Modern Wank".

chii6• 13 years ago

did you just coin that term? it's pretty apropos!

lambdasquirrel• 13 years ago

Sounds like what the Solaris folks were saying to the Linux people years ago.

millerm2• 13 years ago

aren't you being just a bit... pendantic?

Please get the joke, please get the joke.

chii6• 13 years ago

now you're just rubbering it in...

avenger123• 13 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 13 years ago

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.

chii6• 13 years ago

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.

taude• 13 years ago

I have mixed feelings about this.

I wish Apple would just get it on with having some form of integrated active digitizer builtin to the iPad. After playing with MSFT Surface Pro and even Samsung S-Pen, it's obvious to me that these are superior solutions to all these third-party workarounds for iOS. And this is really a locked-in third party solution...

Anyway, I think iOS eco system is ripe for more accurate artist/drawing tools and it seems they should be able to support both types of input (touch & pen)...

lukeschlather• 13 years ago

What really struck me about Pencil here is that they're marketing Pencil as a durable good.

The idea that someone's marketing a computing device without hoping I'll throw it away in 12-18 months is really inspiring.

On the other hand, it only works properly with a single brand of tablet.

hippee-lee3• 13 years ago

I'm a paper user. Here are my pros and cons:

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.

jwr2• 13 years ago

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.

hippee-lee3• 13 years ago

I noticed that too when I colored things fast. It was fast enough for most things. The most frustrating speed issue for me was when painting with watercolor brush where the variable speed changes the effect of the ink.

Thanks for the tip re: Upad! I'll check it out.

eridius5• 13 years ago

I hadn't heard of Upad before. The screenshots look nice, especially if it really does work well for handwriting. Just yesterday I tried doing some mathematical note-taking in another app (already forget which one) and it was pretty bad.

Sadly, the support links leave me with little confidence in the product. The "PockeySoft Web Site" link is actually a youtube video, and "UPAD Support" takes me to a 404 (http://www.pockeysoft.com/upad). If I remove the path on that URL, most of the images on the resulting site are broken. If their site is that broken, and the app hasn't been updated in 11 months, it sure gives the impression that the app has been abandoned.

d23• 13 years ago

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?

hippee-lee3• 13 years ago

No access to images and you can only email an image or export a collection to pdf via several channels: Google drive, computer sync, iBooks.

monkeynotes• 13 years ago

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.

jedberg• 13 years ago

Whoever directed that video needs to go back to film school.

I understand that you're trying to "highlight the product", but causing nausea in your customer isn't the best way to do that.

Segmentation• 13 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted, he's completely right. Too many start up product videos nowadays are directed with shots all over the place. I hate it when I see it in movie trailers, but they can at least explain themselves as not wanting to show you too much of the movie. No excuse in a product video that doesn't need to rush itself.

slantyyz5• 13 years ago

Wow, that was even more nauseating than the Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield.

bluthru3• 13 years ago

I thought, "Oh, that's kind of interesting" when it first tracked the pencil and I thought it was done. Nope. It followed for the rest of the video. I started feeling nauseous, and I don't even get car sick.

joeblau• 13 years ago

I didn't get that feeling, but the "Hm... I wonder if anyone is getting nauseous watching this" thought did cross my mind.

ronaldj• 13 years ago

I thought it was cute.

rhubarbquid• 13 years ago

Cute but nauseating.

300bps• 13 years ago

I've been in every kind of car, on large boats, small boats, in helicopters, in 2-seater planes and every other type of plane and never once I have ever gotten motion-sickness.

Watching that 72 second video right after lunch made me feel queasy. And I still have no idea what the product does other than draw things on a table.

jamiemill• 13 years ago

The difference between 'motion sickness' (which I don't suffer from) and 'simulation sickness'[1] (which I do).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness#Simulation_sick...

Major_Grooves• 13 years ago

Yeah I had to stop watching that video. The shaking about effect was horrible. Can't understand why anyone would have thought that was a good idea.

chii6• 13 years ago

OT, but interesting that you get nauseas in the video, but not in real life.

Do you also by any chance get nauseas if you played First Person Shooter games? I know a coupe of people that do, even tho they don't in real life vehicles.

I don't get nauseas watching videos/playing games, but i do get nauseas on real life vehicles.

ddon• 13 years ago

Also felt nausea from watching the video... Was really bad idea.

lasermike026• 13 years ago

Someone kill me.

NikolaTesla• 13 years ago

All I want is a tablet that has the line fidelity of a pen or pencil, not a crayon. If I can record my writing/drawing with voice-over, even better.

marban• 13 years ago

If you don't need the eraser and battery worries, I recommend http://www.studioneat.com/products/cosmonaut

desireco42• 13 years ago

Awwww, I got Evernote's Jot pen that takes them forever to ship (still didn't arrive). This is really tempting, but how many styluses a man really can use. I really love what they did here.

On the other hand, Samsung Note and Surface are places if you really need to use stylus. I thin Surface is especially strong there.

asadotzler2• 13 years ago

After using a Surface Pro for a year with a real stylus and its excellent digitizer, I wonder how so many people can be so happy with something so inferior. iPads are a joke for input.

toddmorey3• 13 years ago

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.

oddshocks• 13 years ago

Anyone know of some open hardware that does this same sort of thing and works with existing software?

CatsoCatsoCatso• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper

They're both super cheap and open. With the right skill and a few plugins [0] you can create stunning pieces of content [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint (Not to be confused with MS Paint) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

[I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself.]

ajmarsh• 13 years ago

Ok so I'm going to end up buying this. However I feel like I'm due a refund on the Bamboo stylus I bought from Studio 53 when I originally started using the Paper app. The Bamboo stylus was so laggy it was unusable. Hopefully the Bluetooth stylus will work as advertised.

darkstalker• 13 years ago

It probably has a noticeable latency, like most touchscreen inputs. The video just shows silly camera/pen movements and no actual drawing scenes.

jdalgetty• 13 years ago

wow that camera was annoying.

millerm2• 13 years ago

Yes, yes it was. I was feeling a bit woozy near the end and had to just stop watching. Big monitor here, didn't like the movement.

Mithaldu• 13 years ago

Wow, another website featuring a product that is Apple-only and almost actively hides the fact that it only works on a single platform.

typon• 13 years ago

Wait how is this better than Surface Pro? Seems like it has the same features.

curyous• 13 years ago

It is far worse than the Surface Pro, not even in the same league, but hardly anyone uses a Surface Pro.

charlieflowers• 13 years ago

I wonder how well something like this would work for doing math.

Say, for example, a word problem, or a proof. You often need more than one sheet of paper for a problem, but if you're using a notebook, it becomes painful to try to concentrate on what you're doing while also flipping back to the previous page to look at something you need.

If you work the problems on separate detached sheets, you have more flexibility, but you end up with separate detached sheets :).

A computerized tablet interface could solve all these problems and automatically organize the finished work for you. But it would have to not SCREW UP all the symbols you'd be writing.

Has anyone here successfully used Pencil or any other stylus/tablet combination for doing math?

notphilip2• 13 years ago

Surface Pro (or any windows tablet with a wacom-like stylus) with Onenote addresses all of these issues.

Especially since you can easily screengrab portions of the screen (e.g., a relevant theorem from a pdf) and 'print' anything to any onenote page, it's really clean and easy to get all relevant content in one place. It also makes your handwriting and printouts searchable. I also really like using the webcam to take pictures of whiteboards/lecture slides to annotate on top of (really helpful for 'old school' classes or Professors that don't share their slides).

egypturnash3• 13 years ago

Pencil was just announced today, so nobody will have used it yet.

You might want to try Adobe Ideas and a stylus for this; it offers a huge, scalable canvas that you can scroll around in.

borismus• 13 years ago

Still too thick.

xerophtye2• 13 years ago

thank you! Good to see i am not the only one

pagekicker• 13 years ago

Microsoft addressed most of the issues addressed in this thread twelve years ago when it launched XP for Tablet PC with "ink as a first class citizen" data type in the OS.

alexobenauer2• 13 years ago

This is probably the first time I've ever thought that a scrolling-aware content page has actually added meaningful functionality to the page without being in the way and annoying. Really nice work there.

spenrose• 13 years ago

Dangerous. Fifty-three employees will use them 6 hours/day, only a fraction of Paper customers will ever try one once. Anti-dogfooding.

jeena2• 13 years ago

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?

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

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.

jeena2• 13 years ago

It's a bluetooth smart stylus for iOS devices, especially tablets, which integrates with their existing graphic design app "paper".

Such a simple and short explenation! I wonder why they don't mention iOS devices, the word stylus or the word app on their website.

VMG• 13 years ago

Before watching the video, I thought this was a parody

lignuist3• 13 years ago

"If you see a stylus, they blew it"

- Steve Jobs

alexobenauer2• 13 years ago

While relevant, to be fair he meant as the primary method of interacting with and navigating a handheld device, as in needing a stylus to scroll through your email, make calls, etc. This 'pencil' is simply for painting and drawing on a tablet, arguably a different scenario.

lignuist3• 13 years ago

I Agree. I just could not resist posting this quote. :)

Actually Pencil looks nice and I always wondered why Apple did not release such a device itself.

samelliot2• 13 years ago

I would say that quote is not relevant at all.

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

I think he also said he'd rather die than launch a 7-inch tablet.

r00fus• 13 years ago

As long as we're reminiscing, I don't remember Apple ever actually launching a 7-inch tablet have they?

8" 4:3 screen = 34% more real estate than 7" 16:9 screen.

notphilip2• 13 years ago

He didn't seem to have a vision for tablets replacing pen/paper notebooks. The tech is here and prices are getting low (e.g. dell venue pro 8 with a stylus for ~$400); soon mainstream consumers will go fully digital and trash physical notebooks. Apple still can capture this opportunity, but they need to get past this idea that stylus==bad.

I'd guess the first company to get a 10" tablet with a good notebook application and stylus for under $300 will be the big winner in the classroom for the long run.

sgt• 13 years ago

I feel silly about this, but did anyone else also get seasick from watching that video?

jroseattle• 13 years ago

Makes me wonder what the Rembrandts and Picassos would have thought of such a device and whether it encourages or prohibits artistic expression. I can imagine it certainly does on the tablet medium, but in general I wonder if there is any aspect of artistic creativity gained or lost when moving away from traditional mediums.

malrase• 13 years ago

David Hockney has certainly embraced it as a medium.

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/11/hockney/

archagon• 13 years ago

To me, latency is by far the most important issue here, and I don't see any mention of it on the page. Compared to my Wacom tablet, touch input is just too laggy to use in anything but the most basic drawing and note-taking tasks; is Bluetooth better or worse? (Judging by my existing BT devices, I'm gonna have to guess "worse".)

celerity• 13 years ago

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.

hashtree2• 13 years ago

The cost of purchasing moleskine notebooks each month has gotten out-of-hand ($16+ per). As a previously die-hard paper/pen guy, I've attempted to make the move over to iPad based note taking only to find its abilities completely lacking. There are great apps and stylus hardware, but even when tightly coupled to overcome the iPad's lack of hardware support.. it leaves much to be desired.

You see companies like Jot and 53 having to invent far too much in attempts to solve this problem. A shame for otherwise great tablets.

sosuke• 13 years ago

The tip still gets me. I just have a hard time with the thick tip where I can't see my connection to the 'paper'. I keep wanting to try out the Adonit Jot http://adonit.net/jot/touch/

deltaqueue• 13 years ago

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:

http://www.wacom.com/en/us/everyday/bamboo-stylus-feel-samsu...

*edited for clarity

tenfingers3• 13 years ago

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.

bdegman• 13 years ago

Useful for sketching but any real work is going to be done with an actual drawing tablet like the ones Wacom makes.

eridius5• 13 years ago

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.

falcolas2• 13 years ago

It's my understanding that the inaccuracy is not due to the distance between sensors - but rather that Apple/etc have configured the sensors to only respond to contact points over a certain size (to reduce interference from power supplies and other imperfections)

Consumption device, not a creative device.

egypturnash3• 13 years ago

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.

egeozcan• 13 years ago

It doesn't ship to Germany. I was ready to buy an ipad just to give this a go for my note taking needs though.

kitwalker12• 13 years ago

would've loved some iPad 2 love

nilsbunger• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who at first thought this was a joke, i.e. making fun of our crazy hyperbole by marketing a real pencil?

alan_cx• 13 years ago

No, I thought that too. In fact, I was disappointed. I thought it might go on about how useful a pencil still is. Some sort of comparison thing.

Personally, in my IT capacity, I still love going to meetings, seeing all the non tech people with their various electronic toys, and I get out a pencil and a pad of note paper...

Weakly amusing, true, but it also makes a semi-serious point. Im a tech guy who will not waste money on technology for the sake of it. I like to see real benefit for the money spent. On top of that, during such meetings, Im never the one who holds up proceedings taking notes. Kind of help ram the point home.

leoc3• 13 years ago

For most of the way through this, reading about Pencil and its compatibility with Paper, the palm-rejection technology and the super-handy eraser on the rear, I thought I was reading a parody advertisement.

caiob• 13 years ago

Satires please. hehe

crorella• 13 years ago

Nice idea and execution. The video makes me dizzy :P

ep103• 13 years ago

Did anyone else notice that this site somehow causes IE to crash?

yk• 13 years ago

I am confused, is this a parody of the current "Not as cool as a pencil" iPad ad, or is this a real product?

tieTYT• 13 years ago

Is that software that it works with (apparently called "Paper") going to stay free? I see it's free as of today: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-by-fiftythree/id506003...

cytzol• 13 years ago

It's free, but you have to buy the individual tools with in-app purchases: see the list on the left of the iTunes link.

gorner• 13 years ago

It's not super clear from their website but if you buy Pencil, apparently you get the tools for free while you have the stylus connected.

twodayslate• 13 years ago

No pressure sensitivity?

freshchilled• 13 years ago

I really had to come into the comments to see if this was satire or not. Paper, Pencil, Book. I swore this was a joke, even after I saw there was an actual price tag!

adultSwim• 13 years ago

It's not clear to me which benefits are from the new stylus and which are built into Paper.

For instance I don't see how the smudge with finger is actually a Pencil feature.

What are the differences compared to just using a regular/dumb stylus?

the906• 13 years ago

A normal stylus is dumb and only does a line. This stylus allows for change in depth.

TruthSHIFT2• 13 years ago

What makes it interesting is that they are able to distinguish between the 3 different types of input. Most apps can't tell the difference between a finger and a stylus. This one can.

In addition, this stylus knows which end you are using. I suspect that this is accomplished using an accelerometer and the orientation data is transmitted to the tablet via bluetooth.

joelle• 13 years ago

I absolutely LOVE the paper app. This is so cool.

trumbitta2• 13 years ago

I was ready to buy it.

But no. I'm in Italy so screw me :-/

hellyeasa• 13 years ago

Why do all websites have the same design? It's boring and lifeless?

WalterBright• 13 years ago

I watched the video, and although it is pretty cool, I have a couple of issues with it:

1. It's a bit fat, not skinny like a pencil. I generally don't like fat pens.

2. The point is pretty large and blunt. This suggests it is hard to locate it precisely. I've done professional drafting work in the past, and having a nice sharp tip to control exactly where the mark goes is important.

robflynn• 13 years ago

iPads do not play nicely with fine tips.

skrebbel2• 13 years ago

I knew the "Buy Now" button would link to a Kickstarter page. Kudos to the FiftyThree folks for proving me wrong. This looks like a great product.

I'll buy one as soon as they port it to Windows (because seriously, doing real work on a device that doesn't even expose a filesystem? I'm clearly old-fashioned).

mekoka• 13 years ago

Saw the upvotes, opened the link, watched the video, came back to HN comments, saw many people confused and criticizing.

I have to ask, why so many upvotes then?

Could it be that people here upvote even before opening links? Or just because everybody else seem to think it's a good idea to upvote?

encoderer• 13 years ago

Or that there are many more people upvoting than commenting? And that generally the impression is favorable?

MatmaRex• 13 years ago

I almost upvoted because I thought this was a joke and it seemed funny. Thankfully I scrolled to the part where they mention USB inside the "Pencil".

MattBearman• 13 years ago

This looks really cool, but what really blew me away was the way the pencil dismantles as you scroll the page down.

Absolutely beautifully done.

mey• 13 years ago

Some suggestions for pressure sensitive tablets

http://cintiqcompanion.wacom.com/en/?country=us&language=en

Microsoft Surface's use Wacom digitizers as well, see http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/09/26/the-surface-2

Samsung's Note series also has a good digitizer http://www.samsung.com/us/topic/galaxy-note-10-1-2014-editio...

devindotcom• 13 years ago

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.

omegote2• 13 years ago

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?

Sick.

sp3323• 13 years ago

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

omegote2• 13 years ago

So? I didn't know anything about that "Paper" app before. Anyways, I guess you don't get what I mean.

anonymouz• 13 years ago

When I was reading that page I wasn't sure whether they just misspell paper, misspell it on purpose to make a parody of these marketing websites, or whether that should be something else. Only the HN thread told me that apparently it's an iPad App (for sketching I purpose). Especially when the app has such a common word as a name at least a link or something wouldn't hurt...

sly010• 13 years ago

Only 30 times more expensive than this: http://www.cableandcase.com/products/stylus-touch-screen-iph... Is it 30 times better though?

chris-at• 13 years ago

Our adaptive palm rejection instantly knows whether it’s your hand or Pencil touching the page. Rest your hand on the screen, write from any angle. No calibration or setup. You’ll forget you’re creating on a tablet.

Does anyone know if this works with iPad gestures enabled?

All of the other apps promising palm detection/rejection (like Penultimate) require you to turn off iPad gestures.

liminal• 13 years ago

So apparently this is a device to be used with iPads. Would have been nice if the company put that somewhere on the product's webpage.

metaphorical• 13 years ago

Bluetooth but no pressure sensitivity? Pressure sensitive stylus is the closest thing that emulates drawing on "paper".

It's a beautiful stylus, but not a very practical one.

EGreg• 13 years ago

So this is basically a stylus that feels like it's made of wood? Or it is made of wood? That's about it?

xiaoma• 13 years ago

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.

airencracken• 13 years ago

"Capacitve screens are so great, you don't need a stylus anymore"

Sigh.

bitwize• 13 years ago

Wait, so this is a thing?

It's not some sort of tongue-in-cheek joke about our reliance on technology?

Geez, Poe's law even applies to marketing...

lnanek2• 13 years ago

There are already pressure sensitive pens that are supported in multiple apps, not just Paper, like the Pogo Connect. Seems actually bad for the ecosystem to have another separate pen with yet another SDK. Some apps will support one, some others.

etler• 13 years ago

I've never heard anyone using finger input to do smudging. That's so obvious but so smart. I don't know how I haven't heard of that before.

a3_nm• 13 years ago

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...

pbhjpbhj2• 13 years ago

Yup, I'm using my status indication adaptation to uniquely and fluidly demonstrate a situation of synchronistic agreement has been established between your cognisization and mine. With it's motile upper sections and manipulable terminal section it's the perfect vehicle to deliver not only indications of agreement but many other natural gestures drawing you in to an incalculable world of novel experiences.

[pbhjpbhj raised his hand.]

interstitial• 13 years ago

Half the items I see on kickstarter I think are parodies, especially with the high design stock music, ideation sketches on the wall and the animated group brain storming sessions. But hipsters are soft targets full of much self-importance and wow.

Lerc• 13 years ago

/r/SomebodyMakeThis works!

http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/comments/cgkoz/smt_...

I made this pic several years ago trying to express what I thought styluses could be. http://i.imgur.com/yLuh8.png

guiomie• 13 years ago

Just bought one for Christmas. Not for me, but my dad who is addicted to his ipad (hes got the TV turned on in the background by habit, but he is actually consuming content on his ipad on his couch).

beloch• 13 years ago

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.

DonGateley• 13 years ago

Cool if you like writing with a log.

protomyth• 13 years ago

I wonder how many types of "tools" we will get that work with tablets. I'm still hoping someone comes up with a electronic airbrush.

julianz• 13 years ago

I watched the video and scrolled to the bottom of the page. I don't know what they're selling - is it just the stylus thing? Does it work with every app, or just their one? Is it only for ipads, or can I use it on an Android? Then I noticed they spelt "ginkgo biloba" wrong on the sketch underneath the video. Twice. And then I closed the tab.

xs• 13 years ago

Although it looks cool... for my tablet... It doesn't bring the collaboration I still seek. I often work remote and do screen sharing of my laptop. I have a wacom tablet that allows me to draw on my computer screen which is then being shared to my team. It would be great if I could use my existing iPad and something cool like pencil to do my drawing and have it display on my computer so my remote team can see it.

boristhespider• 13 years ago

The Russians used a...

CSDude• 13 years ago

The shaking on the video is so disturbing that I had urge to close the video. It does not how to shake for all the video duration.

beefsack• 13 years ago

I still can't figure out if that page is satirical or not.

brickmort• 13 years ago

I don't understand all the negativity in this post. This product is a work of art. This layout/presentation is making Apple stop and take notes.

elacey• 13 years ago

This has to be my favorite HN comment ever... bravo 53, for this gold alone:

"Pencil isn't designed to only work with Paper. Anyone who is interested in an SDK for Pencil should let us know..."

Oh my, we've come full circle. I look forward to next learning about Bookmark's SDK and it's integration with Bound Book

xerophtye2• 13 years ago

Am i the only one who thinks its too damn THICK? Aren't pencils and styli supposed to be slim and easy to hold in your hand?

matponta• 13 years ago

It's just lovely

0xdeadbeefbabe• 13 years ago

A pencil you can use to shake the world and play violins, nice.

jotm• 13 years ago

So, uh, it's a stylus, right? Cause I can't tell for sure from that page...

serge2k• 13 years ago

this looks amazing.

Too bad I'll never buy one.

Enjoy your ipad toys, I'll go continue not having pencil on my nexus. :(

Pencil

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