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jducoeurI tend to just send most of my Kickstarter links directly to Facebook these days -- part of a general philosophy that FB is good at light-contact links without much depth, and LJ gets saved for stuff that I consider real content. But some still deserve a post here.
Today's example is the Hemingwrite, which is kind of horrifyingly brilliant because of what it is *not*. It is *not* a tablet, *not* a browsing device, *not* a general-purpose PC. It's simply trying to be the freaking *typewriter* for the 21st century, focused on churning out words and nothing else.
I suspect I would find some of their decisions frustrating, but I get where they are coming from. It contains basically no word-processing features, not even cut-and-paste -- the theory is that the Hemingwrite is for creating text, and you then sync it to a real computer (one-button sync to your favorite cloud word processor) for editing. The theory is clearly that writing is modal: that when you are writing, you should *write*, and not be thinking about the editing. (Much less social networking.) So this is a device that is highly optimized for that one task.
That said, the hardware decisions look smart. The screen is e-ink, and it has an old-fashioned, serious keyboard; the result is that the thing looks preposterously retro, very much like the earliest toy laptops. But of course it holds a million pages, lets you work on multiple documents at once, and claims an expected month of battery life.
I don't write seriously enough to need one of these -- most of my writing is LARPs, and the process is about 90% design, 10% writing. But my gadget lust is piqued by such a clever device; if I really was writing a lot, I'd actually think about this...
Today's example is the Hemingwrite, which is kind of horrifyingly brilliant because of what it is *not*. It is *not* a tablet, *not* a browsing device, *not* a general-purpose PC. It's simply trying to be the freaking *typewriter* for the 21st century, focused on churning out words and nothing else.
I suspect I would find some of their decisions frustrating, but I get where they are coming from. It contains basically no word-processing features, not even cut-and-paste -- the theory is that the Hemingwrite is for creating text, and you then sync it to a real computer (one-button sync to your favorite cloud word processor) for editing. The theory is clearly that writing is modal: that when you are writing, you should *write*, and not be thinking about the editing. (Much less social networking.) So this is a device that is highly optimized for that one task.
That said, the hardware decisions look smart. The screen is e-ink, and it has an old-fashioned, serious keyboard; the result is that the thing looks preposterously retro, very much like the earliest toy laptops. But of course it holds a million pages, lets you work on multiple documents at once, and claims an expected month of battery life.
I don't write seriously enough to need one of these -- most of my writing is LARPs, and the process is about 90% design, 10% writing. But my gadget lust is piqued by such a clever device; if I really was writing a lot, I'd actually think about this...
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-16 04:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-16 07:03 pm (UTC)And ideally a "keyboard mode" that would have it send its entire buffer to a connected device as if it's a keyboard, so you could whip it out, compose whatever you're thinking about, and then send it to a wiki or web page or redit or whatever once it's done.
I used to (back in the palm and sidekick days) write things using email drafts -- I'd open a draft, write until I was done, saving in the meanwhile -- and then email it to myself [these days, I tend to use Google Drive or a dropbox synced folder, which allows more seamless switching between editing on a keyboard slider phone, a tablet, and a computer].
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-16 07:12 pm (UTC)Well, note that they are already talking about creating an API for the thing. So it might be possible...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-16 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 01:40 am (UTC)Fortunately, I learned to type long enough ago that I don't need to see what I'm typing to keep it from gettin unintelligible. Just knowing what the "home keys" keeps me from getting to lost to recover the meaning. [to be honest]
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 02:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 02:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-03 04:16 pm (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-03 04:17 pm (UTC)