Stylus input

Stylus touchscreens

Some of these are popular amongst my colleagues, since they allow you to see what you are writing. They have gotten more affordable in recent times. Cheap entry level options which I have not used myself:

• Kamvas Pro 13 Graphic 13.3-inch Drawing Pen Display
• Wacom One

Ones that require multiple plugs are suspect— USB+HDMI+power is a lot of cables to manage. A sinfle USB C should suffice these day, right?

Or possibly you already own a touchscreen if you own a tablet computer. See next.

Special case: Remarkable

Slightly left-field. The most hip device for tabelt-computer-as-graphics-tablet input seems to be the Remarkable, which has many plugins doing clever things with its open API, so it occupies a kind of intermediate niche that is shares much with classic graphics tablet devices than a tablet computer. Richard Zach is once again helpful, settling on a hacky solution that gets output from his reMarkable tablet via srvfb. That particular solution is discontinued but there seem to be several like it.

Livescribe

My current solution is Livescribe, a ball-point pen that remembers what you write if you use special paper. Livescribe is a company which uses Anoto dot patterns. There are a few other pens which use this technology, but Livescribe will stand in for the others for now.

NB: my notes on livescribe are somewhat out of date; new pens such as the Livescribe Symphony have come out. I have not tried the latest hardware because it does not seem to be available outside the USA. Worryingly, even the apparently-operational USA office does not answer my questions any more. Other offices (e.g. EU) are ghost towns. Is this company still in business? Let me know in the comments if you have any insights.

The Livescribe is a good stylus input FWIW. Some models have some bonus features I don’t use, such as audio recording. You can find more about that on the internet, but I will say nothing further due to not caring.

It transfers data to special app (ios/android) via bluetooth then via a cloud service such as dropbox, google drive, Evernote or OneNote to other devices. This is unsatisfactory.

For one, the smartphone app is obnoxiously bad: awful, clunky and unintuitive, and plays mandatory advertisements for other livescribe products before it lets you use the one you just paid for. It crashes if you look at it funny.

For another, there are no end-to-end encrypted sync services on that list, so everything you write using the pen can be assumed to be subpoena-vulnerable and spook-readable in some jurisdiction or other.

And no, there is no option on that list that simply transfers files to your hard drive. It has to go via the hard drive of some unaccountable third party. As such, do not use it to write notes on anything if you do not want police and spooks reading it.

People have been complaining about the app for 7+ years now and it has remained largely unchanged apart from fixes for crashing bugs and compatibility updates, so do not buy the pen in the hope that the app will improve. If this were a priority for the company they would have demonstrated that before now.

A real frustration is that the writing experience for this device is so good, so simple and easy and intuitive, that it makes the unnecessary pain points introduced by their terrible software even more vexing in contrast.

This is so close to an amazing, luxurious experience, but they dropped the ball just before the goal. It is as if you are an aspirational cook, and a Michelin star chef lends you their staff and kitchen and you can use it all you want, but it is on fire.

UPDATE: There is a desktop app called Livescribe+ which circumvents some of my criticism (e.g. going via cloud for no reason) but seems to be only compatible with the newest pens, which, as mentioned, cannot be bought anywhere at all except possibly (?) the USA. Also it is infrequently updated, does not work on Apple Silicon macs and has other worrying signs of abandonment.

tl;dr Great hardware, awful software, possibly the company is defunct?

Here are some links I’ve needed for the Livescribe: (NB one of livescribe’s many irritating habit is suddenly moving their help pages to new platforms without explanation; some links might break).

• Software downloads deleted without forwarding link.
• Un-pairing Livescribe 3 from a device or multiple devices (e.g. because your phone died).
• New dot paper for self-printing. They delete that and left no forwarding address. Here it is: Printing free Livescribe dot paper and controls online
• Ink cartridges are somewhat expensive and take a long time to arrive, so I have learnt how to unclog ballpoints in order to keep them going. Soaking them in isopropyl alcohol seems to have the best success rate.

Question: how bad a security breach is it to lose one of these pens? I suspect very bad, since it will remember a LOT and has essentially no authentication.

I really love the Anoto dot pen technology. Their hardware is wonderful. Is it available anywhere attached to competent software? Livescribe is marginal. I wonder if there is a company which is better at deploying it than Livescribe? Apparently Anoto have made a few mis-steps in their commercialisation and generally do not have a better spin-off technology licensee, or at least, searching for the alternatives I found on Wikipedia led only to discontinued products.

Moleskine pen+

TBD. Moleskine makes smart pens. They are apparently available in Australia.

• Moleskine Smart Pen+ Ellipse, Black, One Size

Wacom digital folio

TBD. Portable wacom input device meets notepad.

• Wacom K100914 Bamboo Folio Digital Notepad