Except when you want to zoom, pan, not zoom/pan while writing or want an infinite canvas (I do). Or if you don't want your page's content to completely shift away from its background (irreversibly) when rotating the device. Those are just the most prominent bugs I remember, there were more.
I love the writing feel of E-Ink; the software makes it unusable.
You may be thinking "just use another app and hack up the SD to enable scribble mode when using it": Well - With Squid, anyway, pen strokes get lost due to suboptimal palm rejection (what the SDK reports seems to be different from what Android reports). Besides, the SDK only sends the stroke after it has been finished, which would be sub-optimal for potentially collaborative applications like Excalidraw.
Such a letdown. Software updates are great, you can even root it, Syncthing works well. But I mainly use my Nova 2 as a slightly fancier alternative to my Kindle that I'm much more worried about breaking.
I'm still excited about the potential. If anyone reading this is also interested in hacking around on Boox devices, let's talk, maybe: https://gitter.im/boox-users/community
I recently got a Nova Air C and I'd like to do a few things with it. I'm mostly interested in getting an optimized terminal to use with the rooting feature, to replace the termux frontend by something that'd be better optimized for eink while reusing termux packaged tools.
There seems to be private APIs to do great software, at least on the Sony DPT, Mooink and Fujitsu Quaderno devices from the Sony spinoff Linfiny.
A terminal often writes to a small portion of the screen, so everything else could remain static and without ghosting, while this portion of the screen getting new characters would get fast text rewrites, a bit like how you when you write on the notetaking app, it shows immediately yet a bit fuzzy, then it's redrawn later in high quality.
In would require talking to these APIs (so maybe with different modes for different brands like Linfiny/Boox/Remarkable/Kindle) + maintaining a simple map of the terminal screen to do invalidation/refresh as needed.
It's a bit hard to understand what component to use for what, if my motivation allows and you're interested I can look for my notes about it. I've personally used the third-party PNGNote as a nice reference: https://github.com/karino2/PngNote
> A terminal often writes to a small portion of the screen, so everything else could remain static and without ghosting
The tablet already handles partial updates pretty well for me, including for Termux.
> while this portion of the screen getting new characters would get fast text rewrites, a bit like how you when you write on the notetaking app, it shows immediately yet a bit fuzzy, then it's redrawn later in high quality.
On a technical level you may be looking for something to automatically switch between one of the fast modes and normal mode/manually refresh the screen. However: Even in X mode the response is definitely not instant. I think the SDK allows directly painting pixels which should be a lot faster and very powerful, but I haven't seen anyone doing so in the wild so far. Let's definitely stay in contact if you're interested in that!
Except when you want to zoom, pan, not zoom/pan while writing or want an infinite canvas (I do). Or if you don't want your page's content to completely shift away from its background (irreversibly) when rotating the device. Those are just the most prominent bugs I remember, there were more.
I love the writing feel of E-Ink; the software makes it unusable.
You may be thinking "just use another app and hack up the SD to enable scribble mode when using it": Well - With Squid, anyway, pen strokes get lost due to suboptimal palm rejection (what the SDK reports seems to be different from what Android reports). Besides, the SDK only sends the stroke after it has been finished, which would be sub-optimal for potentially collaborative applications like Excalidraw.
Such a letdown. Software updates are great, you can even root it, Syncthing works well. But I mainly use my Nova 2 as a slightly fancier alternative to my Kindle that I'm much more worried about breaking.
I'm still excited about the potential. If anyone reading this is also interested in hacking around on Boox devices, let's talk, maybe: https://gitter.im/boox-users/community