I always found it remarkable that a small regional studio like DMA could come out with two of the most important video games ever made (Lemmings and GTA).
I’d love to see the little lemmings statues, but I haven’t been to Dundee in ages :-( They relocated to Edinburgh at some point before GTA3, I don’t think there’s any GTA sculptures there but theres plenty of Edinburgh references. The “leaf links” golf course (Leith Links, a park), Calton Heights (based on Calton Hill), Grove Street (street in Fountainbridge, where I lived when GTA:SA was released!) and plenty more besides
Response time (i.e. pen touch to pixel appearing) on the latest generation of e-ink devices is literally imperceptible, though I believe they've had to cut a few minor corners to get it to that level.
There is certainly enough to justify the cost, if you are a prolific note-taker.
Conversely, I find it hard to justify the cost of an iPad, becuase I already have a phone and several laptops. I can't see a situation where a tablet would be more useful to me, so I've never bought one.
Turns out different people have different needs, and the e-ink note-taking market caters to that. Most people would find an iPad more useful, so they're lower cost.
My killer use case when I was a student was having a device I could take handwritten notes on, watch class videos on, and read my textbooks on. I then had one single device with a large screen for most of my needs. Trying to read notes on my phone was uncomfortable on the train but perfect on the iPad.
The real game changer was when I started taking the iPad to the gym and putting it on the elliptical and could do required reading or rewatch classes.
There was a positive reinforcement loop of wanting to run a certain amount but then also wanting to stay on long enough to finish a chapter and then once again figuring I should run just a little longer and get ahead in class.
I do this too with my Kindle. I feel odd, but I usually set a goal for 30 minutes then if I'm halfway through a chapter or something, I'll often just keep going. It's actually been kinda helpful at times, though I don't do it on days I run, only when I walk/do legs.
> Turns out different people have different needs, and the e-ink note-taking market caters to that.
I have the first generation, and I do enjoy it. However, I think a distinction is _how_ one takes notes. For brainstorming, and just writing free-form, it's great. However, I find it really annoying for taking notes about a doc, for two reasons:
- If you need more notes than fit in the margins and whitespace of a PDF, are you going to flip between the doc and a separate file of notes? What if you want to compare two documents, and take notes about the distinct ways two authors discuss the same material? The idea that you can't have more than one thing open feels immediately limiting.
- If you're several pages into a doc and want to flip back to some prior point (and you don't recall the specific page number), it's actually pretty awkward.
I feel like these devices are on the cusp of being much more satisfying. But at present, either I print out all but one thing which I can deal with on the remarkable, or I end up looking at a combination of a laptop and the remarkable, and in either case, I can't help feeling that an obvious use case was not well considered.
Considering how small the company behind it is compared to Apple, I was positively surprised how well it is designed and made - in some aspects I consider it superior to the iPad. Apple can fund a lot or R&D thanks to the volume of iPad sales, a small company has much more problems to do so. And probably the reMarkable sales numbers are small compared to the iPad. At least they were able to bring down prices quite a bit with the second generation. To be honest, I wouldn't have paid much more than the 400€ for the device.
Let me help you - iPad is the ultimate content consumption device. It’s by far my favorite electronic device and by far the most used. I work on my computer, I communicate on my phone, but I relax on my iPad. Internet browsing, shopping, watching shorter videos (or even longer ones when cooking), sometimes playing games, reading books.
Thanks for the recommendation for Remarkable 2, considering buying one for a while now.
I have heard of some using the ipad pro as a drawing tablet, in which case it competes with e.g. Wacom, whose prices for their display-drawing-tablets are on par with ipads.
I've been slowly learning to draw using paper and an iPad Pro. Obviously they are different, but the iPad Pro gets a lot of right in terms of responsiveness and pencil pressure.
My daughter is in art school. She was considering a Wacom tablet, then did her research and bought an iPad pro instead. She seems thrilled with the choice.
My partner has a ReMarkable 2, I have an Ipad pro 11. I got mine earlier and thought writing on it was pretty good. But it's not even close. ReMarkable feels 90% like paper, it's crazy. Ipad (at least without one of those paperlike screen protectors) isn't even comparable, it very much feels like writing on glass. She loves it (for her PhD), if you take a lot of handwriten notes it's amazing.
I really do not get this at all. I find browsing the internet on a touch screen so much worse than with a keyboard and mouse. Being able to just open a new tab and search for stuff is ever so slightly harder on a touchscreen
Got mine a week ago. I always take notes and draw mind maps while working on a project, so this fits perfectly.
I like the pen and paper sensation, the fact that my handwriting is exactly the same as on paper, the ability to erase, rewrite, cut and paste.
I don't like the flaky sync but love seeing my drawings as PDFs. The LiveView function almost doesn't work but a third party app allows me to display the tablet on the desktop for Zoom meetings.
Arxiv PDFs are easy to read only if you crop or zoom, which is a bit unfortunate. I would have loved integration with Pocket, Dropbox, Arxiv and other sources. There's no TTS option, which is also unfortunate, because I find TTS doubles my focus when reading technical text.
> Arxiv PDFs are easy to read only if you crop or zoom
Have you tried another PDF reader, like KOReader[0] or plato[1]? There's also [2] which looks really interesting for cases where you want to save time.
I use https://github.com/bordaigorl/rmview to good effect, though it just occasionally stops working and I need to restart it to get it going again (I think it’s from brief USB connection blips, which can happen on the Surface Book for reasons I won’t go into but which won’t apply to almost any other hardware).
Could you expound a bit on why you think it's more useful?
I am thinking about getting one (or one of a couple other similar options), because I think it would be MUCH more comfortable for reading and annotating papers, which is my main practical use case for an iPad. And if it's at all a decent replacement for a paper notebook, that would reduce the number of things in my bag.
But I'm also a bit worried that the organizational features might be lacking. Specifically, it sounds like there's no fulltext search feature, and syncing has to be done through their cloud service, which sounds troublesome because I've already got a system and encompasses file types and tools that ReMarkable doesn't handle.
This is not the normal use case of a remarkable 2, but I have found it to be the absolute best childrens toy ever. My 4 year old spends probably 2 hours a day drawing on it, making mazes out of the graph paper templates, drawing beehives on the hexagonal templates, doodling on cut-away diagrams of space shuttles and pirate ships that I found and imported as PDFs from the web.
It feels wonderful for him to use, as opposed to the iPad which makes me feel like I'm rotting his brain. After a half hour of using the ipad, he's irritable and throws a tantrum when it's time to put it away. With the remarkable it's just like a pad of paper, but I don't have to worry about him getting ink on my bedspread.
The remarkable is really good at feeling like pencil and paper, which mean it's really good for written notes. The epaper display is also nice for reading text in daylight.
The iPad has the Apple Pencil and it's not bad but for everything else the iPad is far better. You can annotate a pdf and send it somewhere else in different ways. It can take a or download a picture and mark it up. With the appstore it can handle and convert just about any file type. It also does a million other things like web browsing, chatting, videos, music and games. For most people that adds up to a more objective "useful" score.
But there is a huge charm and advantage for gadgets that are highly focused on a single function. For what it's worth I still sketch and take notes using a mechanical pencil and spiral bounded notebook.
FWIW, I use a Paperlike screen protector, and have been very happy with the writing comfort I get out of it.
If there's one thing I'd absolutely miss with the actual writing experience on a ReMarkable, it's colored highlighting. I've been using the same color coding system for years and years now, and I'd hate to lose it. But it might just be worth it to lose the backlight and the glare, and gain the ability to do my reading outdoors.
I'm in the same boat as you, I'm thinking about getting a ReMarkable 2 and am turned off by their cloud service. It seems possible to run Syncthing[0], however, so this is giving me hope.
same. I spent ~500$ on boox air. To me its my most used device after my laptop. I use it everyday for hours to save my eyes, totally worth $500. I also have an ipad which i never use.
I have no regrets buying a Boox Note 2. It runs Android so I have the Kindle app installed and the Adobe Digital Editions reader for my uni books and well anything else I want. The only thing I wish it had was MicroSD support.
It doesn't seem that measly to me. By my estimate, it would be enough for my collection of academic papers I'm saving to grow to about 4,000, which, at my current reading rate, gives me about 40 years of runway.
It wouldn't be much for a phone or tablet. But phones and tablets also need to be able to store apps, photos, videos, and audio content.
I also own a reMarkable 2 since last December and the fact it is not a light source makes it valuable when you spend almost all your waking hours staring at screens.
For me, the most useful trait is that it gathers all my note in a "physical" gadget rather than being scattered on several laptops/smartphones/notebook.
I have one as well. For me the killer feature is the ability to copy/paste your own handwriting.
I'm on the device 6 of 8 hours in a day, constantly taking notes of my meetings and conversations. Frequently I write sentences in the wrong order, and have to rearrange them for logical/linear understanding.
Sure, you can do that on a Slate or iPad, but neither feel or sound like you're writing on real paper.
The fact that it's a single-purpose (ish) device, and that it feels and works so much like real paper.
It's like being able to carry an infinite number of infinitely long paper notebooks with you.
I used to get through about one paper notebook a month, and couldn't find notes I'd taken 3+ months ago. Now everything I've ever noted is available with 5-30 seconds of searching and paging about.
The fact that, if I've written a bunch of notes in the wrong place, I can cut and paste them elsewhere is something I use every day. Everything is so much more organised.
Also, and it's definitely NOT designed as an e-reader, but if you convert your ebooks to fit the screen, it's approximately the size of a hardback book page, which I find miles more comfortable to read from than my Kindle.
Very interesting. I did the opposite reasoning - I also do lots of note taking, however, I preferred to have a more flexible device with OK note taking (in short, a 10" Android tablet), rather than narrow device with good note taking.
I’ve had the same thoughts about the iPad. Do you know if you can use reMarkable as a display screen to draw on for video conferencing? If it could I’d probably just buy one now.
If you are willing to strip the DRM and convert the files to epub or PDF, you can read them on the Remarkable 2. I do this as I prefer to read on the Remarkable 2 (compared to reading on the Kindle). It's just convenient to have all the technical material, notes and the leisure reading in one place.
I do this too. As well as ebooks, I have all my household manuals on it (washing machine, gas boiler, etc.) plus manuals for various devices - so much better than either keeping the paper ones, or keeping PDFs on the computer, as you can annotate them too!
I use Violentmonkey - I can't remember why, but I probably installed it due to the Firefox issues years ago and carried on using it. No complaints here.
Reminds me of the (apocryphal?) story that the 'OK' button is only labelled that way because in user testing people read the original text - 'Do It' - as 'Dolt'.
At risk of seeming like a shill (I just like Groupy!) there seems to be a 50% discount code here, making it the price of a coffee: https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/groupy
Not free (or 'free') but there is a commercial app that does this very well indeed - Stardock Groupy. It was bundled in with something else I bought years ago and I just leave it running as it's quite handy.
Their 'Fences' app is excellent (which was the app I bought the bundle for).
In particular, the ability to create a view on the desktop onto another folder. This lets me split my desktop into 'local' and 'cloud' areas by having a fence containing a view onto a Google Drive-hosted folder.
The sudden switch to WFH, combined with lockdowns etc, caused me to experience pretty severe stress/anxiety issues for the first time. I severely underestimated how vital seeing others every day was for my mental health (I live alone).
I didn't recognise what the symptoms were, because I've always been positive, optimistic and productive, and certainly never had any mental health challenges.
The last 5-6 months have been deeply unproductive as a result. However now I know what I'm dealing with it's getting easier/better, fingers crossed.
Is there any solution that allows handwritten and typewritten notes to mix?
What I'm thinking is while I'm at the computer, being able to use something like OneNote (not exactly OneNote, just for example) to be able to see and type notes. When I wander away from the computer, use rM2 and see all the notes I just typed.
I guess the idea I'm thinking of is how I can use something like OneNote on my desktop, laptop, and tablet, and enter and view notes on any of them easily.
My understanding is that even though there are ways to see your rM2 notes on a computer, it's a bit clunky and not seamless. More of an "export from rM2".
Gutenberg has some annoyances/quirks, but if you're starting from scratch and using a modern theme it's not bad by any stretch.
Having been in the position of rebuilding two sites from scratch (one personal, one commercial), they are miles easier to edit and maintain with Gutenberg than they were with 'classic' + a third-party page builder.
For example the way it handles a list block. You can't just make a single bullet point a paragraph. All the list block has to be converted to paragraph blocks, and then re convert the paragraphs to list items.
Many of the third party page builders are very mature, and powerful - I use them every day. Yes, some are terrible, or haven't been maintained but others are exceptional and make Gutenberg look simple (edited: I originally wrote "joke" but that was too harsh).
The biggest pain I have with page builders are related to licensing as most are "bundled" with premium themes, and most clients don't understand that a premium theme isn't a one-time purchase, but is instead an annual service (to enable updates) Typically, the client has to either re-purchase the theme (with the newest versions), or purchase a stand-alone license for the page builder.
