I feel like a complete idiot forgetting this and Captain Kirk’s logbook…
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Yeah, Star Trek would have been more striking if it had been possible for them to do a more meaningful presentation, esp. say in the “City at the Edge of Forever” episode, but they were quite limited by the technology of the time.
Curious. What does your colleagues think? How do they react to your hi-tech setup?
Reactions have varried, but most range from curiosity to appreciation. It’s almost normal now to play off an iPad, so the only curiosity these days is that I’m using eInk (the boox max lumi).
Early on, I did have one conductor refuse to allow it and made me put the tablet away and go get the paper music. I was on the front stand, right under his nose and he was old school, very resistant to technology in general, and this was early on. Two rehearsals later, he realizes the bass player has been using an iPad as well and tries to tell him not to, but the bass player refused to switch back to paper. It left the conductor looking foolish for chewing me out and then having to let it slide with the bass, and then it turned out our outdoor concert venue was poorly lit and windy. This would not have been a problem at all if we were using my tablet, but it was disastrous with paper music and not enough stand lights for the whole group.
More recently, I have a collegue who asks if I’ve brought it when we get to share a stand. She’s a not-at-all-tech-saavy older woman, but loves the half page turns from the foot pedal so we never have a gap in the music we’re reading. I quickly explained and demonstrated the slight lag when writing and that didn’t bother her at all. She would just pick up the pen off the stand and mark stuff whenever she needed.
An orchestra I played with in California for a lot of years from the mid aughts to the mid teens as iPads were taking off had a handful of us experimenting with various set ups. This orchestra didn’t share stands, which was unusual at the time as strings almost always share, so I was more free to experiement as it didn’t effect a stand partner. It included the same bass player from the earlier story and a viola section where three of us were reading off tablets (one iPad, one Samsung, and I think I had the HP one with the sonic pen that year). We all used the same brand of foot pedal, all of which failed similarly within a few months of each other, bass player first, and we all moved to an alternative brand that year.
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What foot pedal do you use now?
When my AirTurn failed most recently, I took a chance on a generic one from Amazon. It’s the typical alphabet soup of a brand - YUEYINPU, but it’s worked for the past year.
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Also! How could I forget the Star Trek influence?! Showing my relative age - I grew up on TNG and yes, those data pads played a big role in my vision of the future.
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Similar. Although it only recently occurred to me that said influence proved my search for the one device (@dstrauss) was Quixotic. Even in the 24th century, Picard’s desk looks like my technology drawer.
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For me, it was the obsession for the closest to hand drawn experience. At first it was the switch from hand draw to digital with a non screen tablet, and i found the hand -eyes difference make it hard to draw anything as detailed as hand drawn.
Then i found out about tablet pc and bought an used emr business laptop within my price range, and while it got better than non screen, ⁶there were a lot of shortcomings: the resolution is low and there wasn’t enough drawing space, there’s glass thickness gaps between pen and screen, the cursor drift at the edge, screen feel small.
After that all is history: i kept buying tablets whenever i heard of new improvements: Chinese screen, samsung tablets, windows with EMR, iPad, I tried them all. Screen get sharper, glass get thinner, pen cursor get more accurate.
I think pen technology had finally hit a plateau at around 2020 with the winning contenders being ipad and wacom ( samsung, wacom tablets and some ultra expensive “unicorn”). Any further update feel incremental ( apple adding some tapping gimmick, Wacom s-pen higher refresh rate in number that i doubt most people would notice in actually usage).
The biggest factor now after we have the " best pen tech" is the hardware that is paired with it. High resolution, powerful machine, big screen but compact form, long lasting battery. Getting all of that is so obscenely expensive that it’s best to sacrifice some of them to get something remotely affordable.
I’m currently very content with my tab S7 FE paired with a gaming laptop over SuperDisplay. That gave me processing power, best pen tech, a good high res screen of decent size, powerful Windows software. Portability and battery life is sacrificed but still possible if need to be. I probably won’t upgrade until the tab S8 ultra reach affordable pricing in the used market (and that would be possible if the tab ultra series is not getting axed in the long run).
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Back in the early 2000s, I bought an Asus Eee Slate tablet. That’s when I joined Tablet PCs. Used it a few times on genealogy trips but it wound up sitting in a closet all these years. I did take the time to put Win 10 on it a few years back. Enjoyed using it but no need after I stopped traveling.
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For me it was taking notes in engineering and math classes in college and grad school. Because of how much notation there was, it just wasn’t practical to take notes by typing ASCII (except for one guy who was a legend for taking notes in LaTeX, real time!). The rest of my classmates all used pen and paper, but I’ve always kept all my notes in OneNote.
I spent years pursuing technical degrees accompanied by various tablet pc models (this forum - or rather, its predecessor - was instrumental in helping me make purchase decisions during that time).The Surface Pro was released during my PhD. I loved that machine so much I’m still using Surface Pros today. I don’t need to write mathematical notation anymore (it’s all code, now), but I’m so used to where the Surface Pro sits on the power/portability tradeoff curve that I can’t go back. Besides, I occasionally whiteboard, play games, and enjoy the tablet form factor.
I loved learning about everybody’s use cases. I thought the musician one from @violajack was the most delightful. But I have to admit I’m surprised not to see somebody else share a use case like mine!
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