The Case for the Stylus
It doesn’t have to suck
Why are iPads awesome?
Steve Jobs called them “intimate.” You could manipulate web pages directly with your hands. On a PC, you move the mouse, which moves the cursor over to the link. On an iPad, you just move your finger to the link. Millions of years of evolution have made us pretty good at moving our fingers to a target.
Panning and zooming with your fingers is pretty good, too.
Why are iPads not awesome?
Text entry is terrible! You’re back to the old, indirect way of typing on a keyboard to make letters appear and managing where your text cursor is. Text entry is not intimate. Even worse, most people can’t type on a touch screen without looking at the keyboard. Not looking at the screen means more mistakes and more moving the text cursor around to fix mistakes.
Placing a text cursor or even just tapping small buttons with your fat fingers is not that great.
Cursors are bad
The common thread here is that cursors are bad, and removing cursors is good. Cursors mean indirection and trying to shove your commands through another device. Cursors mean worrying about where your cursor is, whereas you never forget where your hands are.
The iPad removed the mouse cursor, but that’s only half the job. Our post-PC future has got to do better than a virtual keyboard. But how can our hands enter text without a keyboard?
Enter the stylus!
It turns out we have a pretty good system for this: writing. Now, this does require a separate tool, the stylus or pen, but it’s practically an extension of your hand compared to a keyboard or mouse.
Wait, didn't Steve Jobs also say “If it comes with a stylus, you’re doing it wrong”? Yes, and I would agree that so far all the products with a stylus are doing it wrong.
The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is the latest entry in a long line (over a decade!) of tablets with active digitizers and touch screens. In this time, resolutions have increased, handwriting recognition has gotten very good, but the text cursor problem has still not been solved. Using a stylus to enter text brings up a separate writing area, and then you have to insert the text from there to the target. It’s a very indirect and frustrating experience.
But it doesn't have to be this way! Here is a prototype I created of direct text entry using a stylus:
The Future
The text entry problems of the stylus can be solved. We can eliminate the text cursor. Meanwhile, the stylus actually does a better job than your fat fingers at replacing the mouse cursor. A stylus tip is much more precise and less prone to accidental taps. Our fingers could be relegated to holding and manipulating the canvas, just like we do with regular paper (except with panning and zooming).
Perhaps keyboards will end up as specialist devices, like what court reporters use. Maybe most of us will have various thin screens strewn about on our desks that we arrange with our hands and write on with a pen. Our post-PC paperless future might not look so different from our pen-and-paper past.
