Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?
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I love this question. Most eink UIs feel like they just took interaction patterns from smartphones and crammed them in. I would love to see more innovation on eink UI patterns that works from first principles given the nature and limitations of eink!For example, I consider dragging operations an anti-pattern on eink devices. Both latency and touch…
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Funny you should ask, something of a bugbear of mine:1. Persistence is free.2. Pixels are cheap3. Paints are expensive4. Refreshes are slow5. Colour is limited to nonexistent.6. Pagination over scroll.7. Full refresh (of page or portion) over pan.8. Reflective rather than emissive.9. Minimise animation.10. Line-art or halftones over shade…
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Spitballing an idea. I don’t use e-ink stuff but had my hands on it back when personal readers were new to the market.When scrolling arbitrary text on a computer via keyboard, I generally become mildly frustrated hitting Spacebar, PageUp, and/or PageDown because I lose continuity with what I’m reading. (Perhaps the momentary 60hz blur makes it…
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I use eInk as my daily driver and do everything including ssh into tmux into vim and code on eInk.I build all my UIs with Rust and Ratatui. It works very well.So for web, I think it would translate to:0) NO ANIMATION. You have like, 0.3 fps. You might poke somebody’s eye out if you animate something.1) NO SCROLLING. Pagination only.2) Use actual…
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I’d focus more on print usability and readability guidelines than computer guidelines. 5Hz eink is closer to a moving newspaper than a slow computer.https://www.mediapoint.com.au/design-tips/composition-layout... might be moderately helpful.But my advice: do not count on anything refreshing ever. Do not have animations, or transitions. Preload…
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I've been experimenting with a Remarkable Paper Pro.Additive inking works pretty well. As long as I am adding black ink to the page, everything is responsive. But if I want to push other updates asynchronously, or (god forbid) erase something, then there is the danger of clobbering the user's inkwork. I don't have any deep insights here, beyond…
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Beyond the early MacOS UI/UX, I would look at pre-smartphone devices as well. Palm pilot, phones, etc. These will give you ideas on what you can accomplish with lower resolution UI screens.For that matter, look at good TUI applications... (not the render path, but the result as a whole) ... blocking/spacing and clear controls, etc... though you'll…
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TRMNL recently open sourced a CSS framework made specifically for ePaper display [1], you can use the opensource firmware[2] and quickly hack together a good solution using off the self components.Disclosure: I work at TRMNL.[1]
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> 10. Line-art or halftones over shade gradients (images).This is particularly true for eink, because black <-> white is dramatically faster and more reliable (less ghosting) than anything involving any gray. It's why basically all of the "fastest" modes are pure black and white, and why UI shapes are generally pure black and white (though text…
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A lot of times the e-ink display can handle much higher refresh rates but the driver board and software are trash.See the modos for what a clean sheet eink design would look like.