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0 pointsjonahbenton6y ago0 comments

I was a fairly early pre-order for RM1, early enough that I had forgotten about it in the 6 months or so it took after pre-order for me to get it.

But as soon as I get the email for RM2 I pre-ordered again. To your point, it is the product the digital paper market has been waiting for.

I am an avid hand-writer. I have been a Levenger Circa user for more than 20 years, and basically had a subscription to the Circa paper for the last several years, as I went through so much of it. It took me a while to adjust my workflow and so forth, but I am now a full convert to the RM and think the device and the ecosystem have enormous potential, especially for developers.

The RM folks are very dev friendly, though their docs and so forth are poor at present. I take this to be a function of focus/resources rather than intent. The architecture of the software on the device is very good and dev oriented, and the code (what they've released) is well written. The device can run a webserver! The APIs- community documented- for the server-side of the RM platform are minimal but well structured. I was fairly quickly able to dig into them and write some utilities, which work reliably. So I am very optimistic about the ecosystem around these devices.

To your questions- I write on the order of 20-30 "pages"/day on the RM, and go through 1 tip maybe every 2 weeks. The writing experience is very comfortable. Adding an "eraser" to the premium RM2 pen addresses the main ergonomic inconvenience. I also use the device for reading PDFs. There are some ergonomic nits there but on the whole it works well.

Yes, RM is a new, small biz, but to my eyes they have a great product, a great approach, solid operations, and are developer friendly. I have not used the Sony device, and can't compare it, but I see nothing but good things ahead for RM.

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raihansaputra6y ago

Your comment on the device being dev friendly and the fact that you wrote your own utilities is really making me consider to preorder RM2. I saw all these comments and wish I can somehow integrate my own workflow into it.

jonahbentonOP6y ago

Yeah, regarding workflow, I commented elsewhere but despite being a preorder of the RM1, I failed to establish a good "rapport" with the device when I first got it (late in 2018), and basically set it aside for a year until suddenly late last year, struggling with my paper workflow, a switch was flipped and I saw how I could adopt it, and I did, and now I love it.

The software had improved dramatically- they seem to be doing a good to exceptional job at getting incremental features out on a regular tempo without breakage, no simple task- but I think a certain amount of "hammock-time" plus increased awareness of non-digital pain points was necessary for a new perspective to flip into place. (This is re: seemingly small things like using distinct per day notebooks and per week folders, rather than a single monolithic notebook with paper-like day headings etc)

And my workflow is still limited- I am not using the writing recognition at all as yet- and there are plenty of use cases I come up constantly that it doesn't address- smart task lists, various kinds of copy paste, maps (!!!). If one has any kind of paper-based or digital habits adopting the device will be a challenge and involve frustration until it clicks, and probably even after.

But I have confidence both in the device's trajectory and moreover in the ergonomics of a community developer's engagement with the org. There is a lot of open space for patient, flexible developers to build cool stuff in. Cheers.

nicoburns6y ago

Apparently the CTO is a KDE dev, so it's properly open. Has definitely made me very interested in one too.

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