The Daylight DC-1 just got a “Calm Tech certificatiton” but I think there’s something missing. (Hopefully fixable in software so no-one need to throw out their new plastic ewaste devices just yet.)
Apps that can stay still, that can show me one page at a time and then calmly go to the next or previous page, that’s relaxing. Discrete steps and cleary defined modes. That calms me down.
Apps that are all gradiated and fiddly and zoomy and jittery and thinks my palm means that I want to zoom and scroll, that freaks me the heck out.
E-ink’s calming nature isn’t just the screen tech in light and space; it’s also the reduced motion in time. The microperforated RLCD that the DC-1 uses can handle animation better than e-ink can, but that doesn’t mean that it should animate everything. Using that 60hz power to reduce lag on text input would’ve been awesome (though early reviews say the lag on handwriting is inexplicably really bad…?) and there are other apps, like music making apps, where a fast display comes in handy.
As long as the UI itself is stable and knows how to chill the heck out for three seconds and isn’t hyper jittery.
Some of us broken-hearted suckers in the 21th century need to juggle a lot of data. A fast screen can help with that. A fast screen can also hinder that, if it asks us to do the juggling on a rolling table on a moving train on a tilting pinball table.
This is why epub readers are better than browsers even on the most glaring LCD of all time: it show you one page at a time instead of scrolling a few sentences here and there. I don’t get why browsers even in our modern day still can’t do that. I have EinkBro which makes page down and page up really accessible which is great but at the end of the day it’s still a browser page down that has some overlapping sentences meaning I have to reread every single page I turn, or worse, on some sites there’s elided gaps between the pagination so I still have to manually scroll up a few lines for every page. It’s a big ask of EinkBro to fix that since it’s mostly just a UI wrapper on Chrome, but it’s so strange to me that clicking on the “page to epub” button and opening it in an epub reader (like KOreader) is so much better and so much more calming.
I don’t wanna scroll scroll scroll, I want to turn between separate pages with no overlapping text; a UI design decision the printed book mastered centuries ago, thankfully or we’d still read our potboilers and smutty romance novels on scroll tubes. And then zooming and panning should be a deliberate choice, not the whim of a misplaced palm.
Inkscape is also really bad at this, for those holding out for a FOSS example. One slipped twitchy hand and I’m zoomed and panned all the way to heck.
Most writing modes in Emacs are great at this. It doesn’t move the page one line for every line I write, it consistently jumps up half a screen when I’m at the end of the previous half-screen. The fact that it’s half a screen instead of a full screen was hard to get used to but since it’s so consistent about it, that’s calming too, and it is a good thing that I can see what I just wrote so I have some context instead of just writing one word at a time in a vacuum.