Editing The Pen Addict 221/transcript (section)

== Lenovo Yoga Book ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' There's another product, though, which is kind of interesting, which isn't one of these, but it's another take on this type of thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, you picked up on this, and I hadn't seen it before. It was actually in the Moleskine article, but I didn't click the link. The Lenovo Yoga Book. I'm going to say this is kind of interesting, so hit this up for me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So the Yoga Book is like a new type of laptop that Lenovo are making, and it kind of builds on some stuff they've done with dual-screen tablets and stuff. So it is a touchscreen on one side, and it can either run Chrome or Windows. And then the bottom part is just like a flat touchscreen, but not a screen. So it's a Surface that can have a keyboard. It will light up a keyboard, so you can type on it, but you're basically typing on glass. Or you can also put a piece of paper on this and take notes. So they have a stylus, but they're stylus. You can pop out the stylus part and put in an ink cartridge, and then you can take notes on it on any piece of paper that you choose. And it senses, because the paper's on top of the slate side, not the screen side. So it senses that, and then it can do two things. It can do the live kind of handwriting, or it can apparently do live handwriting-to-text conversion. Okay. And there's two ways you can do it. You can either do it so it's flat out like that, so you can see it as you're writing, or you can flip the whole thing over and just write, and you don't see the screen. Gotcha. Now, I've done a little bit of digging on this, just to try and understand the way that they're doing this. And there is an ink refill that Lenovo sell. I don't know what this refill is. It says Ministar on the refill, and a bit of Googling suggests that that is a company that exists.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. Well, it's a stock D1 refill. So any D1 refill will fit, is what it is. So there you go.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You can put any... So that's getting close, because you can use any paper you want. And you can use any D1 refill you want.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And this is cheaper than something like the Moleskine, because you don't have to pay for... I mean, the Moleskine. The Montblanc, because you don't have to pay for Montblanc. You know? And this has a full operating system in the computer. You know, either Windows 10 or Android Marshmallow. And it's cheaper. This is at least interesting. Like, I can shake my head at this and go, okay, I get it. You know? And, you know, maybe this works out well. We don't know how the technology works and if it's useful. But I still... Like, if you're going to do any of this, if you're not going the pen and paper route, and I don't even own one, but I don't see how anything beats an iPad and Apple Pencil for doing the most amount of things in the best way.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's the closest that I've gotten to.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. That's why I own none of these products. Because I don't think they would work for me. And that includes the Apple Pencil or an iPad Pro. I don't... I just don't have the need for it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because basically, as time has gone on, the way that I use my note-taking stuff for the iPad Pro is I use an app mostly called Notability, which I really like. And it does a good job and it has good tools. It has highlighting tools and stuff like that in it. But what I would do is, say I'm on a business call and I take notes on the business call. I take them here. Because then it syncs by iCloud. I've got it on all my devices. And that's the way that I do it. So they're the types of things that I'm taking notes in. Because that stuff is better for me to have that all over the place. So for me, those things are better than using paper and scanning it or whatever. Because I can just write it straight in Notability. And I like it a lot for that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So you're using the Apple Pencil to transcribe those notes, essentially.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So I have my iPad in front of me and then I'm just taking notes in Notability of my Apple Pencil. And it's great. Right, right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay, cool. Well, I'm glad we touched on these because they're all new. I'm sure people want to hear about them. You know, it's going to be that holiday season time. I don't know why. Well, it's holiday season. So...

'''Myke Hurley:''' No, but I mean, I don't know why so many companies are jumping on this specific bandwagon.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it's expanding. And if anything, if we've learned anything, one, there's going to be some frustration. And two, Moleskine seems to do it better than pretty much anyone else right now. So it's not a perfect system. It's not a perfect outcome. But, you know, next five years, I think we're going to see someone like really get it. I mean, it's on the way. I'm mildly interested. I'm not interested in any of these devices. But I think one day I will have something like this.

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'''Brad Dowdy:''' So we both have Squarespace sites, and at one time we both had Field Notes pages on our sites, but as we got busy, those fell by the wayside, because it's just hard to keep up, and we're doing so many other things. But there's a new Field Notes resource that's underway. Right now it just has wallpapers up, but it's so cool. I wanted to get it out there. It's called Fieldly. How did you come across this? Someone in the, I think it was, was it you, Crazy Bobbles, in the chat room here on Slack. Put this in the Slack chat. I was like, I'm totally using that for the newsletter this weekend and for the show, because I think they're really cool. They're very, what's the word? It's simple. Minimalistic. It's not the word. Minimalistic, yes. Minimalistic wallpaper. So they just kind of take the colors in kind of blocky type design. It's an aesthetic I really, really like. So yeah, it was Crazy Bobbles here. He found this somewhere. I don't know where, but he's the first one I saw it from in Slack. And I thought this was really cool. I co-opted the Drink Local wallpaper for my laptop background, and I have the Field Notes grass-stained green for my phone backgrounds. What do you think about these?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I love them. What I really wish that they had was a desktop background of all of them.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That'd be cool.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because they're like, the desktop backgrounds, they're like super big, and then they just have like the one element in the middle, which is like the simple representation of that edition, which I love. But I really, as I say, I would love to be able to see all of them in one.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. And I don't even know who's behind it. I looked for it and just, you know, see if I could send them an email or something. Maybe I didn't know.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It is a design agency called Quarry.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Ah, so it's not a person.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Digital experiences is two people. Dennis Cortez and Drew Miller. I did a little bit of digging.