This works both ways for what it's worth, I have parts of my identity which I simply don't see fit to make a discussion of since there is no ground to gain or concede.

An unlikely failure mechanism perhaps but it costs me nothing to avoid it.

I like this idea, definitely going to test it out.

>you cannot rely on color as an accent

Yeah definitely found this using some 'normal' webapps, default dark mode makes it worse too.

I've recently switched to a black-and-white e-ink smartphone with the motivation of withdrawing from the attention economy somewhat and it's a genuinely cool piece of hardware. While the majority of my needs are met by this device there are a few things I'd like to have which don't work terribly well with the e-ink screen. I'm planning to implement a couple of projects to fill these gaps, at the moment I'm planning a Lemmy frontend and an OpenRouter frontend specifically for e-ink. Both are to be browser-based rather than native, to maximise compatibility and because I'm much more familiar with the web than Android development.

I would like to study the principles of sound e-ink UI design before approaching these projects to avoid creating unusable slop, in particular I am not entirely sure how to approach treating the refreshes as a first-class aspect of the design when I can't control them from the browser, and how to apply comprehensible UI conventions when a greyscale, high-contrast display is the target.

Some specific problems I have out of the gate are:

* Streaming LLM output to the screen is basically the worst-case scenario for e-ink, I need to buffer it and paint it in chunks without this becoming horrible to use.

* Ghosting is a serious problem, browsing HN on the device is a particularly obvious example. Ideally I want to avoid scrolling as far as possible and rely on pagination instead, which I feel has the potential to become annoying if not done well.

* Given I must rely exclusively on layout and type to carry the UI, what design languages emphasise these qualities best? My gut says the early Mac OS versions wouldn't be a bad place to start, this seems relevant given the display constraints of the early macs.

I would greatly appreciate any advice on the design and implementation of e-ink UIs from people with practical experience in this area. This is purely to scratch a personal itch, once they're nailed down I'll put them out in the wild under the GPL.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213660

Points: 214

# Comments: 72

To undermine my own point further, Battersea Power Station in London is iconic. In particular the control rooms were very well-styled with lots of art deco ornamentation, anyone who's listened to Quark, Strangeness and Charm by Hawkwind will have seen it as it's the source of the album art. To be honest I think the idea that ornament in general is bad did a lot of visual damage to the world.