Workflow Boogie / Dark Mode Legal Pad
In a recent post, developer and cyborg rights activist Aral Balkan sang the praises of the Boogie Board, a cheap, liquid crystal paper (like a Kindle) digital writer / tablet, a device I had encountered and dismissed as little more than a $40 Etch-a-Sketch during my innumerable boredom-inspired forays into the Staples pen aisle of my heartlandic existence; thankfully, Balkan’s thoughtful praise gave me pause to grant the Boogie Board more than a dismissive glance and consider its potential to be that oft-quested mythical workflow unicorn.
In my short time with its 8.5×11 iteration ($40-), I’ve found it to be an absolutely transformative addition to my workflow: it brings a tactile feel akin to writing on a dark mode digital legal pad with a pen / stylus that happens to be one of the most perfectly balanced writing implements I’ve found (could they please make this an actual ink pen?), most useful not as a vehicle for long, handwritten passages, but as an extension of typing and working within short assignments: it is invaluable in making my tendency to switch back and forth from typing to writing to typing, often starting something on-screen then moving to scribbles and scrawls from which to mine more depth before returning to the screen once I find an approximation of its rhythmic flow, even more rewarding; it’s like turning a screw with your fingers until the screwdriver of the keyboard is the only way to make it stick and enter that flowstate, boogie-ing back-and-forth towards the utility of thought and/or the absence thereof.
(Another potential usage in the absence of thought department: a way to bring morning pages back into my practice, to exorcise some of the mental pablum and reach, maybe, the nitty gritty of the right rhythm and the right words.)
All of this praise can’t absolve the Boogie of a few gripes that bear mentioning here: one, as an inveterate southpaw, I digitally “smudge” all over the place: it’s like writing with a soft pencil or on a dry-erase board (and I have little interest in learning to write backwards, again, on here); the exact-erase function leaves much to be desired; and the (free) companion app is fairly useless and I can’t figure a reason I would use that extra step when, devoid of OCR capabilities, I could simply snap a photo, should I want to save the scrawl, and Airdrop it to my main Mac – which might defeat the whole purpose… but at that price point what more could I ask for?
In the absence of a better ending, I’ll simply add that my wife also bought one, the smaller version ($30 +/-), as a quick note-taking (not note-losing, like scraps of paper) device to bring a bit more organizational sanity to her schoolteaching day; as for bringing sanity and a new middle way to my writing day and workflow, the Boogie Board has already more than earned its keep. I’m sold.
