Drew Winget

@aeschylus

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Drew Winget pfp

Honored to POAP it up with Nous Research at NeurIPS

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For sure. Google Play comes built in and you can install any apps you're used to on Daylight. (There are a few random apps that aren't compatible, but they're pretty rare.)

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Gabriel Ayuso pfp

@gabrielayuso.eth

Can't wait to replace my Kindle with Daylight.

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Drew Winget pfp

Great question. We have quite a few ideas here, as the current paradigm is based on a rushed port of gestures made for phones, and for consumption behaviors. As speech-to-text transcription models and action parsing and intent modeling also improves, voice also becomes more intrinsic to the medium. A drawback of "Apps" as a concept also has historically hampered interface fluidity. There is no reason why apps cannot share data other than historical inertia and business model cruft. This affects interaction because each app needs strong boundaries around itself to communicate to the user what it is doing. The grayscale display also means symbolism and rigorous typography must play a greater role. New interactions will be two-handed, hand+stylus, and hand+voice, and other combinations. A good app on a tablet will behave more like a game than a grid-based printed design. This means controls that aren't direct manipulations are positioned near where the hands will be. Choice of color will be high-contrast.

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I can take this one. For the foreseeable future, Android is a foundation we can build on that will give Daylight users everything they already need in a computer or mobile device. Our screen makes it possible to use all the different categories of software you're used to outdoors and without eye-strain. Our customizations then address some of the problems with Android and the Google ecosystem, such as the annoying notifications and spyware. We block these at a deeper level if the stack by modifying Android to the extent possible. We want to create an experience where your attention is protected and primary, but you have the power to use any existing software you need or want with a reflective screen for the first time. Long-term, we are de-inventing the contorted version of the personal computer we're all stuck with. That will require creating a completely new and independent OS, which we will progress toward over time, both for technical and design reasons.

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phil pfp

Welcome @tristan-daylight! Tristan is the head of marketing at Daylight Computer. Along with Drew, they'll be answering questions from /books readers over the next hour or so. Daylight is building a new device, designed for deep work Reply with your questions (please make sure to tag him)

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So those were some technical pre-requisites we spent a lot of care to get right. Looking into the future of reading, we proceed mostly by phenomenology. Everyone who contributes to the reader has extremely strong and mature opinions about how their kind of reading works, and we build the primitives to support that. As an example, a very unsupported form of reading by all current software is deep reading of non-linear content like textbooks and academic papers. The screen and software of the kindle and remarkable make it exceedingly difficult to navigate a table of contents in a fluid manner. You cannot explore and map the work in your mind, but are instead forced to peck and teleport into random parts of a book, or know ahead of time what you're looking for. Scanning a text at multiple levels if depth is a fundamental workflow of paper reading, often called "reading in layers," and we try to keep this in mind as we evolve the software. For more on this, have a look at Mortimer Adler.

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Pardon the broken threading. You'll have to let me know the etiquette. In any case, now that we had that renderer as a base, we knew we could address another technical annoyance with digital books: getting the books you want, where you want them. For this we developed a suite of "embassies," or portals: pieces of software that let you send things to your physical device. An underlying idea behind the reading experience on daylight is the creation of sacred space for deep work and the consequential reading we all want to do. So being able to consecrate a piece of writing you want to read by setting it aside there was important. It makes you treat "browsing" differently. Think Pocket or Instapaper, except the things you save go to your "serious" reading device, instead of your phone or laptop. So you can email, send from phone with 2 taps, and drag items from your desktop, and it all goes to your daylight library.

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Drew Winget pfp

On the technical side, we had a deadly strong desire to finally make PDFs usable on a tablet. Our screen goes up to 120hz for a reason, and no existing PDF renderer could adequately support fast and fluid zoom, pan, and inking without jank. So we wrote our own from scratch. Now it performa better than desktop software on a new M3 laptop.

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Drew here. I currently lead the software team. When designing and evolving the Reader, we try to address two tracks of potential for digital books. The first track is raw technical improvements; the second is experiential. We call this second track "phenomenology" of reading. I'll start with the technical improvements.

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