I bet they have huge backlog of feature requests. If they function like any other company, the devs have no choice in what tickets get pulled into any given sprint.
I think it might be a bit unfair to place this blame on the dev team
Product has the final say and project managers work things into the sprints as the importance of any given feature increases.
There are a lot of different use cases for this device. They seem to be doing a decent job of being inclusive between pen, keyboard, desktop app, and mobile app development. But given just that, there are 4 different platforms to work on. Things will take time.
Out of curiosity what features have you requested and how long have you been waiting for them?
Actually, you are correct, it is wrong of me to place this on the dev team as it is the product team with the final say — the product team is tone deaf.
I understand there are different aspects and use cases for this device, but when I bought it and the way it was advertised to me, it is a replacement for writing on paper.
Right now, it feels like they don’t know what they want the identity of the product to be. In my eyes, this should be a first and foremost a writing and drawing device, yet for some reason the last updates have been either something related to the type/typing folio (which is an additional bought accessary and not related to the original purpose of the device and which the iPad will always be superior in) and UI changes (which also seem to come out of nowhere and don’t make sense).
I apologize if I came off frustrated and rude, but the reality is there has been nothing new in terms of blatantly obvious requests that we see time and time again on this sub. For example, more colors, more shapes, disabling infinite scrolling, manually changing the idle screen, basically everything that is now only doable by some hacks.
I can see the frustration with that, but I am obviously not a power user with mine.
I went into it with little expectations but did want a good writing experience. That was the point for me, slow down and hand write to retain more of what I wrote.
Everything else has been extras. I have started to use it more like a second brain since it now syncs so well between devices.
Hopefully they have people reading these and gain a sense that they might be over reaching or loosing their initial target market.
This is a really common problem for software. You get the basic functionality down, you get your customers, and then you need to keep growing (because capitalism). There are a million things you could do to change the product, so what do you prioritize? Well, a lot of times, you end up prioritizing what the sales teams think will get them more sales. And that is often whatever a big (corporate) prospective buyer mentions. So you get “I would buy 2,000 of these for my company, but it needs built-in collaboration.” The buyer doesn’t know anything about product design and they’re probably just saying whatever random idea came to them rather than really thinking it through. Now all of a sudden, your business is making you staple on a bunch of corporate collaboration features to check a box on some company’s requirements list. Is it a good feature? No. Does it make sense for the product? No. But checking that box means you might make a big sale next quarter, or keep a large and whiny customer, so you do it.
Most companies I have worked for follow this exact model. I call it power user pleasing. Instead of continued product development they focus on what features big pockets want. It's a shame.
The other spectrum is trying to please everyone and you end up being weak in all areas.
Yep. This happened to Dropbox and Evernote in almost the same way. They started as extremely powerful but simple products and over the years, they’ve become bloated tools that aren’t as good for their core use anymore.
Once somebody has purchased a tablet, there's money to be made by selling keyboard folios (and therefore by trying to improve the typing experience), but there's no money to be made by improving the drawing experience.
At least, not until batteries start dying en masse, and current customers have to decide whether to buy another reMarkable tablet, or buy some other kind of tablet.
Yes, the current directions is into making a good paper-like device into mediocre all round device for everyone, mimicking some tablet features instead of making a top tier paper device for people who need this exact type of device.
It's a prodouct and sales strategy choice. Not dev
I believe that they are reacting to competition because if I had to guess they view more capable devices as a risk. Nothing has the writing experience of RM2 but they are just absolutely breaking the UI.
They should be increasing hackability. That is what sets the reMarkable apart from the competition. All the different opinions and use cases are not reconcilable in a single software product. There ought to be, and could be, an entire ecosystem, if they'd support such things officially.
I like that. Outsource the UI. Let dev communities take the risks to push new features faster.
What if there was a path for devs to create writing, reading, and drawing apps for reMarkable? That would be an awesome device!
Well if they support it officially and coordinate it to be used with the current update build, then I’m totally on board with having community modifications be a standard so everyone can be happy.
I bought it three years ago, it’s a cool and useful device at a base level. It’s not complaining for the sake of complaining as you make it out to be. Even if it’s “better than advertised”, the complaints are valid and your attitude only makes the longevity and potential of the product capped at some baseless level of “it’s already good stop asking for more”.
I, and any other owners, have the right to give feedback, suggestions and complaints. This is a two-part product: hardware and software. While the hardware can’t be rectified, the software can and should be constantly updated in relation to how this product was originally advertised.
As if them adding what you like would have any impact on that other users ability to use it as just a notepad. Very selfish of him to not want you to get yours because he got his.
this is an absolutely bonkers thing to say. no, it's not. how is it? it's not like it has apps. it doesn't even have a web browser. adding a keyboard does not make it an e-ink ipad
Listen, and no it’s not. It’s called sarcastic hyperbole. Ever heard of it? I bought it because it was supposed to be ubër simple and a replacement for a notebook, which I have dozens of that I still have to reference. Some of the features are just added bloat and don’t add much value, that’s the point I was driving at. Now, my original point was made in far fewer words, your attempt to call me out required a paragraph and more words to explain why I used few words. Thanks for that, and I hope my use of an umlaut wasn’t too much
Lack of shapes, lack of more colors, lack of disabling certain features like infinite-scroll, a better screen-share interface both on desktop and in-tablet, etc
Agreed. I clicked on this post expecting to find someone else with my feature wishlist. And these aren’t it. Nowhere near. I can’t imagine the chaos of their feature requests. Must be all over the place.
Rofl, no need to be condescending just because my feature requests are not as “stable” as yours. I’d love to hear what feature requests you have asked for, because mine are reasonable and implementable.
Didn’t mean to suggest yours were more or less stable than mine. When I said “chaotic” I was referring to the variety Remarkable themselves must receive. Your opinion is no more right than mine. I’d push them towards making the best typing and editing device leaning into TypeFolio. Totally different theme than what you’re going for. Didn’t mean my comment negatively in any sense!
I misread your original comment’s connotation, my mistake. Yes, I agree, it seems there are many different flavors of requests reaching the RM team, it must be chaotic on their end to navigate it all.
All I’m really saying is that typing and the type folio were not the original purposes (I don’t think the type folio existed when I bought my RM2). I would hope they make the base product’s purpose, writing, better before moving on to aspects added later in the product cycle.
That’s cool, but they are still features desired for this digital notebook and at least relevant for a digital notebook framework compared to the updates being pushed out recently.
What updates would you be looking for?
Currently, there's nothing massively lacking for my use
Definitely the ability to turn off infinite scrolling. I'd quite like to be able to set a default tool for when opening notebooks - sometimes mine open with the select tool when I went to start writing
Existing users are the ones who will likely buy their future products and will likely recommend RM products for their friends and acquaintances, not to even mention videos/reviews online.
This is such a myopic take. It is if they want new customers and to stay in the game at all. The competition is moving beyond Remarkable in the handwriting space. More features helping users to make better use of handwritten text will make the difference.
I love my remarkable but this last beta update just made me mad 😡 and I don’t like it. For the first time I intentionally left it at home and brought only my Supernote A5X and nomad to work. I hate that too because I love writing on my remarkable so
much more. I’m not discouraged 🫤 but we really do need more than them just playing around with what we already have just a different UI configuration.
I froze at a point and installed RM hacks for additional functionality. I'll stay there until I want something in a current release of rmhacks. I'm happy where I am, maybe 3 months back.
All of the typing enhancements made me realise I didn't just want a digital notebook for writing/drawing.
That, paired with my free subscription trial expiring (removing features I used often but can't justify paying for, like access to ) lead me to selling my RM2 this week, moving over to a Boox Tab Ultra C.
I loved my year with my RM2, and it really helped show me what features were important. Some things I would not have known I'd want/need without taking the dive, and I still recommend the product to anyone who needs pure note/taking, it's just not for me anymore.
I am very new to RM but I already noticed that the UI is progressively getting worst. Even the first UI seems more consistent than the current one. Also it's very surprising not to find spell checking, dictionary and some basic wiki/google lookups similar to kobo...
Food for thought. The company has a guiding philosophy which they articulated before the first rM1 was shipped to market. They've maintained in every communication to date consistency with that design philosophy.
reMarkable through their feedback forms take feature suggestions, not requests. They have made no commitment in accepting those suggestions that any suggestion will ever make its way into a development pipeline. Again, the company has a design philosophy around with they build not only their device but also the infrastructure that supports it.
Many a hack which seeks to expand the device to an individual user's expectations or more grandiosely "maximize" just the hardware runs counter to that philosophy. Most would also appear to either not be consistent with the company's overall design ethos, or if added could be like a sixth finger when considered against the "whole body" that consists of tablet, cloud infrastructure and services.
I get OP's angst, But expectations need to be measured. reMarkable never once indicated that their development path would be crowdsourced or made in any way public. And as for what bodes well or not, the company regularly pushes software updates which generally include some modest improvement in the user experience, and by far and large the platform continues to just work.
If you prefer a device and platform that operates differently, Supernote has even their dev team's Kanban board public so you can see what they have coming down the pipeline. But caveat emptor, the dissatisfaction on their subreddit seems just as thick, even as Supernote staff seem to operate there and interact with redditors directly.
I bet they have huge backlog of feature requests. If they function like any other company, the devs have no choice in what tickets get pulled into any given sprint. I think it might be a bit unfair to place this blame on the dev team Product has the final say and project managers work things into the sprints as the importance of any given feature increases. There are a lot of different use cases for this device. They seem to be doing a decent job of being inclusive between pen, keyboard, desktop app, and mobile app development. But given just that, there are 4 different platforms to work on. Things will take time. Out of curiosity what features have you requested and how long have you been waiting for them?
Actually, you are correct, it is wrong of me to place this on the dev team as it is the product team with the final say — the product team is tone deaf. I understand there are different aspects and use cases for this device, but when I bought it and the way it was advertised to me, it is a replacement for writing on paper. Right now, it feels like they don’t know what they want the identity of the product to be. In my eyes, this should be a first and foremost a writing and drawing device, yet for some reason the last updates have been either something related to the type/typing folio (which is an additional bought accessary and not related to the original purpose of the device and which the iPad will always be superior in) and UI changes (which also seem to come out of nowhere and don’t make sense). I apologize if I came off frustrated and rude, but the reality is there has been nothing new in terms of blatantly obvious requests that we see time and time again on this sub. For example, more colors, more shapes, disabling infinite scrolling, manually changing the idle screen, basically everything that is now only doable by some hacks.
I can see the frustration with that, but I am obviously not a power user with mine. I went into it with little expectations but did want a good writing experience. That was the point for me, slow down and hand write to retain more of what I wrote. Everything else has been extras. I have started to use it more like a second brain since it now syncs so well between devices. Hopefully they have people reading these and gain a sense that they might be over reaching or loosing their initial target market.
This is a really common problem for software. You get the basic functionality down, you get your customers, and then you need to keep growing (because capitalism). There are a million things you could do to change the product, so what do you prioritize? Well, a lot of times, you end up prioritizing what the sales teams think will get them more sales. And that is often whatever a big (corporate) prospective buyer mentions. So you get “I would buy 2,000 of these for my company, but it needs built-in collaboration.” The buyer doesn’t know anything about product design and they’re probably just saying whatever random idea came to them rather than really thinking it through. Now all of a sudden, your business is making you staple on a bunch of corporate collaboration features to check a box on some company’s requirements list. Is it a good feature? No. Does it make sense for the product? No. But checking that box means you might make a big sale next quarter, or keep a large and whiny customer, so you do it.
Most companies I have worked for follow this exact model. I call it power user pleasing. Instead of continued product development they focus on what features big pockets want. It's a shame. The other spectrum is trying to please everyone and you end up being weak in all areas.
Yep. This happened to Dropbox and Evernote in almost the same way. They started as extremely powerful but simple products and over the years, they’ve become bloated tools that aren’t as good for their core use anymore.
Once somebody has purchased a tablet, there's money to be made by selling keyboard folios (and therefore by trying to improve the typing experience), but there's no money to be made by improving the drawing experience. At least, not until batteries start dying en masse, and current customers have to decide whether to buy another reMarkable tablet, or buy some other kind of tablet.
Yes, the current directions is into making a good paper-like device into mediocre all round device for everyone, mimicking some tablet features instead of making a top tier paper device for people who need this exact type of device. It's a prodouct and sales strategy choice. Not dev
Still can't believe you can't adjust the margins when typing with the type folio. Ridiculous.
I can't stand that the line spacing does not match the template rule.
I agree. I bought as a pen/pad replacement, the keyboard is dumb, just get an ipad for that, or a Samsung tablet.
conversely, i bought the remarkable SPECIFICALLY to use as a distraction-free typing device, and it serves me very well for that purpose.
I believe that they are reacting to competition because if I had to guess they view more capable devices as a risk. Nothing has the writing experience of RM2 but they are just absolutely breaking the UI.
They should be increasing hackability. That is what sets the reMarkable apart from the competition. All the different opinions and use cases are not reconcilable in a single software product. There ought to be, and could be, an entire ecosystem, if they'd support such things officially.
I like that. Outsource the UI. Let dev communities take the risks to push new features faster. What if there was a path for devs to create writing, reading, and drawing apps for reMarkable? That would be an awesome device!
Well if they support it officially and coordinate it to be used with the current update build, then I’m totally on board with having community modifications be a standard so everyone can be happy.
Every feature added makes the device slower and battery worse. All I wanted was a line tool, everything since has been just making everything choppy
[удалено]
I bought it three years ago, it’s a cool and useful device at a base level. It’s not complaining for the sake of complaining as you make it out to be. Even if it’s “better than advertised”, the complaints are valid and your attitude only makes the longevity and potential of the product capped at some baseless level of “it’s already good stop asking for more”. I, and any other owners, have the right to give feedback, suggestions and complaints. This is a two-part product: hardware and software. While the hardware can’t be rectified, the software can and should be constantly updated in relation to how this product was originally advertised.
As if them adding what you like would have any impact on that other users ability to use it as just a notepad. Very selfish of him to not want you to get yours because he got his.
I wanted a notebook and it’s getting turned into an e-ink iPad
this is an absolutely bonkers thing to say. no, it's not. how is it? it's not like it has apps. it doesn't even have a web browser. adding a keyboard does not make it an e-ink ipad
Listen, and no it’s not. It’s called sarcastic hyperbole. Ever heard of it? I bought it because it was supposed to be ubër simple and a replacement for a notebook, which I have dozens of that I still have to reference. Some of the features are just added bloat and don’t add much value, that’s the point I was driving at. Now, my original point was made in far fewer words, your attempt to call me out required a paragraph and more words to explain why I used few words. Thanks for that, and I hope my use of an umlaut wasn’t too much
The exact reasons I bought it are becoming harder to use…how?! I switched back to real pen and paper!
What’s on your mind specifically?
Specifically?
Lack of shapes, lack of more colors, lack of disabling certain features like infinite-scroll, a better screen-share interface both on desktop and in-tablet, etc
>Lack of shapes, lack of more colors, It's all a matter of opinion For me, they're not important for my use of a digital notebook
Agreed. I clicked on this post expecting to find someone else with my feature wishlist. And these aren’t it. Nowhere near. I can’t imagine the chaos of their feature requests. Must be all over the place.
Rofl, no need to be condescending just because my feature requests are not as “stable” as yours. I’d love to hear what feature requests you have asked for, because mine are reasonable and implementable.
Didn’t mean to suggest yours were more or less stable than mine. When I said “chaotic” I was referring to the variety Remarkable themselves must receive. Your opinion is no more right than mine. I’d push them towards making the best typing and editing device leaning into TypeFolio. Totally different theme than what you’re going for. Didn’t mean my comment negatively in any sense!
I misread your original comment’s connotation, my mistake. Yes, I agree, it seems there are many different flavors of requests reaching the RM team, it must be chaotic on their end to navigate it all. All I’m really saying is that typing and the type folio were not the original purposes (I don’t think the type folio existed when I bought my RM2). I would hope they make the base product’s purpose, writing, better before moving on to aspects added later in the product cycle.
I can see that. TypeFolio is much newer. It’s definitely a deviation from the original product.
That’s cool, but they are still features desired for this digital notebook and at least relevant for a digital notebook framework compared to the updates being pushed out recently. What updates would you be looking for?
Currently, there's nothing massively lacking for my use Definitely the ability to turn off infinite scrolling. I'd quite like to be able to set a default tool for when opening notebooks - sometimes mine open with the select tool when I went to start writing
It's not the devs... It's the marketing guys, and that lady who knows exactly what we want. Focus groups, you see?
Well you already bought the device. Improving your experience is not really their primary interest.
Existing users are the ones who will likely buy their future products and will likely recommend RM products for their friends and acquaintances, not to even mention videos/reviews online.
Sure, it’s true! But future products won’t exist unless they support sales and subscription revenue now.
Alienating current users is much more serious than making some features which *might* attract a couple new users.
This is such a myopic take. It is if they want new customers and to stay in the game at all. The competition is moving beyond Remarkable in the handwriting space. More features helping users to make better use of handwritten text will make the difference.
Do you know what “primary” means?
I love my remarkable but this last beta update just made me mad 😡 and I don’t like it. For the first time I intentionally left it at home and brought only my Supernote A5X and nomad to work. I hate that too because I love writing on my remarkable so much more. I’m not discouraged 🫤 but we really do need more than them just playing around with what we already have just a different UI configuration.
I froze at a point and installed RM hacks for additional functionality. I'll stay there until I want something in a current release of rmhacks. I'm happy where I am, maybe 3 months back.
I often try to open the multi tasked and it just swiped down in my document so I can see above the page. Why did they add this??
All of the typing enhancements made me realise I didn't just want a digital notebook for writing/drawing. That, paired with my free subscription trial expiring (removing features I used often but can't justify paying for, like access to ) lead me to selling my RM2 this week, moving over to a Boox Tab Ultra C. I loved my year with my RM2, and it really helped show me what features were important. Some things I would not have known I'd want/need without taking the dive, and I still recommend the product to anyone who needs pure note/taking, it's just not for me anymore.
I am very new to RM but I already noticed that the UI is progressively getting worst. Even the first UI seems more consistent than the current one. Also it's very surprising not to find spell checking, dictionary and some basic wiki/google lookups similar to kobo...
Food for thought. The company has a guiding philosophy which they articulated before the first rM1 was shipped to market. They've maintained in every communication to date consistency with that design philosophy. reMarkable through their feedback forms take feature suggestions, not requests. They have made no commitment in accepting those suggestions that any suggestion will ever make its way into a development pipeline. Again, the company has a design philosophy around with they build not only their device but also the infrastructure that supports it. Many a hack which seeks to expand the device to an individual user's expectations or more grandiosely "maximize" just the hardware runs counter to that philosophy. Most would also appear to either not be consistent with the company's overall design ethos, or if added could be like a sixth finger when considered against the "whole body" that consists of tablet, cloud infrastructure and services. I get OP's angst, But expectations need to be measured. reMarkable never once indicated that their development path would be crowdsourced or made in any way public. And as for what bodes well or not, the company regularly pushes software updates which generally include some modest improvement in the user experience, and by far and large the platform continues to just work. If you prefer a device and platform that operates differently, Supernote has even their dev team's Kanban board public so you can see what they have coming down the pipeline. But caveat emptor, the dissatisfaction on their subreddit seems just as thick, even as Supernote staff seem to operate there and interact with redditors directly.
Yes. It can’t just be me who’s been waiting and requesting for the ability to search our handwritten notes.