> Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable?

It glitches more than I can list within the comment length limit. The highlights are:

- Glitchy panning and zooming (they're extremely glitchy by themselves and can't be done together)

- Ineffective palm rejection. No matter whether with or without a sleeve between hand and display, it always wants to zoom or pan, which takes forever to settle down. I am aware of the touch lock, but find it too cumbersome to be acceptable. Well, maybe if that was the only issue.

- Slow eraser. You have to rub around forever for it to register all strokes you want to erase. I don't know what kind of galaxy brain shit they're doing to manage this because Squid, a different note app, registers it perfectly on the same device.

- Limited canvas. You can have the canvas be something like 2x the height of the device. Well great.

- All kinds of issues with rotation and zoom (kind of important on the smaller models, no?). The right half of the canvas not being usable, strokes being misaligned with strokes, rotation being wrong after switching apps ... I finally went all Bill O'Reilly ("Fuck it, fuckin' thing sucks") when it permanently misaligned my content from the template.

There have also been instances in which it just wouldn't register any strokes until after restarting the app. The app also can't be started without using the official Onyx Launcher, which I don't (there's not only no icon for it, as far as I found there's no Activity you could call).

What a disappointment. I have watched reviews and read opinions online and apparently nobody thought to mention how terrible that app is (thanks for the latency measurements, though). I've considered having a faulty device, but really, all the strokes register fine, all the other apps work perfectly.

> Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use

Hard to be worse than the Boox Note app :-)

I dislike OneNote enough that I'm probably not going to use it (notebooks metaphor, weird cloud stuff), but wow, what a difference. At least it doesn't have any of these show-stopper bugs. It's like they've actually started it and used it once.

The way Onyx implemented the scribble mode indeed looks a bit on the low-effort side regarding the stroke thickness and style, but for how much of a hack it is (I assume they can't actually properly hook into the app itself), how reliably it works is pretty impressive.

Fun fact about that scribble mode (what enables the low-latency pen input): It keeps working until the app that enabled it also disables it again, so if you exit an app using it in the right way, it stays on and you can draw anywhere. The downside is that the screen doesn't refresh by itself anymore, so you better have a manual refresh gesture set up or you'll probably have to reboot to fix it.

Apps can also enable and disable the mode from the background. This means that you can basically enable scribble mode for all apps without even needing any special privileges. The issue is, however, that the screen stops refreshing after a stroke after a few minutes (responsibility of the app controlling scribble mode. Presumably it eventually gets suspended ("allow running in background" is enabled). I would be happy about suggestions for how this could be solved (I haven't been able to transfer the logic to a background service presumably because of surface/context issues).

If you've read this far, you may be interested in joining a Discord community of (more technical) Boox users: https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd