The Dory Sign is E ink, smart screen simplicity at its finest

Dory Sign is a small E Ink display designed to improve a simple sign while keeping its core purpose: clear, delightful communication. The sign is easy on the eyes because it does not use bright lighting. Updates are controlled through a free iOS or Android app that does not require sharing email or a name. The app provides separate editing areas for header, main text, and footer text, plus options to add an image and choose a background. Multiple people can make changes, and communication to the sign happens via Bluetooth. The app includes preloaded images and backgrounds, and it also supports uploading custom images. Text styling includes multiple typefaces and adjustable size, spacing, and color.

"Dory is a small sign that, like many E Ink displays, is easy on the eyes because it doesn't use bright lighting. You control what the sign displays through a free iOS or Android app that doesn't force you to share your email or name to use it. The app has clear sections for editing the header text, main text, and footer text, adding an image, and choosing a background. It also allows more than one person to make changes to the display and communicates to the sign through Bluetooth."

"Many gadgets marketed as being "smart" make me wonder if they would be better off dumb. Some examples are smart TVs that insist on sending your activities to businesses to track you, smart fridges that use the Internet to cycle through ads, smart gym equipment that won't work offline, smart toothbrushes whose batteries drain too quickly, or virtually any gadget that forces you to use a minimally effective or otherwise unimpressive app."

"You can upload your your own image or background, but the app comes with a decent range of preloaded images, like animals, flowers, and illustrations, and preloaded backgrounds, including ones that look like brush strokes or marble and more detailed ones, like a landscape. You don't have to spend a lot of time designing the sign, but if you want to get creative, the app has six different typefaces for text and sliders for text size, line height, letter spacing, and text color (which makes text darker or lighter)."

Read at Ars Technica