Last December, Apple announced that hover would be added to the Pencil’s bag of tricks. It may sound like a minor update to non-artists, but it represents a significant addition to your workflow. Digital drawing is more forgiving than real-world drawing when it comes to correcting errors, but stopping and starting is still a very frustrating aspect that can ultimately hinder the creative process. .
Hover adds the ability to preview lines before committing to a piece. By hovering the Pencil 2 up to 12mm above the new iPad Pro (Apple says it’s the M2 that enables this feature, so limited hardware options), the system Provides a preview of line and line width and color. Select a drawing tool in your markup.
“The pencil is emitting signals that the iPad interprets to know where the tip of the pencil is in 3D and at what angle it is held,” said Apple’s director of input experiences. Leslie Ikemoto told TechCrunch. “It gets more complicated the further away you are from the screen, but I did a lot of research on how you hold your pencil when you are resting and how you hold it when you are painting. Our process shows that we can detect these signals even from 12 mm away.”
Savage Interactive, creators of the graphics editing and digital painting app Procreate for iOS/iPadOS, seemed particularly bullish when the product was released. At the time, CEO James Cuda said: I think that kind of thing makes a big difference especially if your app is iPad/iPhone only.
“The iPad is first and foremost a touch-first device. You are the one holding this glass,” says Steven Tonna, director of product marketing for the platform. “Adding different accessories, such as keyboards and trackpads, unlocks different features.
iPadOS 16.4 arrived this morning with even more refinements in the form of Tilt and Azimuth. Tilt effectively sounds like it. Azimuth is new to me (and so is our staff his designer Bryce). Considering how bad I was at geometry in high school, I do the most high school semester paper thing I’ve ever done on TechCrunch, citing Oxford Languages dictionaries.
The direction of a celestial body as seen by an observer. Expressed as the angular distance from a point north or south of the horizon to the point where a vertical circle through the celestial body intersects the horizon.
Image credit: apple
These tools are open to developers looking to build on top of existing Pencil functionality. “If you look at Procreate, there is a pencil brush that is small and thin when perpendicular to the display and wide when tilted for shading,” says Ikemoto. “Procreate can use tilt and azimuth to render the exact contours of the marks you make when you put your pencil brush down. This is a huge accelerator for users.”
The company got into the tablet stylus game about 7.5 years ago, announcing the first Pencil alongside the original iPad Pro. The Pencil 2, meanwhile, came three years later with the third-generation Pro, bringing wireless magnetic charging to the table. Of course, Apple doesn’t comment on roadmaps or developments regarding new or upcoming features. But in addition to the aforementioned research, the company says the update is based on user feedback. After all, artists are often a specific collective, working on specific workflows that have been developed over time.
“We are always listening to customer feedback,” says Tonna. “One of the key parts of building a great product is taking that feedback and listening to what’s going on. We see it, we love it, we go further. We listen.”
Functionality is made available to developers through various APIs. “We wanted to make the hover as easy to adapt as possible, so we used the existing APIs that the Magic Keyboard trackpad used,” he adds Ikemoto. “It’s a UI pointer interaction and a UI hover recognizer. Developers who already adopt UI pointer interactions in their apps will get Apple Pencil hover for free without doing anything. It will work. Developers wanting a more custom experience can use the UI Hover Gesture Recognizer, which can be extended to report the position of the pencil tip in 3D and also the angle at which the pencil is held.”
Unsurprisingly, Procreate is an early recipient of new technology. “I’ve been really excited about the possibility of the Apple Pencil hovering since it launched,” Procreate Chief Product Officer Claire d’Este said in her TechCrunch comments. .
However, the company told TechCrunch that drawing and painting on iPad isn’t a more popular activity for pencils than handwriting. Hover functionality also works in various apps such as Notes and Safari. Access tools and preview features similar to those found in places like Procreate.
“I can put this device on the table and take notes during the lecture, and when the lecture is over I can put it in the Magic Keyboard,” says Tona. “You can use your keyboard to write your term papers. […] Paste your handwritten notes directly onto paper and they will be converted to typed text. ”
Working on product lines always involves a fair amount of dogfooding. For Pencil, that means making sure there are some amateur his artists on the team and actually using any new feature added to the line before rolling it out broadly to developers and users.
“The team comes to Inktober every October and draws and draws a different concept each day,” says Ikemoto. “Inktober is a big event in the artist community. Like ‘plants’, there is a daily published word and everyone draws and draws plants. A great way to share that artwork with the whole team. ”
The new iPadOS 16.4 also brings Safari Web App Push Notifications for the home screen, 21 new emojis and a host of bug fixes.
