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Posts tagged with "iPad Pro"

The Pen Addict’s Apple Pencil Review

Of all the Apple Pencil reviews I’ve read over the past few weeks, very few of them offered examples of actual handwriting – which is perfectly understandable, as most of us don’t use physical pens and pencils for writing anymore.

This is why I recommend reading Myke Hurley’s review of the Pencil for The Pen Addict – he knows what he’s talking about:

The second issue these weights attempt to solve is to stop your Pencil rolling off your desk. The Pencil is completely cylindrical – there are no flat edges and no clip – so it’s prone to fall victim to gravity and non-level work spaces. But with the weights inside the Pencil, as soon as you set it down, it rolls a little and then stops itself. The weights appear to have been designed to balance it and take over. In most instances this works out great, but I have observed that if you place the Pencil down with any force, say if it is not gently put down on a desk, but maybe dropped from a few inches (I love my implements, but I use them too…), the Pencil will likely roll a couple of times in the process.

When this happens the weights actually seem to give it momentum, and will propel it forward further and faster than it would have otherwise. Each time as the Pencil turns, it acts against itself as it is moving to quickly to balance, and on it goes, off the table.

Myke makes some good points in his review, which I haven’t seen anywhere else.

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Serenity Caldwell on Apple Pencil

From Serenity Caldwell’s first thoughts on the Apple Pencil:

It says something that Apple doesn’t ship the Pencil with a “settings” app. Wacom does. So does Microsoft. Even some third-party styluses have preferences for adjusting your pressure choices.

Normally I would be annoyed by this. Everyone draws differently, and everyone’s used to pressing against the screen in a different way.

But you know what? I agree with the company here. Apple is essentially saying: This is a tool, just like your HB pencil. You can’t tell your HB pencil you want it to make lighter strokes. You have to learn how to use it. You have to trust it.

Serenity has been drawing digitally for over 16 years. She’s been waiting for the Pencil for a long time, and I can’t wait to see what she creates.

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“A Fundamental Point of Interface”

From Tony Chambers’ interview with Jony Ive on the Apple Pencil:

I think there’s a potential to confuse the role of the Pencil with the role of your finger in iOS, and I actually think it’s very clear the Pencil is for making marks, and the finger is a fundamental point of interface for everything within the operating system. And those are two very different activities with two very different goals.

So we are very clear in our own minds that this will absolutely not replace the finger as a point of interface. But it is, and I don’t think anybody would argue, a far better tool than your finger when your focus becomes exclusively making marks. The traditional pencil could have been replaced by a dish of powdered charcoal, which you dipped your finger into to make marks with. And that didn’t happen.

The interview also has some interesting thoughts by Ive on avoiding to model the Pencil after specific physical tools.

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Apple Highlights Apps and Games Updated for iPad Pro

In yesterday’s weekly refresh of the App Store’s front page, Apple launched a new section highlighting apps updated to support the iPad Pro with design optimizations and new features.

Creativity and productivity soar when you pair great apps with iPad Pro. We’ve compiled some of our favorites that take advantage of its expansive Retina display and astounding performance. On iPad Pro, everything from drawing to multitasking to watching videos is a stunning experience.

The section is organized in six sub-categories, each grouping apps that have been updated with integrations for specific iPad Pro and iOS 9 features, such as ‘Enhanced for Apple Pencil’, ‘Powerful Multitasking’, or ‘Desktop-Class Apps’. Featured apps include well-known names such as Evernote, 1Password, Slack, and OmniGroup apps, but also apps from smaller indie studio like Numerics (which takes advantage of the Pencil in an interesting way), LiquidText, Curator, and Workflow.

With the exception of Apple Pencil, apps featured by Apple in this section don’t have access to iOS features that are exclusive to the iPad Pro, and they’re not iPad Pro-only apps. Instead, Apple is highlighting apps that optimize for the iPad Pro’s hardware and bigger screen to augment existing iOS 9 functionalities. Thanks to the 12.9-inch display, multitasking on the iPad Pro is more powerful than its counterpart on the iPad Air 2; with the four speaker audio system, video apps can be more immersive.

In a separate section, Apple is also highlighting games for iPad Pro – which include titles like The Room Three, Broken Age, and Geometry Wars 3. You can find the section here.


“Why the iPad Pro Needs Xcode”

Steve Streza, writing on the state of some iPad apps and developers stretching their iPhone UIs for the big screen:

App developers don’t feel this pain as much, because they’re not living on iPad. For 8+ hours a day, they’re stuck using Xcode on a Mac. They aren’t living and breathing the idioms and design patterns of great iPad apps. Instead they’re stuck on Macs, usually sitting on desks with mice or trackpads, using a very underpowered and unwieldy iPad simulator, to build apps you touch with your hands on the couch.

Xcode running directly on the iPad Pro could fix many of those problems. You now have a tablet powerful enough to run an IDE, with a very nice keyboard cover, and a screen big enough to encompass all the functionality of Xcode, capable of testing almost every feature of every iOS device ever made. You can code with your keyboard and test with multitouch. You could work on a desk and take your whole development environment with you on the couch, bed, or plane.

I couldn’t agree more with all the points mentioned by Steve, especially about the potential benefits in education. As I wrote yesterday, the iPad Pro’s hardware demands to be used by new kinds of apps. This includes Apple.

Fortunately, I want to believe there’s some hope here. Over the past few months, I’ve personally heard about an iPad Pro version of Xcode in early stages, being demoed internally at Apple. I don’t know if this will ever actually happen, but it sure would make for a nice surprise at WWDC next year.

My fingers are crossed.

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‘The Start of Something New’

Great piece by Ben Bajarin on the iPad Pro, with an important section in the middle on the mobile generation (which is often unaccounted for in a lot of product reviews):

There is truly something happening with this generation growing up spending the bulk, if not all, of their computing time using mobile operating systems and doing new things with new tools. Being the techie that I am, I was a bit disheartened that my twelve-year-old was getting more out of the iPad Pro and pushing it further limits than I was. But she is a part of the mobile generation after all. For them, the future will look quite different and the tools they use to make that future might look quite similar to the iPad Pro.

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Connected: The iPad Pro Review

Federico talks to Myke and Stephen about the iPad Pro.

On this week’s Connected, we prepared a special episode to discuss my iPad Pro review, how I’ve been using the device for the past week, and what we expect from it going forward. It’s a good one. You can listen here.

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Jony Ive on the Apple Pencil

I liked this bit from The Telegraph’s Rhiannon Williams interview with Jony Ive on the Apple Pencil:

“I always like when you start to use something with a little less reverence. You start to use it a little carelessly, and with a little less thought, because then, I think, you’re using it very naturally. What I’ve enjoyed is when I’m just thinking, holding the Pencil as I would my pen with a sketchpad and I just start drawing,” he enthuses.

“When you start to realise you’re doing that without great intent and you’re just using it for the tool that it is, you realise that you’ve crossed over from demoing it and you’re actually starting to use it. As you cross that line, that’s when it actually feels the most powerful.”

Something I noticed I’ve started doing since having the Pencil: when I was editing my review, I kept playing with the Pencil as a distraction, and I even occasionally used it to highlight words on screen instead of reaching to it with my finger (the iPad Pro was held upright by the Smart Keyboard) – just like I’d normally point to something with a real pencil. It does feel familiar.

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