Apple Pencil is even mightier
Digital scribbling advances
wIth all iPad models now supporting one of the two versions of the Pencil, it’s no surprise that iPadOS reinforces the pairing. What is surprising is how much software tweaks have improved the immediacy of the Pencil.
Among the factors that conspire against digital scribbling feeling exactly like the real thing, a tricky one to eliminate is latency: when you touch a pencil or pen tip to paper, it makes a mark in real time, but on a screen there’s a tiny delay.
Reducing that delay is primarily a hardware challenge, but it turns out there was some room for improvement in the operating system too. Using the Pencil 2 on the latest iPad Pros, iOS 12 achieved a latency of 20 milliseconds; iPadOS cuts this to nine.
“Our goal is to have it be indistinguishable from making marks on a physical piece of paper,” said Federighi.
SCREEN SWIPE
iPadOS also enhances the default tools for marking up images and documents. You can take a screen grab by swiping up from the bottom left or right corner of the screen with the Pencil. This is a blessed relief from the hardware button combinations that have always been as likely to result in turning off or dropping the device as getting a screenshot. Even better, when grabbing a web page, document or email, you can choose to create a Scan image of the whole thing, not just the part currently on screen. The Markup tools then appear for you to add annotations, and they’re now in a floating palette, with a pixel eraser (to remove precise areas rather than whole strokes) and ruler added.