Filip Brož I never got a taste for traditional styluses, if only because the control of the iPhone or iPad and the whole iOS was never adapted to such tools, a finger was enough for everything. On the other hand, I have never made a living from graphic or creative work where I understood the need to use a stylus. However, I occasionally sketched or sketched something for a note, so when a stylus came my way from time to time, I tried it.
I started with the now old iPad 2 and no-name touchscreen pens, which were predictably terrible. The stylus was rather unresponsive and the user experience was such that I dropped the pencil again. After some time, I already tried significantly better products from Belkin or Adonit Jot.
They already offered a more meaningful use, drawing a simpler picture or sketch with them or sketching a graph was not a problem. In many cases, however, the problem was with applications that did not understand anything other than the human finger, and the iron of the styluses themselves had limits.
The company FiftyThree was the first to stir up the relatively stagnant waters - also due to the fact that Apple had logically rejected a stylus for its products for a long time. She first succeeded with the sketching application Paper, and then sent it to the market massive carpenter's pencil Pencil specifically designed for the iPad. As soon as I got the Pencil in my hand, I immediately felt that it was something better than what I had been able to draw with on the iPad before.
Especially in the well-optimized Paper app, the Pencil's responsiveness was great, and the display on the Pencil responded exactly as it needed to. It was of course also possible to use it in other applications, but it was not always so smooth.
Nevertheless, FiftyThree bet on an almost unprecedented design - instead of the thinnest possible product, they created a really massive pencil that fits very well in the hand. Not everyone liked this design, but Pencil found many fans. You got a simple pencil without buttons in your hand, with a tip on one side and a rubber on the other, and while drawing, the feeling of holding a real pencil was really faithful.
Pencil from FiftyThree was very good at shading, blurring and writing. I myself had a bit of a problem with the sometimes too soft tip, reminiscent of a felt-tip pen, but here it depends mainly on the use of each user. Thus, Pencil was a good companion for my occasional creative games.
Apple Pencil enters the scene
After a few months, however, Apple introduced the large iPad Pro and, together with it, the Apple Pencil. On the giant display, it was clearly offered for painters to paint, draftsmen to draw or graphic artists to sketch. Since I ended up getting a large iPad Pro, given my history with styluses, I was also logically interested in the new Apple Pencil. After all, original accessories often work best with Apple products.
Due to the initial very poor availability everywhere in the world, I only touched the Pencil in the store at first. However, I was very interested in the first meeting there. Then when I finally bought it and tried it for the first time in the system's Notes, I knew right away that I couldn't find a more responsive stylus on the iPad.
Just as FiftyThree's Pencil is built especially for the Pencil app, Apple's Notes system has been fine-tuned to work with the Pencil to perfection. The experience of writing on the iPad with the Apple Pencil in exactly the same way as if you were writing with a regular pencil on paper is simply unique.
Those who have never worked with a stylus on touch devices probably cannot imagine the difference when the line on the iPad exactly follows the movement of your pencil, versus when the stylus has even a slight delay. In addition, the Apple Pencil also works great for actions such as highlighting, when you only need to press the tip, and on the contrary, for a weaker line, you can relax and draw exactly as needed.
However, you would get bored with just the Notes app very soon. Moreover, for most users, creating more meaningful content, it is not even enough. Therefore, it is important that the developers of the most popular graphic applications, including the already mentioned Paper, have begun to adapt their applications for the Apple Pencil. The positive thing about this is that FiftyThree did not try to push their own product at all costs, although the apple pencil is definitely in their hands.
However, applications such as Evernote, Pixelmator or Adobe Photoshop have also been optimized for Pencil, and their number is increasing. Which is only a good thing, because using the Pencil in incompatible apps can very quickly make you feel like you're holding that nameless stylus mentioned at the beginning. Delayed reactions, a non-functioning change in pressure of the tip or not recognizing a resting wrist are clear symptoms that you will not work with the Pencil in this application.
As I already mentioned, I'm not a painter or a draftsman myself, but I did find a handy tool in Pencil. I really liked the Notability application, which I use especially for annotating texts. Pencil is perfect for this, when I manually add notes to classic text or just underline. The experience is the same as on physical paper, but now I have everything electronically.
However, if, unlike me, you are serious about drawing and graphic design, you cannot do without Procreate. It is a very capable graphic tool that is also used by artists at Disney. The main strength of the application lies primarily in working with layers in combination with high resolution up to 16K by 4K. In Procreate you will also find up to 128 brushes and many editing tools. Thanks to this, you are able to create practically anything.
In Pixelmator, which on the iPad has developed into a similarly capable tool as on the Mac, you can use the Apple Pencil well as a brush and a tool for retouching or adjusting the overall exposure.
In short, the Apple Pencil is a great piece of hardware for which the aforementioned thesis that Apple products often come with the best Apple accessories is 100% true. The icing on the cake is the fact that when you put the Pencil on the table, the weight always turns it so that you can see the company logo, and at the same time, the pencil never rolls off.
Apple Pencil and Pencil by FiftyThree show how the same thing can be approached with a different philosophy. While the latter company went for a massive design, Apple, on the other hand, stuck to its traditional minimalism, and you can easily mistake its pencil for any classic one. Unlike the competing Pencil, the Apple Pencil does not have an eraser, which many users miss.
Instead, the upper part of the pencil is removable, under the lid is Lightning, which you can connect the Apple Pencil either to the iPad Pro, or via the adapter to the socket. This is how the Pencil charges, and just fifteen seconds of charging is enough for up to thirty minutes of drawing. When you fully charge the Apple Pencil, it lasts up to twelve hours. Pairing also takes place via Lightning, where you don't have to deal with traditional shortcomings, e.g. the Bluetooth interface, and you just plug the pencil into the iPad Pro and you're done.
We mention the iPad Pro (large and small) specifically because the Apple Pencil does not yet work with another iPad. In the iPad Pro, Apple deployed a completely new display technology, including a touch subsystem that scans the Pencil signal 240 times per second, thereby obtaining twice as many data points as when operating with a finger. This is also why the apple pencil is so precise.
With a price tag of 2 crowns, the Apple Pencil is twice as expensive as the Pencil by FiftyThree, but this time there is not much to talk about: the Apple Pencil is the king among iPad (Pro) styluses. After years of experimenting with different products from all sorts of manufacturers, I finally got a perfectly tuned piece of hardware that gets along with the software as well as possible. And that's the most important thing.
Although I'm not a great graphic artist or painter, in a few months I got used to Pencil in combination with iPad Pro so much that it has become a permanent part of my workflow. Many times I control the entire system with a pencil in my hand, but mainly I learned to perform a lot of activities, such as annotating texts or editing photos, just with the pencil and without it the experience is no longer the same.
Nice article with which I agree in the sense of a great Pencil.
thank you, very nice article, it will help in making a decision.
Thanks, quality article :)
A quality article, but for me, paradoxically, it would be better not to read it, because I again find myself in a situation where I want something for which I do not have the means. I can only mischievously declare that I feel sorry for chronic pencil chewers. In this case, the crunch will be a bit expensive for them ;)
I use an Apple pencil to study - I write down notes, draw graphs (economics)... I always have notes with me thanks to OneNote, and my friends can't believe that what I wrote in OneNote I wrote on the iPad :)