Thought this was interesting. Turns out there are things you can’t do with the Apple Pencil, things that actually require your finger.
You cannot access edge gestures like Notification Center or Control Center. Swiping with your Apple Pencil from the top or bottom of the screen does nothing. You’ll need to use your finger if you want to access these edge gestures.
There’s no technical reason for this, of course — it’s a deliberate design decision by Apple.
Fascinating.
Makes perfect sense. It is an accessory for a particular purpose, not the primary mean to interact with the OS. And if you are drawing, you can use the entire surface without triggering some jerky interface madness unintentionally.
Yep, I’m in support of this design decision. Drawing around the edges of the canvas shouldn’t trigger any UI side-swipe gestures. Something that third-party styluses can’t prevent.
I like the fact that every time I “shake to undo” the iPad Pro my Apple Watch registers it as a workout 🙂
This might be the Pencil’s best feature.
All of the things that come out from the edges are just for tech bloggers. For real people, we trigger these things by accident as we go about getting our work done. They are a gigantic pain in the ass.
There is no reason that these things have to be there. Consider that when you double-press the home button to get the app switcher, there is plenty of room there to put the Control Center at the bottom and the first few notifications of Notification Center at the top, and even the multitasking launcher can be there at right. If you want the launcher, you press the home button once. If you want anything other than the launcher, you double-press the home button. That divides the user interface into easy press-once use for everyone, and tech bloggers who can double-press to get their little geegaws and toys. My father-in-law, for example, would never use the double-press and never miss it.
It is very telling that Apple had to essentially backtrack on these edge features when they did the pencil. It’s like admitting that the slide-out drawers are terrible user interface. The same reasons they are bad for Pencil users are the reasons they are bad for finger users. They are out of context, intrusive, hardly ever need to be used, and yet they can be triggered accidentally again and again so easily, to where you are triggering them accidentally much more than deliberately.
Yeah, but many of us also draw with our fingers on iOS. And we also play musical instruments with our fingers on iOS. How are we supposed to stop “triggering some jerky interface madness unintentionally?”
Neither should drawing around the canvas with your finger. Or tapping a piano key near the edge of a canvas with your finger. But unfortunately it does. Fixing this only for Pencil users is a half-assed approach that is sadly typical of today’s Apple.