Today is the day of the Apple Pencil

I have the iPad pro for just over a week now and loving it. I’m still waiting for a case I ordered from Amazon to arrive. I really do need to have my iPad Pro in the case so that I can feel comfortable with carrying it around the house. I hate the idea of dropping it and breaking it and I’m tempted to go into the local stores later today and see if I can find one of those neoprene slip in cases. It would be handy if I could have something that would allow storage of the Apple Pencil also. During the week I have done some drawing in application Procreate using my old Wacom creative stylus. I’m expecting great things from the Apple Pencil and I’ve just this minute had another message in from Apple on my Apple Watch informing me of the arrival. In the past I have had Wacom creative tablets including the Cintiq. That advice was pretty good but it seemed a little bit small for what I wanted to do. The thing was, that the point for drawing was not quite underneath the stylus and I could never quite get used to it. According to all of the reports I’ve heard so far about the Apple Pencil in conjunction with the iPad Pro, it is a much better experience. I can’t wait to test out the pressure sensitivity for controlling the width of the lines.

IPad Pro and Astropad Graphics Tablet Software

Some ex-engineers from Apple made Astropad which allows you to use your iPad like a drawing tablet. I tried it out with the iPad I had previously and I didn’t really like it that much. I’m thinking I should give it a bit more of a try, now that I have the iPad Pro. I have heard a number of people using it with the new iPad and loving it. It could be it has improved since I used and it also could just be that it works better with a larger device. I seem to remember also I was a little bit put off by the price, €50 is what I remember but it looks like it might be cheaper now. Anyway, I have reinstalled it and get a proper try later on – after I have my new Apple Pencil in my hand.

Using the iPad Pro

One of the big things with iOS 9 and also with the iPad is the multitasking. That thing where you can slide in from the right-hand side of the screen and see another application running. You can just about have 2 applications running at the full size of the smaller iPad on the screen of the iPad Pro. It’s a really handy thing if you want to keep an eye on what’s going on with Twitter or Facebook while you are working on something else. It’s also useful if you want to have a window open for some research in Safari while you are doing some writing work in your text editor of choice. My favourite text editor is still Byword I use on both OS X and also on iOS.

Even though I’m still waiting for the Apple Pencil to arrive I’ve been keen to use iColorama and Procreate to do some artwork. It is nice to have the extra space. Procreate is fully updated to use with the iPad Pro. The developer of iColorama has promised an update to the application really soon. Yesterday I wanted to do a blog post and use just the iPad Pro to do it. I used Siri dictation into Day One, to begin with and then moved into Byword because the text was bigger and better for the editing. I exported out of that application using the HTML export feature and put it into Blogsy. I was then able to easily add an image to the post. I wanted to get my hands on the embed code for a video from YouTube and I got annoyed because every time I tried to open it in Safari it took me to the YouTube application. From the YouTube application I could get a URL for the video but I couldn’t get the embed code. I’ll have to have a look into that further to see if there is a possible way of doing this. So I just about did everything within iOS for blogging and it worked out very well indeed. Siri dictation is not quite as accurate as the dictation I get when using DragonDictate on my Mac. Even so, it was still pretty accurate and I didn’t have to do too much more in the way of editing than I would have had to do on the Mac.