An iPad Professional displaying designs for the digital shadow of the Apple Pencil Professional
In a uncommon interview, key Apple designers reveal why they gave the brand new Apple Pencil that digital shadow, and the way it’s a part of their general purpose for the iPad Professional.
If an iPad Professional person is hand writing on the gadget, the Apple Pencil Professional seems to throw a shadow that appears like a fountain pen. Or if the person is portray, the shadow is of a paintbrush.
That is solely one thing Apple would do due to its obsessive consideration to element. However now Apple’s Steve Lemay, accountable for human/machine interplay, says it wasn’t simply finished as a result of it appeared good.
“Prior to now, we needed to rely by yourself reminiscence [of which tool you had selected,” said Lemay to French technology site Numerama (in translation). “We have imagined a digital shadow to make you feel like you are holding a real pencil. This convinces you that it is a sheet of paper.”
Lemay also said that just adding haptic feedback to the new Pencil “was one of the most difficult things.” It required the Apple Design Studio to “rethink the entire architecture [of the Apple Pencil].”
Making the iPad Professional thinner was additionally troublesome, say the designers, however one among them, Molly Anderson, referred to as it the primary precedence for the gadget.
“Portability is at the heart of the iPad experience,” mentioned Anderson. “In 2010, our design intention with the first iPad was to create a sheet of magical glass, a sheet of digital paper [and we] have never been so close to this original idea.”
Anderson additionally says that attending to this way took iterating by way of many alternative designs — and doing so in collaboration. “Our habit is to meet people in the studio,” she mentioned, “to put models on the table, sketches on the walls”