sjleworthy
macrumors 68000
do you think the Pencil will be able to be used as a regular non-funcion stylus on other ipads and apps that aren't Pencil activated on the Pro?
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Apple Pencil
- Thread starter The Game 161
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engineerben
macrumors regular
Apps that aren't specifically pencil-ready on the Pro? Almost certainly. I imagine IOS passes through Pencil taps and drags as normal IOS events to those apps. Other iPads? Don't know - it depends on what the capacitance profile of the tip is. I'd kinda lean toward no on that one, but we'll know for sure in a few weeks.
Krevnik
macrumors 601
The bold is certainly true, look at UITouch now that the 9.1 docs are available to browse without a dev account.
The other, I wouldn't bet money, myself...
Mac 128
macrumors 603
I tend to agree. The pressure sensitivity, line thickness, etc. won't likely work, as well as any of the other collaborative software functions.
hovscorpion12
macrumors 68040
The iPad Pro's display has sensors that detect the pencil vs fingers something not found on the previous iPads. For your second question, the Apple Pencil is a basic stylus that is made by Apple with no dedicated software functionality. The "Apple Pencil activation" is the app updating to support the pressure sensitivity and other pencil functionality for drawings and precision.. Apple Pencil will be able to be used to write out your iMessages, Emails, Safari, Pages, Keynotes...etc with the 3rd party handwriting keyboard in the App Store. Also on Apple's Apple Pencil Page, you can see the apple used.
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Krevnik
macrumors 601
It won't. The catch here is that UITouch drives all inputs. Gestures analyze them to detect scrolling, tapping, etc. So long as it is using UITouch, existing apps can literally write no code, and the pencil will simply act like a finger in that app.
And yes, if you want access to the pressure sensitivity, and the like, you get to do that yourself. But considering apps like Paper, OneNote, Noteshelf, etc all have their own ink engines already, as the developer, you are mostly feeding those extra inputs into your engine. If your engine doesn't support pressure/etc, well, that's still a problem. But an app like Paper which already does at least some of this for their own stylus, shouldn't have too much trouble integrating this data into their existing engine. Other developers will need to improve their existing ink engine to add this functionality if they want to support it.
Apple is only providing access to the input via the UITouch. The developer is on their own on how to interpret it.
on others ipads it will not work...the latency will be too big the display from ipad pro is made for the tip of pencil
Hardly the former. It's 12 hours no matter what the pencil is doing. Idle or working. I'm on my second pencil since I thought my first one was bad. But I am experiencing the same thing. Since the pencil has no off switch, the battery drains regardless if it is being used or sitting on your desk.
Charge the battery to 100 percent and by night, with no use, I'm down to 10 percent. Other folks say their experience is different. It's possible that I have a second bad one, and maybe there are bad batches?
Seems to me Apple could have built in an off switch. Otherwise the alternative is to turn off BT and then reconnect the pencil after turning BT back on.
It should go to sleep when it hasn't transmitted anything for a bit. If the pencil moves just a tiny bit it wakes up to communicate with your iPad.
Is it possible your pencil moves a lot when not being used?