Tag: Apple Pencil

Tales from the Orchard: What would Steve Jobs think of today’s Apple?

 

Originally posted on ZDNet

Steve Jobs was never one to leave anyone in any doubt as to what was on his mind, and thanks to hundreds of hours of keynotes, speeches, and interviews, we can get an insight into what he might think about the current state of the company he founded.

 

Still no next big thing

“One more thing…” — Steve Jobs

No quote excited Apple fans than this one. Those three simple words launched a number of world-changing Apple products.

 

Lack of focus

“Focusing is about saying ‘No.'” — Steve Jobs

The iPhone started out as a simple idea — a device that reinvented the smartphone. All a buyer needed to do was decide how much storage capacity they needed — 4, 8, or 16 gigabytes — and they were an iPhone owner.

Jump forward a decade and buyers are faced with eight different iPhones in numerous storage capacities and finishes.

 

AirPods

 

“The problem with Bluetooth headphones is that it’s not just recharging your iPod, you have to recharge your headphones too. People hate it. There are quality issues — the bandwidth isn’t high enough, and even if it does get there some day, people don’t want to recharge their headphones.” — Steve Jobs

While there’s little doubt that Bluetooth is now more than capable of delivering crystal clear audio, Apple’s solution to how to charge the AirPods would have no doubt upset Jobs. Not only do AirPod owners need to pop the AirPods into a case to charge, they also have to remember to charge up the case itself!

Dongles, dongles, and more dongles

 

“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” — Steve Jobs

Apple is clearly on a mission to simplify its Mac lineup, and one way it wants to do that is by eliminating as many ports as possible and standardizing on a single port where possible, as it has done with the new MacBook Pro.

Problem is, while one port might work for the iPhone and iPad, when it comes to a computer it’s a real pain, and it forces many users to carry with them an array of different dongles and accessories (such as this Satechi Type-C USB 3.0 3-in-1 combo hub) in order to be able to get work done.

Dumb solutions to simple problems

 

“You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog s— for frosting.” — Steve Jobs

Apple employs some of the smartest people on the planet, and the company is capable of doing wonderful things.

But it’s also come out with some howlers. For example, the battery case for the iPhone that has a charging indicator on the inside where you can’t see it. Or a rechargeable mouse that has the charging port on the bottom. Or a rechargeable pencil that has a tiny cap that’s easily lost.

These are just the sort of design howlers that you don’t expect from Apple.

Bogged down iOS

 

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs

When the iPhone was unveiled a decade ago the operating system (then called iPhone OS, the iOS name didn’t appear until 2010) was sleek and simple. Everything was a couple of taps away and the user interface was intuitive and a snap to use.

Fast-forward a decade and things have changed dramatically. While iOS 11 retains some of the look and feel of the early iPhone OS, Apple has bolted on, shoehorned in, and otherwise added to the mobile operating system so much that the once elegant and streamlined platform has become a kludgy and awkward mess.

Notification panels and popups litter the interface, gaining access to often-needed features now require users to memorize a number of different gestures, and the Settings app is now a mess to rival the Windows Control Panel at its worst.

Siri is still so dumb

 

“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” — Steve Jobs

Apple acquired the technology behind its Siri voice assistant back in 2010 and integrated the technology into the iPhone 4S in late 2011, and since then it has spread from the iPhone to the iPad and the Mac.

But over that time Siri has gone from being “Wow!” to “Meh.” Put Siri in a room with Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Now and you quickly discover just how dumb and gimmicky Siri actually is. The voice recognition is poor, and the range of things you can do, and the flexibility to ask questions in a natural way, is very basic compared to other voice assistant offerings.

Apple’s massive R&D budget

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” — Steve Jobs

Apple’s R&D budget has increased over tenfold since the iPhone was released in 2007, and yet the company hasn’t come up with anything that comes close to the success of the iPhone.

Apple Pencil

 

“Who wants a stylus. You have to get ’em and put ’em away, and you lose ’em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.” — Steve Jobs

I know many would argue that the Apple Pencil is more than a stylus, but many of problems with the stylus — finding it, putting it away, and losing it — haven’t really been solved by Apple.

The iPad’s rapid decline

 

“What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes.” — Steve Jobs

The iPad was Apple’s plan to disrupt the tablet market and put a stepping-stone between the iPhone and the Mac. And it looked like it would work. But in seven years sales have gone from showing strong growth initially to hitting a peak a few years back to now a rapid decline.

It could be said that the problem with the iPad is that consumers and enterprise buyers have lost interest in tablets, and that it’s only natural that sales would tank. But in that case how has Apple managed to keep Mac sales strong in the face of horrible PC sales, or managed to return the iPhone to growth?

Evolution over revolution

 

“I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.” — Steve Jobs

Over the past few years we’ve seen a lot of incremental, evolutionary updates from Apple, ranging across hardware and software, but there’s been little in the way of revolutionary changes. Certainly nothing that compares with those big gambles that Apple took while it was under the leadership of Jobs.

Following, instead of leading

 

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” — Steve Jobs

Apple used to look forward, but now the company feels like it is increasingly looking sideways at what its competitors are up to, in particular the premier Android device maker, Samsung.

Samsung has a “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” attitude when it comes to hardware, and over the past few years we’ve seen Apple take a similar approach, especially with the iPhone. Some of these moves have been successful (for example, it’s clear that there was indeed a pent-up demand for larger and more expensive iPhones) while others have flopped (the iPhone 5C springs irresistibly to mind here).

 

Share your favorite Steve Jobs comments in the comments below!

0

App of the Week: The best Apple Pencil apps that aren’t for drawing

 

 

By Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac

You have a new iPad, and you have a new Apple Pencil. Time to learn how to draw, right? Not necessarily. Just like a regular pen or pencil, there are ton of other things you can do with an Apple Pencil. You can write, of course, but you can also play games, compose musical scores, do coloring in books, edit photos, and even play the Apple Pencil like a musical instrument.

Let’s take a look at the best non-drawing apps for Apple Pencil.

Why Apple Pencil?

The Apple Pencil is the best iPad stylus you can get, because it and the iPad’s screen talk to each other. All other styluses are just proxies for your finger, stubby pens with conductive rubber tips that pretend to be a flesh finger. The Apple Pencil, on the other hand, can register different pressure levels, so pressing harder draws darker, and it can make a different line depending on how you tilt the pencil (like slanting a pencil to use the wide side of the lead to color in).

But most useful is the fact that it’s not your hand. When an app detects the Apple Pencil, it can ignore all touches from your hand. This lets you lay the side of your palm on the screen to write, draw, or whatever, and you’ll never make an errant mark by mistake. It’s called “palm rejection,” and it’s probably the feature that does the most to make it feel like you’re drawing on paper.

The result is a combo that brings the immediacy of pen and paper to many apps, and not just drawing apps. Let’s check out the best Apple Pencil apps available.

Edit photos with Affinity Photo

 

Apple pencil works with many photo-editing apps, but Affinity Photo is one of the most powerful, and works great on the new Apple Pencil-compatible iPad. It also uses all of the Apple Pencil’s sensors — tilt, pressure, and angle.
Even a simple bullet list of what it does would be too much for this post, but if you’re looking for an alternative to Photoshop for the iPad, then this is the app you want. You can select, retouch, edit, and add real-time effects all with the Apple Pencil, and the app also plays great with iOS 11’s new Files app, so you can drag and drop single or multiple images right into the app.

Price: $19.99
Download: Affinity Photo from the App Store (iPad)

Take notes with GoodNotes

Apple’s own Notes app is already a great companion to the Apple Pencil, but if you want something extra, try GoodNotes. GoodNotes is like a pro version of Notes app. It will recognize your handwriting as you write, so you can search on it in the future.

It can also turn your handwriting into regular, editable text. You can drag-and-drop documents, notes, images, and texts in and out of the app, and you can annotate PDF documents that you’ve opened with the app. Goodnotes can also sync with the Mac version of the app.

My favorite feature is one of its simplest: custom stationery. The app comes with plenty of different kinds of paper to use as backgrounds to your pages. You can also add your own. I have a custom paper for noting guitar chords, for example.

Price: $7.99
Download: GoodNotes from the App Store (iOS)

Write music with Leadsheets

Leadsheets is a music composition/notation app. It presents you with a page of music staves, and you just draw notes onto them. The app’s “compoze” engine recognizes the notes you’re writing, and turns them into standard musical notation. Want to tie two notes together? Just draw a line across the top of their tails.

You can also add chords, set the speed, time signature, and so on. And the app can even play back the result to you.

There are more sophisticated music notation apps for the iPad, but I like Leadsheets because it is so easy to use. If only it could also do guitar tabs, I’d be using it all the time instead of paper.

Price: Free with in-app purchases
Download: Leadsheets from the App Store (iOS)

Play a violin with Pen2Bow

Pen2Bow turns the Apple Pencil into a violin bow. You saw it back and forth, or round-and-round, on the iPad’s screen, and it turns the gestures into music.

Surprisingly, you can squeeze a huge amount of expressiveness from the little white stick. It just depends on how hard you press on the iPad’s screen, how fast you move it, and even the angle at which you tilt the thing.

You can also use Pen2Bow with musical instruments that aren’t usually bowed, because the app can act as a MIDI controller for any other music app. You can get super-expressive with the electric guitar, for example, or try it out on a piano.

Price: $7.99
Download: Pen2Bow from the App Store (iOS)

Drawing with Linea Sketch

OK, let’s add in one drawing app, just because it’s too good to miss. Linea Sketch is a killer drawing app that has everything you need, and nothing you don’t.

Quick sketches are Linea’s turf. It launches fast, and you can be working on a new canvas in seconds. The interface is minimal. It’s all right there, obvious and simple, instead of requiring multiple menus just to switch colors. It supports layers, and generates tints and shades of the currently-selected color, for instance. It also offers plenty of neat touches. For instance, you can use your finger as an eraser anytime, without having to select it as a tool.

Linea really is the best app for quick sketches, but it also makes for a surprisingly sophisticated painting app.

Price: $4.99
Download:Linea from the App Store (iOS)

 

Mark up PDFs with… Files app?

The fastest way to mark up a PDF is in Files app.

Given the number of PDF apps for the iPad, it may seem odd that I’m picking the native Files app here, but it’s the one I use. To mark up a PDF in Files app, you just start drawing on it. That’s it! There’s no need to enter an edit mode, or anything like that. Just tap the Apple Pencil onto the PDF you’re viewing in Files app, and you will draw a line. If you need to switch to a different pen, or change color, or add fancier markup, tap the little Markup icon at the top right of the screen.

I use this all the time for annotating PDFs I have scanned from paper. For instance, my guitar teacher writes out a lot of musical notation during lessons, and I use Files app and the Apple Pencil to mark out sections of songs, or to add notes of my own.

Not just for drawing

The Apple Pencil is a fantastic tool, and now that it’s compatible with all new iPads not just the iPad Pro, we can hope that the range of apps will increase. I’ll admit, my Apple Pencil sits in the pencil jar with my other pens and pencils a lot of the time, but for some tasks, nothing else will do.

Do you have a favorite app to use with the Apple Pencil? Tell us about it in the comments below.

0

Tips& Tricks: iPad app lets you play a violin with Apple Pencil

Pen2Bow turns the Apple Pencil into a virtual violin bow.

By Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac

The Apple Pencil, now compatible with pretty much all new iPads, is not just good for drawing and writing. Because if its bevvy of sensors — tilt, pressure, acceleration, and orientation — the Apple Pencil is also a pretty good musical instrument. Pen2Bow is a new iPad app which turns the Pencil into a violin bow, letting you use all of these natural gestures to play a virtual violin.

Pen2Bow

The idea is that you use Pen2Bow as a controller for a violin app, or for any other app which accepts MIDI signals as input (which is pretty much all music apps on Mac and iOS). Pen2Bow itself doesn’t actually generate sounds — its purpose is turning the swoops, swipes, and swirls of the Apple Pencil into expressive MIDI data. The piano keyboard has already been successfully translated into an electronic keyboard, complete with sensitivity to how hard you hit the keys, and even how you move them after the note has sounded. But a virtual violin can’t really be controlled with a keyboard.

Pen2Bow fixes this using there Apple Pencil. You can squeeze a huge amount of expressiveness from the little white stick, depending on how hard you press on the iPad’s screen, how fast you move it, and even the angle at which you tilt the thing.

As you can see in the demo video, Pen2Bow actually has some advantages over a real violin bow. For instance, a real violin bow has a finite length. You can only bow upwards for so long before you have to switch directions. Pen2Bow lets you bow upwards or downwards indefinitely, by moving it in a circle or figure-eight. And those funky trailing light-tails tell you whether you’re bowing up or down, according to their color.

Not just violins

While Pen2Bow is perfectly suited to controlling a violin, it can also be used with any synthesizer app. And you can use it with instruments that aren’t usually bowed, or which require a higher degree of control than afforded by a keyboard. The electric guitar, for example, is extremely expressive, with all kids of ricks to add vibrato and pitch variations as you play. To use Pen2Bow to play guitar, you just need a guitar synth app that supports enough MIDI control parameters.
Pen2Bow is just $8, which is a steal considering what it can do. And of course you’ll need an Apple Pencil and an iPad.

Price: $7.99
Download: Pen2Bow from the App Store (iOS)

0

Tips & Tricks: Apple Quietly Changed the Icon for the iOS Pages App

 

 

By Andrew Orr

The new iWork update gave us features like Apple Pencil support, Smart Annotation, book creation, and new collaboration. The iWork suite includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, and they have been updated on macOS and iOS. Speaking of iOS, the iOS Pages app has a slight change that came with the update.

Goodbye Pen, Hello Pencil

 

On the old icon, there was a pen drawing on a sheet of paper. But the new icon replaces the pen with an Apple Pencil. I think it’s an interesting move and obviously makes sense given the new support for Apple Pencil in iWork.

The Pages icon on the Mac remains the same though, although maybe it will get updated in the next version of macOS.

Pages is Free for Mac and iOS

0

How to: use Apple Pencil with Pages for iPad

 

 

By Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac

In Pages 4.0 for iPad, you can use Apple Pencil for more than just tapping stuff. Now you can use two great new iOS-only features in Apple’s word processing software. Smart Annotations lets you mark up text just like a teacher would — scoring red lines through words, running a highlighter over a sentence, etc. And a new drawing mode means you can easily add a sketch to a page just by tapping it with the pencil.

The drawing feature is neat, and brings Pages into line with Apple’s Notes app. But Smart Annotations will be a game-changer for many people, because it replicates something many folks still prefer to do on paper. Here’s how to take advantage of the new Pages features.

Drawing in Pages for iPad

 

To add a drawing to the body of a Pages document, you just long-press the Apple Pencil onto the screen and start drawing. This first tap brings up a resizable panel into which you can draw. If you prefer (or if you’re not using the Apple Pencil), you can tap the + icon at top right, then choose the symbols panel (the one that lets you add stencils of animals and cars), then tap the Drawing button at the bottom.
In drawing mode, you’ll see a familiar-but-different panel of tools at the bottom of the screen. These let you choose pencils, erasers and paint, and also to pick a color. But the panel’s options go beyond the usual Instant Markup tools found in other parts of iOS 11. For instance, there’s a proper color picker, so you’re not limited to just four colors plus black and white. You can also adjust the tools by tapping them a second time. In most cases, you can adjust the size and opacity of the pencil, crayon or pen.

Once you’ve completed your drawing, just tap Done. It then becomes a normal Pages object, which can be dragged different places and resized.
The super-intuitive new Pages drawing tools make it really easy to add quick illustrations to your work.

Smart Annotations in Pages

Smart Annotations may be Pages’ best new feature. It lets you mark up text using the Apple Pencil just by picking up the stylus and using it. You don’t have to launch a special mode, or tap a button (although there is a button if you insist on doing it this way). You just start writing, as if you were marking up text on real paper with a real pen.

For editors, this is a game-changer. It’s so much easier to mark things up like this than it is to use even well-designed PDF markup tools. In the book publishing business, editors still use paper galleys for final tweaks.

The big difference between Smart Annotations and paper, though, is the smart part. These annotations are tied to the text, not to the paper. That is, if you edit the text, the annotations stay with it. For instance, if you highlight a sentence, and then edit that sentence, the highlight stays.

The Smart Annotations feature is still in beta, so some things don’t work all the time. I’m sure I copied and pasted a paragraph, for example, and the highlight moved with it. But when I try it again, I can’t make it work.
Smart Annotations: A game-changer for editors

You can export the annotated document as a PDF, and the annotations stay with it. You can also share a document for collaboration via iCloud. People you share it with will be able to view your Smart Annotations and make some of their own if they like.

Imagine having a single manuscript, shared between author, editor and proof-readers, and you’ll see how powerful this feature is. You can also view and delete Smart Annotations on a Mac. I wonder if this feature will remain Pages-only, or if Apple will add it to the standard iOS text tools for other developers to use. It might be neat for coders, for example, and would be fantastic (and ironic) used with plain text notes apps.

The new Pages update brings several other nice additions. You can (finally) switch between portrait and landscape orientation for documents, you can add an image gallery, and you can view pages in double-page spreads. You can also use Pages to create iBooks, which is a huge new feature that we’ll cover in another post.

Price: Free

What is your favorite App to use with the Apple Pencil? Sound off in the comments below!

0

App of the Week: Nebo; the handwriting app is like paper, only better.

 

 

 

BY CHARLIE SORREL of Cult of Mac

Nebo is an alternative to Apple’s upcoming iOS 11 Notes app. Like the Apple app, Nebo lets you use the Apple Pencil to draw and write in notes. It also recognizes the words you write and lets you search on those terms. Unlike the native Notes app, however, Nebo also converts your longhand scrawls into actual, editable text, which can be copied and pasted anywhere.

In fact, I used Nebo to write this entire article. My handwriting isn’t as fast as my typing any more (my hand still hurts), but the app is fantastic.

Nebo is like a smart piece of paper

 

Nebo is absurdly easy to use. That comes, I think, because it works so well. At no point during writing this piece did I get frustrated, or find the app doing something I didn’t want it to do. Quite the opposite, in fact: Nebo works just like paper, only better.

As you write, Nebo converts your words to text, and shows them at the top of the paragraph. This gives you confidence that it’s doing a good job. The handwriting recognition is uncanny. After a while I stopped trying to be clear, and just wrote in messy “joined-up.” Nebo got almost everything. Even better, you can make corrections like you would with pen and paper by writing over the word you want to replace. Nebo recognizes this and corrects the word for you. It’s not perfect, although the level of imperfection depends on how bad your handwriting is.

To erase a word, just scribble over it. To add and remove spaces, or split and join paragraphs, just draw a vertical line up or down. Then, when you’re done, simply convert to text or export text via the standard share sheet.

More than words

 

In Nebo, you can also sketch, add images and diagrams, and even do math. This last feature is pretty neat — you write an equation, then Nebo converts it into fancy math symbols. Better still, it’ll work out the answers for you, which paper will never do.

You can also search your notes (the search terms will be highlighted) and write bulleted lists just by starting each new line with a dash.

Sketches and diagrams are done in boxes, but they remain in-line with the body text. This is already an improvement on iOS 10’s Notes app, which shifts you to a separate mode for drawings.

Apple Pencil required

 

To use Nebo, you need an Apple Pencil. (The app actually requires you to prove you own one on first launch.) But if you have one, and you like handwriting, you’ll love Nebo. It’s not quite the same as the iOS 11 Notes app — in some ways it’s actually more powerful than Apple’s app, which is currently available in beta only.
If you’re hankering for a handwriting recognition app now, Nebo might be perfect for you.

Nebo will cost you just $3.

Download Nebo foriPad.

Nebo is also available for Android and Windows 10.

Do you have a favorite handwriting App for your tablet? Tell us in the comments below!

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: