“We ditched it all,” says Bottomley, “and went with that very conventional set of sliders you see on the left hand side of the screen.” Iterations came and went the pair tried variations on pinching and zooming and tapping and holding, but nothing felt properly connected to the rest of the Procreate experience. But they hit a proverbial artistic wall when trying to build UI for repetitive interactions like adjusting brush size or opacity. Procreate's interface has long championed minimalistic tool windows and intuitive gestures like tap-to-undo to keep the canvas clear for the work. “Our goal is to put absolute focus on the artist’s content,” says Cuda. While the Procreate team delighted in improving interactions for brush cursors and ColorDrop, they had a much bigger problem they hoped Apple Pencil hover would solve: a little piece of UI that had been bothering the team since the app's very first days. Hover over your color, then drop it on your canvas. “Even moving your arm across the screen takes time. “Those kinds of interactions take a surprising amount of time,” says Bottomley. It’s also a timely example of how a small change can make a massive improvement in an artistic workflow. If you’re doing inking - comic book art, for instance - it’s huge.Ĭlaire d’Este, Procreate chief product officer "If you’re doing inking - comic book art, for instance - it’s huge,” says d’Este. Using Apple Pencil hover, people can preview of what the artwork will look like before committing to a color, speeding up the process dramatically. “Now, all the brush-makers out there can customize what their hover state will look like.”Ī second target was the app's ColorDrop feature, which instantly fills a section of your artwork when you drag and drop a color on it, paint-by-numbers style. “We needed to move away from that idea of ‘one thing to rule them all’ to a series of settings that could get us there,” says Cuda. Lloyd Bottomley, Procreate chief technology officerĪfter a few weeks of back and forth, the team landed on a solution: customizable cursors that change with different brushes. We're obsessed with keeping people focused on that point of interaction. To represent all that in a hover state was really challenging.” “The problem was there's not one singular representation of that hover mark, because our brushes can do anything - you can have brushes inside brushes you can have brushes that move across each other. “Honestly, we thought we'd have just one design through the entire brush library," says Cuda. ![]() One area that proved surprisingly challenging: the brush cursor. ![]() “We’re obsessed with keeping people focused on that point of interaction,” Bottomley says. With so many possibilities open to them, the Procreate team had to approach each idea with care and scrutiny to ensure they were aiding and improving design and creation workflows rather than hindering them. “The first is the initial, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ But then your mind starts racing because you’re trying to think of all the things you could do with it.” "There are two phases with something like this,” says Procreate chief technology officer Lloyd Bottomley. With your iPad on a desk or table, hover works in conjunction with Multi-Touch capabilities. Tools like the color picker or menu buttons react as you move across them. In the gallery view, hovering over thumbnails expands the image or previews animations. ![]() The Procreate team has hidden these sorts of playful moments throughout the entire app. The ability to not make a commitment or damage the artwork is transformative. There’s something so nice about everything lighting up as I’m thinking about what to do next.” “I find myself rolling up and down menus just to see it responding. “It makes everything feel so playful,” says Claire d’Este, Procreate’s chief product officer. "The ability to not make a commitment or damage the artwork is transformative," Cuda says.Īnd the feature's functionality is only half the fun. Developers can customize what the feature does within their app, including offering tool variations, menu selection, and even previewing lines themselves - so artists can draw, sketch, and color with even greater control. With ColorDrop, you can precisely preview your colors before tapping your canvas.Īpple Pencil hover activates when the nib is up to 12 mm above the display on iPad Pro with the M2 chip.
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