Direct from the Pencil
Jul. 6th, 2018 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter a few experiments with text entry on an iPad, I discovered a quicker way to type apostrophes and quotation marks on its standard keyboard. Convinced this was a useful trick not widely known, I made a presentation about it at the local Apple users group (back when it was still meeting.) In the time since then, though, I have found myself not typing very much on my iPad any more, even with an upgrade to the keyboard offering more access to the punctuation.
By no means have I got away from using an iPad nowadays, however. In fact, around the new year I was getting to think that I'd had my iPad Air for "long enough" and could stand considering getting a new one. At first, it was just a matter of knowing they now have fingerprint sensors built in; tapping in the same four-digit unlock code over and over could start to get to me. I decided to pay attention to the next announcement of an iPad update.
The announcement did seem earlier than I'd quite expected, but one of the new capabilities mentioned that caught my eye was that the "regular" iPad would now support the Apple Pencil that had been introduced with the larger, more expensive iPad Pros. The Pencil itself was an expensive peripheral, though, and for someone who doesn't practice enough to draw very well it did have some intimations of a mere indulgence.
I did look in a convenient Apple Store not that long after the new iPads were available for sale, though, and saw they were being demonstrated with Apple Pencils. One of the demonstration programs was a notepad program called Myscript Nebo, which promised not just to record your handwriting the way other note programs did but convert it into text, suitable, say, for forming a journal entry draft.
I witnessed from afar, as it were, the "pen computing" efforts of the 1990s that didn't wind up the punch lines of cruel jokes slide into seeming obscurity, and it's easy enough to imagine some institutional memory at Apple shaping just how text would be entered into the first iPhone. Even so, writing by hand does appeal to me; I suppose I take some pride in having managed to keep seemingly legible what I'd been taught in grade school. (I recall it threatening to get scrawly in high school, but my parents bought me a fountain pen; these days, however, I seem able to get by with ballpoints.) I'm aware even so, though, that what's written in a notebook is stuck there until the second expense of time to transcribe it, and I did get to thinking during those past experiments that two decades of hardware and software development might have made some difference. At that point, I tried out a "handwriting keyboard" from Myscript capable of being used with multiple applications; with the simple styluses the dollar store sold with their rubber-hemisphere ends, though, text always seemed to turn out large and a few words would fill the input area, after which I'd have to wait for it to process and clear. In any case, I was interested in buying a new iPad; after using it for several weeks and getting used to its fingerprint sensor and a general sense of greater peppiness, I ordered an Apple Pencil.
Just as I was installing Myscript Nebo, the App Store promoted the colouring-book application I'd tried for a while before with simple styluses. Trying it out again with the Apple Pencil, I did appreciate the pressure sensitivity, even if that got me wondering about the expensive subscription that offered more pages and colouring implements. Then, I started working with Nebo a bit more. I did get to wondering whether I was "getting scrawly" writing on its screen even as I tried to take that much more care in forming my words, and after transferring the copy to my computer for final editing I had to change a fair number of standalone "l"s to "I"s given the program had turned the writing into sans-serif Helvetica. Still, it was interesting to have another an option to transcribing out of a notebook or off a printout when I'm not at a regular keyboard.
By no means have I got away from using an iPad nowadays, however. In fact, around the new year I was getting to think that I'd had my iPad Air for "long enough" and could stand considering getting a new one. At first, it was just a matter of knowing they now have fingerprint sensors built in; tapping in the same four-digit unlock code over and over could start to get to me. I decided to pay attention to the next announcement of an iPad update.
The announcement did seem earlier than I'd quite expected, but one of the new capabilities mentioned that caught my eye was that the "regular" iPad would now support the Apple Pencil that had been introduced with the larger, more expensive iPad Pros. The Pencil itself was an expensive peripheral, though, and for someone who doesn't practice enough to draw very well it did have some intimations of a mere indulgence.
I did look in a convenient Apple Store not that long after the new iPads were available for sale, though, and saw they were being demonstrated with Apple Pencils. One of the demonstration programs was a notepad program called Myscript Nebo, which promised not just to record your handwriting the way other note programs did but convert it into text, suitable, say, for forming a journal entry draft.
I witnessed from afar, as it were, the "pen computing" efforts of the 1990s that didn't wind up the punch lines of cruel jokes slide into seeming obscurity, and it's easy enough to imagine some institutional memory at Apple shaping just how text would be entered into the first iPhone. Even so, writing by hand does appeal to me; I suppose I take some pride in having managed to keep seemingly legible what I'd been taught in grade school. (I recall it threatening to get scrawly in high school, but my parents bought me a fountain pen; these days, however, I seem able to get by with ballpoints.) I'm aware even so, though, that what's written in a notebook is stuck there until the second expense of time to transcribe it, and I did get to thinking during those past experiments that two decades of hardware and software development might have made some difference. At that point, I tried out a "handwriting keyboard" from Myscript capable of being used with multiple applications; with the simple styluses the dollar store sold with their rubber-hemisphere ends, though, text always seemed to turn out large and a few words would fill the input area, after which I'd have to wait for it to process and clear. In any case, I was interested in buying a new iPad; after using it for several weeks and getting used to its fingerprint sensor and a general sense of greater peppiness, I ordered an Apple Pencil.
Just as I was installing Myscript Nebo, the App Store promoted the colouring-book application I'd tried for a while before with simple styluses. Trying it out again with the Apple Pencil, I did appreciate the pressure sensitivity, even if that got me wondering about the expensive subscription that offered more pages and colouring implements. Then, I started working with Nebo a bit more. I did get to wondering whether I was "getting scrawly" writing on its screen even as I tried to take that much more care in forming my words, and after transferring the copy to my computer for final editing I had to change a fair number of standalone "l"s to "I"s given the program had turned the writing into sans-serif Helvetica. Still, it was interesting to have another an option to transcribing out of a notebook or off a printout when I'm not at a regular keyboard.