Apple just kicked-off WWDC 2019 announcing features of the upcoming OS for their hardware lineup. The event was much awaited by creatives who were hoping for features that could make the iPad Pro 2018 a laptop replacement as the company marketed. The new iPadOS that is now separated from iOS carries all the features of iOS for iPhone along with several of iPad exclusive features that attempts to make the device more powerful. Here are some features that are relevant to the Artists and Designers who’ve been using iPad as a work tool:
(Photo source: Apple)
(1) Apple Pencil latency drops from 20 ms to 9 ms, that means response delays beyond what a human eye can perceive. The latency and no-parallax was already pretty solid on iPad, so the change might mean much richer experience.
(2) New macOS Catalina has a feature called ‘Sidecar’ that supports iPad to work as secondary display for macs (the OS also supports mirroring). Only for select apps! ZBrush, Substance Painter, Maya, Illustrator, etc. are supported. Photoshop not in the list. Perhaps Adobe wants us to subscribe/buy upcoming Photoshop iPad app. Apple started with showing a picture of some other graphic tablet (Wacom Pen perhaps), so it does sounds promising. No word out yet on latency. (Good Bye Astropad, DuetDisplay?)
(3) With iPadOS, you can get new fonts from the App Store (that probably means paying for them, I guess). Procreate already supports importing custom fonts.
(4) Same app in multiple spaces. That maybe means you could open two Procreate documents at the same time. Apple showed the demo using native apps like Notes, so we don’t know yet if it’s universally default to all apps.
(5) The redesigned tools palette gives you a pixel eraser to remove exactly what you want from a drawing. Also a ruler to draw straight lines. Advanced Drawing apps are already equipped with powerful tools, but no harm in getting the markup features elevated.
Slide Over, Pen Drive support, much improved ‘Files’ app with Local and Downloads folder, Zip files, File Servers, the list is pretty large. I’ll put these things to test when a bit stable beta is out. Did these announcements excite you? Was there any feature that you wished for, but didn’t see? Would you buy the iPad Pro after the iPadOS is out? Are you still very dependent on desktop workflow? Share your thoughts in the comments below.