I’ve been drawing on the iPad for a while now, creating cartoons, drawing graphic notes and generally having a great time.
But you don’t have to draw on it for too long to start cursing the iPad’s limitations, even as you marvel at its abilities. And high on my wishlist for the iPad are two items: 1) pressure-sensitivity and 2) being able to draw while resting my palm on the iPad’s surface.
It turns out those two issues are pretty high priorities over at Ten One Designs, too. They make the Pogo Sketch, the handy little stylus I’ve used on most of my iPad cartoons. But they also develop software, and they now have a demo that shows you can have both pressure sensitivity and what they call “palm rejection” (where the iPad distinguishes between your hand and the stylus when you’re drawing, and ignores your hand).
They can’t make those features available yet, though:
We plan to release this capability as a free software library so it can be included in any application. However, this may not be possible for a while as the library now uses a private function call to access the required information.
We hope the UIKit framework can be updated to make the required information available, but there are no guarantees this will ever happen. In the meantime, we hope the video provides some insight into what is possible on this amazing piece of hardware.
I have a cramped wrist that’s eagerly awaiting word that Apple’s willing to either accommodate Ten One or release their own solution.
(Thanks to Mike Kelly for pointing me to this!)
Postscript: There’s a darkly funny irony that a new feature of the iPad – the successor to Apple’s failed Newton, the original PDA – might be called “Palm rejection.”
