Now that I have the new Apple Pencil Pro I’ve got some ideas for more things the squeeze action could do. I really like it opening the quick menu and switching to the eraser. But I think it would be really awesome if it could be set to do these things too (I’m most excited about the first two ideas here):

- open various panels- it would be great to map it to opening the color panel or the favorites panel or the brushes panel, which would appear right under the cursor.
Apple has a similar option in its settings, to open a color palette. They knew this was a useful idea!
It might even be neat to have repeatedly squeezing it cycle through several panels.

- toggle clear blending- this is similar to toggling the eraser, but more powerful- it would allow you to switch between drawing and erasing with not only brushes, but also lasso fill. That would be awesome!

Before getting the new Apple Pencil pro I was using double tap to open the quick menu- it would be great if the above options could also be added to that and other gestures so people could mix and match them however they like.

- undo - back when I used a Wacom more, I always had the pen button mapped to undo which was really quick and nice. Two finger tap undo on iPad feels great, but this would be a great intuitive option to have. would work great with setups where you essentially turn off all touch inputs, and are using keyboard shortcuts for navigation etc.

- pick layer- this is a really nice function, would work great on the squeeze action.

- toggle lines mode - quickly switching between drawing in Freehand or line mode would be really cool! Could be fantastic for drawing.

- keyboard shortcut- allowing the squeeze action to essentially send a user defined keyboard shortcut would let it trigger basically anything in the app’s keyboard shortcuts commands, which would be super powerful!

- brush size - sort of like the control+option+move gesture to control brush size, you could hold the squeeze and move the pencil up and down (while hovering?) to change the brush size.

The Apple pencil pro is so new it seems like there’s a whole lot of unexplored potential. It’s awesome that you guys got support for it in already, faster than basically all the other apps! I’m excited to see its functionality get extended and refined.
Thanks for considering these ideas, they would be really cool to see! Especially the panels and the clear blending toggle!

Clear blending does nothing on pigment layers, but works on regular layers. Tools still draw instead of erase. It seems like it should work regardless of whether the layer is set to pigment or not.

It would be great if in the gesture preferences under long press, there was an entry for “pick layer,” which would be functionally similar to the “long press to pick” option in the move tool. This would let you use long press to pick a layer without having to switch to the move tool first, allowing you to quickly paint in different layers. It would be similar to the other entries for eyedropper and autoshape, a simple numerical value that would set how long it takes to invoke.

Could we get an assignable hotkey that shows the quick menu? Right now you can only get it via gestures but when working with a Bluetooth keyboard it would be great to have a hotkey. (On iOS here, not sure how it works on Mac)

It looks like the layer thumbnails are rendering weird alphas on transparent layers. they look fuzzy and seem to have dark halos. This is the case in light and dark mode, and with the light or dark backgrounds options for them.

It would be great if you could view .artstudio files in the Reference Panel. This would allow you to look at other paintings you are making while working, saving you the step of having to export an image of your paintings first. Thanks for your consideration!

When you drag the brush size slider, the icon on the toolbar renders over itself as it animates, making it illegible. You can see the issue in the attached video captured on iPhone.


Also- the icon is of the brush stamp and scales down to nothing when the size goes to 1- I find this pretty impractical. I often work with small brushes and it effectively makes the brush icon invisible most of the time. There also is a bug that makes the little radius number below the icon not render sometimes which makes things worse.


I think a very simple improvement would be to just not animate the size of the brush stamp on the icon. Just leave it a constant scale that is large enough to see. Let the radius number inform you of the current size. The visual scale of the icon can’t be a great preview of the brush size anyway because it’s limited to the size of the toolbar height.


There are some brushes with very transparent stamps that are hard to see on the icon as well, even when they are larger… I’m not sure about what to do to improve this other than trying normalizing the opacity range of the stamp for the toolbar icon. But that may look strange in some cases.


Thanks for your consideration!

My pencil brushes act strangely in the beta now. It seems like something is wrong with the pressure sensitivity, maybe in regard to controlling jitter amount, possibly other aspects. I’ve attached a comparison image and the brush itself.


You can see that the expected result is that the brush creates a spray of tiny stamps, with the jitter distance controlled by pressure. Instead there appears to be strange semi circles cut out from the stroke, in the beta.


It’s the exact same brush in both. I’m sure that more brushes are affected by this, hope there’s a simple solution.