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!