“It’s truly made a profound impact in our design phase,” CEO James Cuda noted at the time. Savage Interactive, which makes the graphics editing and digital painting iPadOS app Procreate, seemed especially bullish at the time of the product’s release.

“The pencil is emitting signals that the iPad is then interpreting and figuring out the location of the tip of the Pencil in 3D and the angle which it’s being held at,” Apple’s Director of Input Experience Leslie Ikemoto tells TechCrunch. By hovering a Pencil 2 up to 12 millimeters above the new iPad Pro (Apple notes that it’s the M2 that makes the feature possible, hence the limited hardware options), the system offers line and line width and color previews, along with the ability to choose drawing implements in Markup. Hover adds the ability to preview lines before committing them to a piece. While digital drawing is more forgiving in terms of correcting errors than its real-world counterpart, stopping and starting is still an extremely frustrating dimension that can ultimately hamper the creative process. What might sound like a minor update to non-artists represents an important addition to workflow. In October of last year, Apple announced that hover was being added to the Apple Pencil’s bag of tricks.

Digital painting procreate