Apple Pencil Pro and iPad Simulate a Shadow of the Pen Being Emulated

But sadly I find Apple's attention to detail in its UX to be typically rather low. MacOS in particular is littered with broken interactions.

The underpinnings -- the stuff users don't see -- suffers from this much less, and if there were a choice of where to have attention to detail, that would be the right choice. But Apple is big enough not to have to make this choice.

Am I missing something here? I just drag and drop into the email body and it just works.

The cool animation when bringing phones close together to share contact and data?

Well, work 10% of the time for airdrop, but often doesn’t do anything…

It’s rarely ever been the company itself or even the policies/vibe of a company but instead it’s been the few employees who propose, communicate, and support the details that eventually get rightfully called “insane”.

Different priorities.

I thought it was interesting because a.) it showed they were aware of how common the frustration was, and b.) man it takes the world's leading tech company a lonnnnnng time to implement a feature that is about as simple as features get, if it isn't one they invented themselves.

I'm not an artist, but this is actually useful to me even for just writing sometimes, e.g. when writing Japanese characters with a flat/bladed pen style.

You are right that the physical Apple Pencil stylus doesn't have the same geometry as the virtual pen/brush/etc it is modeling, so without the preview mark on the screen when you hover the tip of the stylus near it, it would be really hard to know what the angle was.

Perhaps some real artists could develop a muscle memory, because while the stylus tip is round, the body of it has one flat edge. In my quick testing, it seems that the angle of the virtual brush/pen tip stays consistent relative to the flat edge of the stulus itself, even across drawings and putting the styus away and taking it out again.

But for normal people, I think the preview indicator is very useful and easy to use — although not needed at all for many pen/pencil styles, since those also are modeled on writing implements with round tips.

At this rate I suppose the rich will live in VR (Vision Pro) and the rest live in the physical world (can't call it 'real' cause it sounds better somehow) to deal with issues like paper. It's like we're implementing Buddhism pulling the wool over our own eyes.