So I’m sorry to be a downer, but I just had to share that I picked up the M2 12.9 again a few weeks back and committed to it this time, trading in my 2020 for it. I think I may regret it.
I’m currently having an issue where there’s a really bad brush splattering/taper behavior going on when trying to side-shade with tilt in Procreate. I made a video of it:
I’m scheduled to go to the “Genius bar” tomorrow afternoon and I’m just terrified they’re going to send me away and not respect this. I think it’s the result of a faulty M2 sensor and not the Pencil, but the problem is I do sometimes have some trouble replicating it. I’d say maybe it happens every 1 out of 5 attempts at side-shading. You can see in the vid that it does not happen every time but if you want a really good example look at the very end — that last example was just awful.
Other than that, the hover shortcuts in Procreate 5.3…. I mean, they’re good, but they aren’t going to impress anyone who already had a flow going with Expresskeyremote or Tabmate. The best I can say about them is they’re very traveler-friendly, you know, versus breaking out a hotkey peripheral with your CSP workflow on a plane, bus, car, etc.
The shortcuts also become inverted depending on the orientation your iPad is in, so they feel cheap and rushed out the door. Hoping they can fix that later.
I was going to eventually compliment this iPad with an iPhone 13 (finally getting off my awful SE), but I’ve been seriously thinking about trying to get an S23 Ultra, just use that with my iPad before several months before finally making the full transition to Galaxy. That’s just how I feel about Apple right now (plus CSP is all I truly need for the indefinite future — you can do a lot with it), but let’s see if they do right by me tomorrow….
That’s gotta be a disappointment. There is definitely something wrong going on because I cannot replicated it on mine. Charcoal? There’s not a hint of that side splash when I do it.
It’s the Derwent brush under Sketching. Please give it a quick shot tonight, too, for me if you can. Don’t just use light shading — put a bit of pressure on for me, just without anything ridiculous where something might get damaged. A few people, including a mod over on the Procreate board say they can’t replicate it.
I gave that brush a real workout and there wasn’t the slightest bit of that behavior on mine. I was thinking maybe there was a bug in Procreate but it seems it’s a flaw in your iPad Pro.
I suggest you bring your video along with you to the Apple store just in case you can’t reproduce it in front of them. It might be like an automobile that never misbehaves when you take it to a mechanic.
That’s unfortunate but I’m almost 100% certain it’s just a defective or possibly damaged unit. The reason I say possibly damaged is because we’ve seen similar behavior with both the recent 12.9 and 11 inch models where the case has gotten slightly bent or torqued.
It’s hard to spot visually though one customer was able to see it with two their 12.9 units by placing them face down on a genuinely flat surface and noticing they wobbled a bit.
IMHO it also represents a potential weakness of Apples digitizer which seems to be sensitive to any distortion of the digitizer frame.
I’m obviously not saying that is definitely the case with your unit, just suggesting something to look at.
Hey, so they were actually insanely cool about it. The only negative is they did not have anymore of my iPP in stock so I’ll have to wait until next week to do the exchange.
And I feel it basically clowns the official $99 one, which also started falling apart on me by the 3rd year. I think the magnet is a little bit stronger than the one on the official folio. I’d like to find out later if all these products actually have to be certified. I just get it into my head that maybe this could have screwed up the digitizer, maybe even the 2nd magnet that helps secure the Pencil.
Yes, in our experience 3rd party cases can negatively affect any digitizer regardless . Specific to our customer base experience, AES seems most prone to it, but we’ve seen all kinds of false touch or jagged pen lines that ultimately came down to poor case design.
People don’t stop to think about it , but the OEM cases are built with knowledge of how/where/how much magnets affect the device whereas 3rd party cases, especially the less expensive ones tend to have the cheapest most variable magnets the vendor can find.
Just last week one of our customers was having weird intermittent issues with pen quality with their Tab S8 + units.
They refused to believe initially that their custom designed (and apparently pricey) cases could be the culprit, until we loaned them a couple of the Samsung OEM cases and of course on the units with that case, the pen and touch worked properly.
BTW: I’m not saying only to go with OEM cases. There are quality 3rd party vendors such as Belkin, Spigen, or Logitech.
One general rule we follow is that if a 3rd party case is released coincident with a brand new device, unless it clearly has the “made for iPad” or “designed with Samsung” labeling on the box, best to proceed with caution.
2nd BTW all of the above doesn’t justify the IMHO ridiculously high prices that Apple and Sasmung charge for their own cases. OTOH even at those prices, they are still but a fraction of the price of the device itself
PPS: case materials especially with the more bulky cases can also interfere with the digitzers by partially blocking or attenuating the fields uses by them. Samsung’s spen for instance is prone to that if the case back is thick and blocks the EMR field
Thanks a bunch. To be on the safe side, I’m not going to use this folio with the new one. I’m even wondering now if it’s why I had to buy a new Apple Pencil shortly after the new iPad — my old one from Spring 2020 just stopped working altogether. It would not connect to any iPad, not even prompting the “Apple Pencil” graphic to appear at the top middle screen. It was just totally fried.
And of course I checked to see if the if this problem would go away when the folio was removed but it did not, so it either did permanent damage with one of its three magnets or the frame/digitizer grid was bent all along (and the Pencil from 2020 was a bit of a dud). Either way, not taking anymore chances.
I just had to share that my worst nightmare sort of came true. I finally got the new iPP last night, did some brief testing, and the problem is still there. So it’s either the Pencil or I just have the magic OCD touch that neither Apple nor Savage planned for in the hardware/software design. Unfortunately I think it really could be the latter.
I’m not able to replicate it in CSP, but the only tilt brush I have on hand that I know about right now is the default pencil.
Maybe the dumbest part about all this is I really did spend some time testing my pencil and theirs on their display unit, and I felt like maybe my pencil was slightly worse but theirs was also kind of damaged — the tip was sort of malformed so their pencil may not have had the full range of tilt to begin with. Then my judgement is getting clouded because I’m getting fixated on how a new iPP is coming my way, light at the end of the tunnel, all that fun stuff — and at the same time the poor store employees are basically just confused, but at the same time they totally give me the benefit of the doubt and aren’t remotely scrutinizing anything. No one even came to stand over my shoulder as I was testing.
I’m going to take one more stab at it, drive to a different Apple Store later this week and see if I can seriously demonstrate it’s the pencil and have that exchanged, but barring that I guess I’ll have to learn to live with it…. At least unless I manage to set myself up with an EMR Samsung phone + Tab S9 combo later this year and get back to the CSP workflow I left behind. Try not to judge me too harshly for this but I still just can’t use CSP on iPad; it seriously does not feel right to me in many different ways. I actually feel like CSP works best on widescreen, and frankly I know it’s crazy but Apple Pencil in CSP has also never felt right to me, maybe because I grew up on EMR and MPP. Then there’s the lack of Tabmate support I always moan about and I really have been unwilling to use anything else. I’d happily buy another Tabmate if they’d update it for Apple (it only uses BT 3.0 to this day and I heard that’s why it can’t pass certification).
Sorry about your issues, but I would suggest one other thing specific to your pen. A customer taught us this trick awhile back and it’s been effective with multiple customers since.
With the pen paired to the iPad and importantly with the iPad on, remove the pencil nub/tip. Then before you put it back, power cycle the iPad, put the nub back in, then re-pair the pencil. As near as we can tell that sequence causes a reset of the pen hardware and iPad digitizer
I’m scared of the answer, but I need you guys to revisit this one last time. I need you to specifically shade with your left hand, not your right, and tell me if you end up observing this effect. Already asked the mod over in the Procreate board to do the same.
I just returned from another visit to the Apple Store and am now convinced this was a software problem, probably introduced ever since 5.3. I tested my Apple Pencil on two different store units with the tech, both of them running Procreate 5.2.6, and both of them were awesome. Zero aberrations, total consistency.
I think they’ve done something to the brush engine by accident. This sort of reminds me of the time they also literally broke a narrow sliver of space at the top of the canvas, where it was impossible to start a brush stroke, so you literally had a smaller area to work with and it was deeply distracting. I remember I overcame it at the time by turning on full screen and setting it to automatically exit full screen after 10 seconds, but I digress.
(And of course I tried what you suggested, Desertlap — thanks. As you can see it hasn’t worked out, unfortunately.)
Procreate 5.3.1. Derwent brush. Left hand, right hand, pressing hard, pressing softly, at all angles of shading. No differences, no hint of your problem. Sorry.
Edit: also in portrait, landscape, with my full hand against the canvas forcing palm rejection, and then not touching at all. No change, nothing off about it.
sigh
Guess I’ll have to think about how to move forward. Time to start talking directly to Procreate support, I guess, as I’m not getting anything out of the forum. Found out the mod addressing me is not even using a 12.9, only his 11.
FWIW here’s a video of me trying it at the Apple Store today just to prove, I guess, it’s not my magic touch or OCD after all. I’m using my Pencil on their 12.9. https://youtu.be/aHVICLpUABE
But basically after talking about it a lot and me being completely honest with him, telling him everything that happened, he was able to send me away without doing anything, not that it necessarily means anything as far as shutting down the possibility of a 2nd iPad exchange. I just know for sure it’s not the Pencil.
I guess it would have been simple if their units were running 5.3.2.
I didn’t realize there was a new version since I don’t have automatic updates turned on. I just updated it to 5.3.2 from 5.3.1 and no change. It’s still all good.
Yeah, thanks. I don’t know, maybe this is good news. I was so convinced — or they had me so convinced — it was software that I thought I was going to have to sit and wait for them to fix it. I just sent everything to Procreate support and will, IDK, wait until maybe Tuesday for their response before I go to Apple again and try to insist they bring out an iPad with the latest version, and if we can’t replicate the problem, they I suppose they kinda-sorta need to let me get another one…
Because I’m pretty much shut down because of this — wish I was joking. My Pro is just for media consumption and web browsing now, and it’s the only slate I have. Guess it’s not a terrible thing to go back to pencil and paper for a while.
Wow, sorry to hear about your hardware troubles. Just curious, if you are still within your return period, why not just do a straight return (Pencil and everything).
Then collect your thoughts and gather your options. Maybe try out the Galaxy Tab Ultra. When/if you’ve decided to give another go with the IPP, then purchase in-store and do the test right then and there.
Tell the staff, that it’s absolutely critical that this functionality work, so have a guy bear with you as you unbox and go through the setup. For this kind of expensive equipment, I think it’s absolutely justified (plus, what are Geniuses doing standing around anyways :P)…they gotta make sure it ‘just works’.
I think I have to go ahead and amend what I was saying earlier about CSP just not “feeling right” on iPad. For instance, I finally overcame my tendency to be a little bit narrow minded and actually tried out the Companion mode (I just didn’t want to use it before because I only have an iPhone SE and totally assumed it isn’t “fancy enough”).
I now believe the unofficial statement from a Celsys dev, if I were able to complain directly to him/her about Tabmate, would be something to the tune of “Just use Companion mode, dummy! It’s kinda-sorta superseded hockey peripherals, but the rule of the game is we release these things without overtly making statements like this.”
It has me feeling warmed up to my whole Apple setup again and I think I’m about to start buying a subscription, and migrate back to CSP until Savage can sort themselves out a little more, because Procreate is having other issues as well. People are saying the palm rejection is utterly terrible now and I’m having the same experience — I’m wearing a drawing glove and sometimes even that doesn’t work anymore, it just seems like it’s gotten so insanely sensitive ever since around 5.3.
I scheduled another appointment with Genius Bar for Tuesday, and at the same time I have an actual support case going with Procreate, not just a largely ignored forum thread, so we’ll see about sorting that out but I’m back to thinking it’s software because I’m spending more than just a few minutes in CSP now and not experiencing any tapering/splattering.
Edit: Additionally the brush cursor hover tracking appears to be fine in CSP, and basically pixel perfect when the tip touches the glass, so that just seems indicative of a good digitizer grid, but who knows.
Anyways, thanks again.
Edit 2: Also, to be a little cute, it’s like, who wants a damn Tabmate anymore anyways when they now cost $80?
All’s well that ends well? Regardless, if you’re okay with the outcome that’s all that matters.
Funny about that Procreate palm rejection, when I was testing and trying my best to replicate your problem I remarked to myself how perfectly Procreate was rejecting my palm, splayed fingers, and other weird placements as I drew. Never an stray mark throughout. Never had to use my glove. :vb-headscratch: Oh well, that’s how the internet works. You don’t get many posts about how well something works but when someone has a glitch it’s splashed all over, in multiple forums.
Agreed here on specifically the Tab S8 + or Tab S8 Ultra. Speaking specifically to purely the pen experience, The S-Pen Tab S8 combo is the very top of the heap. That of course doesn’t consider other factors that may be as or more important to many buyers such as overall OS UI or app availability.
To wit, in our customer base, ProCreate sells a lot of iPad Pros…
I haven’t used CSP on anything with Wacom, but it was a huge improvement going from CSP on my Windows AES machine to CSP on my iPad Pro. I don’t use the companion app, I just use the side bar with programmable buttons for my settings personally. But I was never a Tabmate user either. CSP is so accurate and so much better compared to Procreate for anything I want to do serious art on. I still use Procreate a lot for quick sketches and getting ideas down just because the interface is so much more user friendly for speeds and convenience of just sketching without anything being in your way.