Steve Jobs thought the best stylus was the one between your thumb and your middle finger. The iPad and iPhone were built around that simple idea—that fingers were the ideal tools for interacting with touchscreens—and as a consequence, iPad styluses haven't been able to do much that our fingertips can't. Pencil is different. Built by FiftyThree, makers of the beloved iPad sketching app Paper, it proves that a stylus can be far more than a replacement digit.
Here's Pencil's appeal in a nutshell: It's the rare iPad stylus you can actually use like a pencil. One side draws, the other erases. It's sophisticated enough to make sure your palm will never mark up your canvas or send your app going haywire. In other words, it's just as easy to operate as the instrument it's named after. That's no small feat.
>You don't have to press anything to switch between drawing and erasing.
The thoughtful design isn't a surprise. Paper, FiftyThree's first product, was singled out by Apple as one of the best iPad apps of 2012 and has won a slew of design awards. It's been downloaded over 8 million times and used by kids and architects alike. Pencil is the company's first foray into hardware–and the first fruits of the $15 million VC haul it secured earlier this year. It's also a clear signal that FiftyThree's ambitions extend beyond the App Store.
As for Pencil, the magic comes courtesy of some clever electronics. Where most iPad pens have been passive devices, relying on simple conductive tips that basically trick your iPad into thinking they're a finger, Pencil is what's referred to as an active stylus. Both ends are essentially highly-sensitive buttons. Inside both the tip and eraser are 14k gold-plated switches; Bluetooth guts instantaneously tell your iPad when one is being depressed. What that means in practice is that you don't have to press anything or change any settings to switch between drawing and erasing. You just flip the thing around.
The electronic guts also mean that Paper, the companion app, can distinguish between your hand and the stylus, making way for two other great features. One, Pencil has palm detection that actually works–you can rest your hand however you want on the screen, wherever you want, and Paper won't go berserk (plus, you can still use the app's familiar multitouch controls: a two-finger swirl for rewinding, and a pinch for opening a magnified loupe.)
The other great feature is that when you use Pencil, your fingers become a separate tool for smudging colors on-screen. Swiping quickly produces a blurry, depth-of-field-like effect, while a more deliberate drag brings a trail of digital pigment wherever you pull it. Put differently, with clever tech that tells your stylus apart from your finger, Pencil doesn't just give you a different way to draw, it multiplies the creative tools at your immediate disposal by two.
The most important thing with Pencil, according to John Ikeda, one of its designers, was to be true to the tool that inspired the name. "We wanted to make sure it wasn't just a better finger," he says. "Pencil does what's good for a pencil; your finger does what's good for your finger." (Ikeda hails from Microsoft, where he worked on all-things-Xbox, including helping to hone the Xbox 360 controller.)
Georg Petschnigg, one of FiftyThree's founders, goes a bit further. To him, what the stylus really offers is the chance to "think with your hands." Using a finger to sketch out idea is convenient, sure, but it's nowhere near as natural as bringing that idea to life with a pen. Plus, there's the fidget factor: You can twirl Pencil as you daydream; you can tap it metronomically while you're turning an idea over in your head. In the end, Petschnigg says, it's about letting people do more with their touchscreen devices. At the outset, as we've all heard, they were about consumption. Now, he says, "We're at a level where we can use all these advances in technology to serve the human need to create."
In order to simply get out of the way of the creative act, a stylus has to get all sorts of little things right. Pairing the stylus to your iPad requires nothing more than tapping its tip to a button on-screen–a smart use of the latest, less-stringent Bluetooth protocol. Charging Pencil up, which you'll have to do every few months, requires nothing more than yanking out the tip and plugging it into the nearest USB drive.
>Your fingers become a separate tool for smudging colors on-screen.
The device packs all this into a body modeled after a carpenter's pencil–it's rectangular, not round, so it won't roll off the desk, and it's satisfyingly chunky to hold. Pencil is at its best with Paper, where it can leverage that active design for palm detection, but you can use it as a straightforward passive stylus in any app. There are two models: one in aluminum ($50) and one in walnut ($60)–buying either unlocks all of Paper's in-app purchases. And the wood one comes with a bonus feature: Thanks to some concealed magnets, you can stick it to the hinge of your iPad for storage.
Other iPad styluses have done some of these things—the Adonit Jot Touch 4, for example, is a Bluetooth-powered stylus that communicates with a host of iPad apps–but none have wrapped it all up in a package as coherent as Pencil's. Collectively, the team had just the right pedigree to pull that off: Several of FiftyThree's founders worked on Microsoft Courier, the compelling two-screen stylus-and-tablet concept that surfaced in 2009. Courier's vision for tablet computing was something a bit different from the one we've come to know today, mixing fingertip and stylus interaction for more complex scrapbook-like functionality. But now that FiftyThree's starting to master the challenge of making stylus and tablet feel a lot more like, well, pencil and paper, you have to wonder: What sorts of new possibilities could these smart digital tools can bring to the creative process?
It's easy to see how Pencil opens the door to new possibilities. With the two-ended stylus, each of the app's tools–the paintbrush, the marker, the calligraphy pen and so on–can now theoretically have a front and back of their own. "It becomes a multiplicative effect," Ikeda says. "But we're trying not to get ahead of ourselves."
Yet if you go back and watch the Courier video, it's easy to see how a smart stylus could unlock tablet experiences that go far beyond more seamless sketching. Think about a stylus that communicates intelligently with Evernote to better recognize and process handwritten notes; or one, like we've seen in Adobe's stylus concept, that could copy and pate visual content between pages–or even between apps. Is that what FiftyThree's really after with their ever-expanding line of products? Petschnigg and company–the guys who dreamed up many of these sorts of use cases with Courier in the first place–just smile and dodge the question.
