After the keynote of the presentation of the new Apple Watch and the new iPad, Apple released last night the new operating system updates for the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Apple Watch. However, there are many new features that have arrived in a short time frame. Let’s focus on one of the most striking and at the same time useful: the gestures when writing with an Apple Pencil on our iPad.

Gestures to add, select, delete, delete, etc.

Thanks to iPadOS 14 Apple Pencil is much more efficient on iPad. The novelties can be summarized in four points: the ability to write in any text field, the ability to select and edit handwritten text, as well as recognize it to convert it, to be able to draw shapes with precision in the Notes app and that the data detectors work now in those notes and handwritten texts. In addition, all this is accompanied by the different gestures that we can perform while we are writing.

The function that allows us to write throughout the system with the Apple Pencil is called Scribble. The actual operation is explained in a few words: we can write with our pencil anywhere. Whether we are talking about a text message, a tweet, a phone number in Contacts, a reminder or an email, to name just a few examples, we can write it with the Apple Pencil.

As we write our iPad will recognize the writing and convert it to text and to edit, modify, select or delete parts of the written text we have several resources, as shown in the following video:

  • Remove: Deleting one or more words from a text is as simple as crossing them out (with something other than a straight line) with our Apple Pencil.
  • To select: Also very simple, we simply draw a line above the words we want to select or we draw a circle around them.
  • Insert: If we want to add a new word in a sentence already written, we keep pressed together where we want to write. After less than a second the text will separate and give us a space in which to write. If we change our mind and don’t write the text, it will come back together.
  • Link: Joining or separating words is as easy as drawing a vertical line just where we want to split a specific word or between the two we want to join. Very useful to correct some small errors when we write too fast.

It should be said that for now it seems that Scribble is only available in Chinese or English, although, from the tests we have done, it seems to work perfectly in spanish. It works in Spanish as long as we add the English keyboard in Settings > general > Keyboard and that we do not use language-specific characters such as ñ or accents.

Useful, right? In iPadOS 14 Apple has really taken a barter turn to the use that we can give the Apple Pencil, taking the iPad + Pencil couple much further.