Paper 2.0.0 Bugs and Other Strange Behaviors

With FiftyThree’s Paper hitting 2.0 and Apple’s iOS 8 system update dropping recently we’ve seen some noticeable improvements in the software along with brand new features like Mix and Surface Pressure.

With such a substantially upgrade to both Paper and iOS, a few bugs were bound to slip through. My goal with this post is to document these “bugs” and what conditions they occur under. If you’ve experienced any of these know that you’re not alone and hopefully a fix or official workaround from FiftyThree is on the way.

Using a Stylus to Blend is Unreliable

I’ve always used Paper’s Blend feature as designed: draw with Pencil and smudge with one of my fingers. Because I’m a finger blender I learned about this next bit from Edwin over on Tumblr. For those of you who prefer using a capacitive stylus like Wacom’s Bamboo to smudge, you may need to change your work-flow after updating Paper to version 2.0.0…

In my tests this appears to be limited to styli with smaller nibs. In Paper 2.0.0 (193), smudging with these sorts of nibs no longer works… well not 100% of the time. If you press hard enough to “squish” the tip it might register as a touch and smudge but at the cost of wearing out faster.

I tried several styli with rubber nibs to see if it was indeed the tip’s size or some other quality. As long as the tip is fat enough Paper will interpret it as a finger touch and Blend — and sometimes draw (see bug below). Anything smaller it ignores as a way of filtering out touches to avoid making errant smudges.

While I believe only activating Blend with finger sized touch targets is the intended behavior. I do see how it could be bothersome for those who prefer using a stylus (that falls under the size threshold¹) to Blend. If you want to test it out here are the steps I followed:

1. Tap Settings in the upper right corner.
2. Choose Pencil.
3. Set Finger to Blend.
4. Draw something with Pencil.
5. Attempt to smudge something with another stylus.
6. Lightly drag this same stylus’ tip across the screen.

Pencil “Nothing” Bug

Under ideal conditions, a Pencil stylus paired to Paper should only draw/paint/erase with it’s tip and Blend with a finger. I’ve found that a stylus used in place of your finger will draw even if you’ve turned off the Blend feature. Here’s how to reproduce the bug:

1. Tap Settings in the upper right corner.
2. Choose Pencil.
3. Set Finger to Nothing.
4. Make a stroke with Pencil.
5. Switch to another stylus and make another stroke.

It doesn’t always draw and it doesn’t happen with every stylus. Capacitive tip styli with smaller tips exhibit it more often than those that are fat and squishy — but not always.

Pogo Connect Bug

I’ve been using my Pogo Connect less and less these days so this bug hasn’t been that troubling for me. But for those of you who rely on it (especially pre-iPad air users), you may want to take extra care when using a Pogo Connect until this bug is fixed.

This is a really weird one and I’m not entirely sure why it’s happening, but it certainly feels like it has something to do with the new watercolor brush behavior. Here’s how to reproduce it:

1. Draw something with one of the ink tools.
2. Switch to the watercolor brush and paint.
3. Invoke the Rewind gesture.

Here’s a video to better show what’s going on, but the gist of it is this.

If you paint something after drawing and then invoke Rewind, it undoes the drawing strokes instead of the painted strokes with no way or restoring them. They’re simply removed from Rewind’s history of undoes.

How To Avoid the Bug

To get around this bug take extra care when using the fountain pen, pencil, and watercolor brush tools. As far as I can tell if you make strokes with the fountain pen or pencil tools and then paint with the brush, you could potentially lose parts of your artwork after Rewinding. It doesn’t happen all the time but is more prevalent when switching tools quickly.

iOS Accessibility Zoom and Pencil

Back before Paper had the Loupe tool, many of us resorted to the Accessibility Zoom hack as a crude way of zooming in and doing detail work. By going into the Settings app, selecting General > Accessibility, you could turn on a 3 finger tap gesture to magnify the screen.

If you use FiftyThree’s Pencil, have the 2.0.0 version of Paper, and the zoom accessibility feature enabled, you’re in for a rude awakening. When you launch Paper you won’t be able to flip pages, draw, open the tool tray, or pretty much anything else. I’m sure there is a good reason for all of this, but for now you need to disable Zoom in the Settings app to use Paper properly.

For those of you that don’t use Pencil, the 3 finger tap accessibility zoom gesture works perfectly fine in Paper 2.0.0.

Other Bugs

Have you noticed any other bugs since updating to Paper 2.0.0 or iOS 8? Let me know in the comments section below so I can include them in the list.