This is the first article in a series of Creating on Apple Vision Pro articles. In this series, I will challenge myself to complete a similar creative action on all the Apple devices I regularly use, using the same app(s), the same tools, and the same features across different devices and operating systems. To begin the series, I selected an exercise in drawing shapes using Apple’s standard shape drawing tools in macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
To help somewhat level the playing field, I will begin on the device I usually use, or prefer to use, for a given activity, and complete it without practice. In this case, I usually use macOS in Keynote to create shape-based drawings. The tools are essentially the same across devices with the differences being the manner in which the user interacts with the user interface (UI) elements.
In this example, I will use the shape drawing tools to create a simplified version of my #AppleVisionProEDU logo. I created the actual logo in Keynote on macOS. In this case, I will draw a simplified version of the logo using several features I regularly use:
- Draw a variety of circles and ellipse shapes
- Use the Unite Shapes and Subtract shapes features
- Use the Gradient Fill tool
- Add a text box, change the font, size, and center the text
- Draw a diamond shape
Here is the basic design I’ll recreate four times:
The four apps and versions I will use include:
- Keynote on macOS
- Keynote on iPadOS
- Keynote on visionOS
- BONUS: Pages on visionOS—This will give an idea of the differences between using the same tools native on visionOS compared to an iPadOS app running on visionOS
For this article I will report the times it took me to create the same shape drawing in four app versions as one metric. Perhaps more importantly, I will report my experiences using the UIs of each OS.
Keynote on macOS
I have been drawing logos and shapes using the draw tools in Keynote for macOS for over 2 decades. I use these shape creations in presentations, logos, and videos. When the Bézier pen tool was released in Keynote in about 2011, I started using Keynote (and later Pages) as my primary illustration app. Here are all the basic shapes required to draw the simplified logo (shown in different colors with each shape selected for the sake of this explanation):
To level the playing field, I did not practice the original drawing in advance, I just started drawing from an image in my head. The unrehearsed drawing took 4 minutes 26 seconds on macOS.
It’s easy for me to take drawing in Keynote for macOS for granted, but the UI features that set the macOS version apart are mostly due to keyboard shortcuts and multi-touch trackpad features. A couple UI elements are a bit more difficult in macOS, namely, the Unite and Subtract Shapes features are buried under the Format > Shapes and Lines menus. However, my long-term experience in the app/OS made this drawing almost effortless.
Keynote in iPadOS (M1 iPad Pro 11-inch)
Although creating drawings with shapes on the iPadOS version of Keynote is my second-favorite option, I have a fair amount of experience from my many sketchnote projects I draw using Apple Pencil on iPad. I frequently access the shapes tools for drawing/tracing guides and to help with layout—even if you never see the shapes in my final sketchnotes because I delete these guides.
For the iPadOS on iPad version of my drawing, I used the exact methodology, but used the touchscreen features of iPad and the iPadOS touch UI. This logo took me 7 minutes, 25 seconds to complete, nearly 3 minutes longer than macOS.
To me, the multi-touch interface on iPadOS is nearly as efficient as macOS, and I would cite no problems using the iPadOS version. I speculate that a combination of having less overall iPadOS experience and the fact that I find the iPadOS UI slower to navigate may be the reason for the increased time. However, iPadOS feels more precise in moving objects because you are touching them “directly” (not using a trackpad), and I had already drawn this logo once—factors that should have increased efficiency and decreased time. Overall, this activity did not seem overly complicated, nor did I feel it took too much time to complete.
Keynote on visionOS
Please note that this was not my first time drawing shapes on visionOS. (I wrote about these experiences early on this blog.) Also be reminded that this was the third time to draw this logo so I was well practiced by now. This visionOS Keynote version of the drawing took me, surprisingly, 6 minutes 33 seconds to complete—about 1 minute faster than iPadOS on iPad! I was fully expecting to add at least a full minute due to my inexperience with the eye-tracking and pinching visionOS UI, but I was proven incorrect.
However, I have several visionOS UI issues to report. At this time with my current experience, the drawing did not feel “natural.” Many times throughout the drawing process I felt a bit of frustration.
1. It is very easy to accidentally select a menu in visionOS, but it is not yet natural for me to deselect this menu I didn’t want. To make a menu without a close button “go away,” you need to look “nowhere” on the screen—in a blank area—and tap your fingers. There isn’t always a blank area to look at so it’s easy to bring up another unwanted menu. Frustrating—but tolerable.
2. Moving objects with resize handles is somewhat of a gamble, especially if the object is small. You need to look at the center of the object, pinch, and hope your drag moves and doesn’t resize the object. I found myself focusing all my will on the center of circles hoping that my "psychic power" would ensure I would move the object—oddly, this usually worked!
3. Drag-select is unpleasant. Frankly, I have no idea how I made this function work—sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. To drag-select, you look at “nothing”—in the middle of a blank space—and tap-and-drag while desperately hoping the interface understands that you want to drag-select over objects. This is about 800% more effort than macOS and iPadOS. On visionOS, there is no feedback that your eyes are “locked” into a place that will trigger the pinch to cause drag-select to function. This UI feature apparently functions on hope.
4. Resize handles offer sufficient visual feedback because they slightly change color while you look at them. When objects are small and/or close together, this action is still challenging, and I found myself using my “psychic powers” to ensure I was looking precisely in the exact right place. It mostly worked.
My description of using my “psychic powers” to ensure precise eye-tracking is meant tongue-in-cheek, but it I did it many times, and I wonder how many other users are doing it. Despite these issues using visionOS for this drawing example, the stopwatch didn’t lie—I still completed the activity in less time than iPadOS. However, it felt longer and the UI caused friction.
BONUS: Pages on visionOS
Since the shapes drawing tools are exactly the same on Pages, especially if the Pages document is set up as a Page Layout document as I did for this example, I wanted to try the iPadOS tools on visionOS. The time for completing the drawing was 7 minutes 9 seconds—about the same as the iPadOS version on iPad. Since I suspect we will see a Pages for visionOS version relatively soon, I just have a few insights:
The overall experience was very similar to Keynote for visionOS. The side-tab and “ribbon” menus in iPadOS are functional, but the visionOS floating menus are far better for the eye-tracking/pinching UI. When a side-tab menu is selected in the iPadOS version, the workspace shrinks unnecessarily in the visionOS world. (This is odd because the iPadOS version on my iPad Pro uses a floating side menu—NOT the fixed version of the side tab menu used by visionOS shown below.) Also, the tools and icons are spaced further apart on visionOS allowing for more precise selections, even if they are placed in yet another set of locations on the screen for you to need to locate.
In iPadOS, there is no visual feedback on whether or not you have selected a resize handle, you have only your hope that the thing you are looking at is selected. Hope is not enough for a functional OS. Note to Apple Human Interface Team—hope alone does not make a functional UI element.
Conclusion
To conclude this first article in my series on Creating on Apple Vision Pro, I decided to make a video of drawing this example using Keynote for visionOS. I sped up the video so it is just 1 minute long. However, I was surprised yet again by the actual time of this example—the fifth time I completed this activity in 4 different formats—my time was 5 minutes 26 seconds on visionOS. This is just 1 minute longer than my original, unpracticed macOS version.
Even with its imperfections, visionOS is impressive as a creation tool for drawing with shapes.
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