PencilKit: From simple drawings to custom creative tools
summary
PencilKit provides a ready-made drawing stack: PKCanvasView for rendering, PKDrawing as the vector model, and a floating PKToolPicker that now accepts custom tools on iOS 18. Apple Pencil samples at 240Hz, so apps use Metal for performance and lossy compression (drop colinear points) to avoid multi‑megabyte traces. Erasing uses an additive mask rather than deleting points, and stroke access lets apps move, reorder, recolor or split strokes; export needs bitmaps for non‑PencilKit viewers.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 3:42Setting up PencilKit
- 5:30PKDrawing data model
- 7:18Tools and tool picker
- 9:29Summary and wrap-up
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