In my last post I went over the new brush library introduced with Pocket’s 5.4 update, which has prompted a massive outcry from users, most of which can be summarized as follows: it’s awful and we hate it! Read on for my analysis of the updated UI, and the workarounds I’ve been using so far.
A major source of user dissatisfaction with the new UI comes from the fact that the new layout of tools disturbs years of built up muscle memory. I’m not going to lie: this is, indeed, a massive pain in the butt. However, the way I see it is this: as annoying as it is, interface updates that disrupt users’ established workflow are just one of this things that roll around every so often, and all you can do is adjust and move the fudge on with your life. Ain’t no use in bellyaching over it.
The real problem, in my opinion, is the performance of the sidebars, which tend to slide veeery slooooowly. This is exacerbated by the design choice of making each sidebar have two forms: a half-sidebar with an abbreviated selection of options and a full-sidebar that contains all of the options. When you open a menu, it opens to the half-sidebar, so if the option you want isn’t shortlisted there, you have to swipe again to pull up the full-sidebar. Similarly, when you swipe to close it, it just goes from the full-sidebar to the half-sidebar and requires another swipe to completely close it. When the slide animation lags, it makes navigation incredibly frustrating.
I’m really hoping that Procreate is going to release a patch addressing this issue, but in the meantime, here are the workarounds I’ve found.
Pocket 5.4 Lag workarounds
To the best of my understanding, the issue with the slow sidebars is that the animation rendering lags when the OS is processing many things at the same time. Here are some things I have been doing to minimize concurrent processes.
- Close unused background apps.
- Don’t use the new brush library. The new brushes use advanced mechanics that require more processing to render.
- Delete unused brush libraries and gradient maps.
- Use as few layers as possible. You should aim to have no more than 10 layers, and less than 5 is optimal.
- Rasterize text layers.
- Merge layer masks.
- Keep layer blending style set to normal, and merge layers with other blending styles into a normal layer.
- Clear your undo history after using gradient map, liquify, or clone. You can do this by closing out of your canvas (go back to main gallery) and reopening it.
- When all else fails, force-closing and restarting the app can fix the lag for a short while. How long depends on whether you do the other things on this list.
Here’s hoping we’ll see an official patch for this issue sooner than later!
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