I really want to love this. iPad hardware just doesn't deliver.
The problem isn't that nice drawing software like this doesn't exist, it's that styli on iPad still suck. The capacitive screen (even on "new" iPad) only has about a 6mm capacitive resolution, so you're stuck fudging the fck along with a sausage for a stylus. Ars had a good review[1] on the current state of styli, and they said much the same. I've personally owned about four iPad styli and none come close to what I am capable of with an old Graphire.
We need pressure sensitivity, finer resolution, and proper calibration for this to work well. Everyone wants to replace drawing stuff with iPad (including myself) but until iPad supports Wacom-esque pressure sensitivity, feel and resolution on iPad everything you do there will likely be too rough compared to what you could get with a Bamboo on Painter/Illustrator or what could be drawn directly on paper, scanned in and retraced with said Wacom. Even the Galaxy Note / Lenovo Tablet / etc. are better for this.
I agree completely, but there's something very important that Apple has to to – not bundle a stylus. That's right: they should build Wacom technology into the tablet without including a pen or a place to hold it.
Why? For the same reason that Macs still come defaulted to "one button" mode – to restrain software developers. You see, application developers for Mac can count on a significant percent of their user base being completely without an alternate click, so they are forced to expose functionality as buttons instead of stuffing it all in the context menu.
If Apple bundled a stylus with the iPad tomorrow, thousands of developers would add support for it for "gee whiz" reasons. If the user has to purchase one separately, it won't be used gratuitously. Instead, only the professional apps (which actually benefit from a stylus) would use them.
I agree with your point in general, but must nitpickishly correct your comment on Macs and right click. Every Apple trackpad and mouse sold today supports right click out of the box, and has done for years. Apple hasn't sold a one-click input device in a long time.
That's right. When you first plug in an Apple Mouse or Magic Mouse it is in one-button mode. However, any multi-button mouse will have all the buttons enabled. This is probably why some people think that multi-button mode is the default.
So let me clarify – all apple hardware comes by default with the secondary click disabled.
It was the case when I purchased my magic mouse last year, and when my wife bought one a few days ago. Prior to that she'd never plugged in a mouse to her MacBook Pro.
Huh, maybe the external devices are different. Built-in trackpads come configured to use two-fingered clicking as right click by default, as far as I've seen.
I think you're off on that, Mike. I just tried making a new user, and two finger tap for right click was not enabled on my MacBook Air. I do have two finger tap for right click configured for my usual user.
Been doing Personal Setup in Apple stores for a year now and I can assure you that all new macs come out-of-the-box with secondary click enabled for Trackpads, Magic Trackpads and Magic Mice.
Try a two fingered physical click, rather than a two fingered tap. I just checked a one-off test account that I'm sure I never reconfigured, and the former is not enabled, but the latter is.
After seeing study after study found that most people never right click it is hard to find one button stupid. I recall one KDE usability study I sat in on where some actions were only accessible via the right click menu. The user (who was a kde developer!) couldn't figure out how to complete all of the tasks because the actions were hidden and he happen to not right click on the "right spot" to see them. For the maintainer of the application it was an eye opening experience.
I completely disagree, but not for the reasons you might expect. Most people attribute Apple's decision to stubbornness, laziness, arrogance, vanity, or "just being different." It's not any of those, but Apple is so tight-lipped about their decision making that no one articulates why they make the choices they do. Their "one button" strategy is brilliant, and here's why:
As I said, the real reason Apple needs one button is to prevent interface designers from getting lazy. Apple (and their third-party developers) know that most people never change the defaults.
However, they don't really want to ship single-button hardware. Here's what most people don't realize: Apple knows it's a less expressive device. Back when they shipped real one button mice, their advanced users were forced to BYOHID. The hardware that Apple shipped was wasted. That sucks.
To resolve this dilemma Apple devised the Mighty Mouse (later the Magic Mouse). Since the "right-click" was in software they could keep the one-button default but have the hardware magically transform into a multi-button mouse for advanced users. Surely many will BYOHID anyway (this happens with PCs too), but two buttons satisfy many more users.
It's a neat solution to a technical and social problem.
They seem to use totally different approach - an external motion detector, proximity sensors which gives this tool much better precision. It's this kind of technology as used in kindle touch. Although it's still early for them, idea behind this is quite interesting.
These pens use ultrasound triangulation. I have tried the earlier paper versions of them and they are eerily accurate. I was just thinking someone should use a pen like this for the ipad and it seems that someone already has.
Yep - there is a reason Wacom tablets are still so expansive. You wouldn't be able to get that resolution at an iPad size for cheap enough - but it is only a matter of time (now that there is a higher scale of demand from Apple and other tablets)
I used to work for Wacom, and there's another reason they're so expensive: volume. Think how much a retina display would cost if, say, Samsung made it in 10k-per-year quantities, and you'll have an idea. Wacom just isn't a big enough fish.
They also have an insanely high threshold for parts quality, but without the volume to keep manufacturers making the same parts, they keep running out. The new Cintiq[1] has one of the nicest displays you'll ever see, but it will likely always be in short supply.
the real wacoms have 1025 lines per inch, your Aus Eee Note doesn't have 1025 in the entire touchscreen
the component cost of the touchscreen in the Asus is around $40. I have the larger model here. the component cost for the wacom touch interface and controller (which you can't even really buy) would be in the hundreds of dollars (for a 7").
if you have used a real wacom you will know what I am talking about, the feeling and accuracy is simply awesome. I can't wait until the technology makes it into consumer tablets
It looks like a somewhat different design than all the other styluses, and so might work better, but I haven’t seen any direct reviews except their marketing material, which is hardly impartial.
Yes. I own one. It is by far the best of the capacitive styli, hands down. It isn't perfect but is the closest thing you will get to perfect without dropping $100+ for something like the XO[1], which is a bit buggy from what I've seen and you are stuck with their software/SDK. I just won't pay an extra $150 for a stylus. At that point I might as well go the Wacom-equipped Android route.
Even with the Adonit, though, iPad is still no match for a Wacom. It's not even close.
Go on YouTube and just search for Adonit Jot Pro reviews. There are lots of impartial people and accurate action.
While looking for a precise stylus I came across this one as well: http://www.cregle.com/ It looks like it solves a lot of the gripes with normal capacitive styluses, but I haven't tried it.
This is the same hardware as the XO stylus in a different case. Same OEM for both. They look great, the demos are wonderful, but user reviews say that they don't work well in the upper third of the screen and require frequent recalibration.
Interesting, I hadn't seen the XO before. It's too bad these ultrasonic styluses don't live up to the hype. I would love to take notes on a new iPad and ditch the paper notebooks completely. It'd be sweet if Apple shipped a solution, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
If you go to Cregle's iPen Kickstarter page - Comments section - you'll see it didn't live up to expectations. (Google iPen, should be first result).
Calibration issues, broken, etc. I was really looking forward to a precise stylus (pressure sensitivity is number 2 priority to me), and I'm still waiting…
The low resolution and lack of pressure sensitivity is frustrating. It feels like I'm drawing with a chalk stick. We can zoom into the image to add detail, but lose sight of the overall structure.
However, as an artist, there is sometimes something to be gained from embracing the confines of a particular medium and learning to work within them. And there are serious artists working with the ipad, e.g. David Hockney:
I'm a lot more interested in stroke dynamics and zooming than I am in resolution and pressure sensitivity. I don't mean to say that those features wouldn't be welcome, but no real world tool can do everything. And limitations are often the foundation of style and expression.
I spent several years drawing with silverpoint and while it was an excruciating experience, the results were often gorgeous; especially as the drawing "ages" and the silver tarnishes. Talk about your non-intuitive interface.
Most of that stuff is in storage in another state. I'm not sure how silverpoint would scan. It would probably just look like a pen or pencil drawing.
Basically it is drawing with a piece of silver wire. The mark is very faint, especially on paper. To get enough silver to deposit, you often use paper covered with a ground of some kind, like gesso or very find sand or grit in a sizing of some kind.
Over time the silver tarnishes and darkens, but it has a luster about it that would be very difficult to photograph or scan. If you don't want the silver to tarnish, you can coat the work with a modern sealer, but no one really knows how that will age over the years.
One of the ways of drawing with silver point is to "glaze" over the work by tracing and retracing over the forms, to build up a fusion of the marking material. This can result in a very cloudy, diffuse rendering that still has a definite graphic look to it.
Very time consuming and it's hard to judge when to stop since the image is so faint.
One artist I knew used to spray the silver with chemicals to "develop" the image to a certain point, and then neutralize it when it had reached the darkness level he wanted, and then he sealed it.
You can also draw with gold wire, the markings are a faint yellow brownish color, but they have a definite luster to them. The gold doesn't tarnish like the silver, so you don't have the change over time. Depends on the effect you want I guess.
There was an artist in recent years who did these very large semi-photo real silver and gold point drawings. Several feet across. A reproduction simply cannot do them justice. They are very faint, and the light changes as you walk around them.
I've actually thought about doing a digital installation piece using Processing that has drawings and photos that exhibit apparent change according to the light and the viewer's orientation to the work. And of course with digital, you could have the actual image itself change, and not just the viewing apparition.
This would probably be considered a "Not Safe For Work" image, so be aware.
The photo really doesn't do justice to what these look like. The image as perceived in the room is almost latent, no where near this explicit. Very faint, but definitely there.
I wonder if the resolution issue could be improved by combining inertial sensing in the stylus with the position data from the capacitive display. You should be able to get sub-"pixel" resolution by using multiple sensors this way, though I'm not sure how well it would work in practice, with inertial drift, etc. It might be pretty good though! Worth trying I bet.
I would be willing to bet they are doing some kind of inertial modeling in their stroke dynamics right now. There is some kind of "Dynadraw" algorithm in their now that is smoothing and adjusting stroke thickness. Some it seems to be based on pointer velocity, but there is something else going on that I can't quite put my finger on ... as it were.
Noting that the interaction you are accustomed to using a Wacom tablet is far more controlled and rich, I don't think thats the point here at all.
Every artistic medium has constraints, and every artist is used to this fact whether he is a painter or a sculpter. The iPad's input device (capacitive screen) is one such constraint here. What I think is great about this app is how great it can be at capturing a good number of important expressive pieces that are possible in the medium and presenting them as easy to understand tools. In using the app for about 30 mins I felt pretty great about what I was able to create in comparison to other apps on the same medium (iPad apps).
There appears to be a project on Kickstarter to create an open source pressure sensitive pen. The current design doesn't look like it incorporates a "higher precision" tip like the iPen (http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/ipen) or Jot Pro (http://adonit.net/product/jot-pro/) that have already been mentioned, but it could be promising.
> The capacitive screen (even on "new" iPad) only has about a 6mm capacitive resolution
I told this to a rather well known analytic design guy, before he went to Frisco to lecture at Apple before the release of iPad 2: the input resolution needs to be a lot better.
16 months on, no improvement. I can only hope tablet designers have boxed themselves in: there's not much more to improve on this thing. I've got the new ipad, the first gen ipad, and the touchpad. They're all stone cold awesome. But their drawing inputs still fail miserably compared to a sharp pencil. Hell, most erasers are more precise than a tablet.
“What hardware improvements would I want in a tablet? The iPad can already do 3D games, resolution limited more by your retina than the screen, wireless networking, sensors for touch, position, orientation, acceleration, sound, front and rear facing cameras...”
I think you just provided a great answer to that question.
The ability to write, or draw, with a high degree of precision is something I think a lot of people are going to want.
Dang, I was finally hoping for a worthy replacement for the aborted Microsoft Courier.
If it's possible to have a tablet with high enough display resolution that you can't see individual pixels, why can't we also have a touchscreen with high enough touch resolution?
Pretty sure he means that while you can draw smaller than 6mm, you won't be able to position it accurately. I've tried using capacitive touchscreens and styluses, and they are not precise at all.
Your fingers don't have that kind of accuracy either. What you do have is precision in your finger/hand/arm system. Moment arm dynamics are far more important in precise drawings than addressable accuracy. The best digital drawing tools I've found make use of stroke dynamics rather than sensor sampling to produce precise and high quality strokes.
Just downloaded it and gave it a spin with my Bamboo stylus. Here are my impressions, FWIW:
* First impression: Nice tutorial, nice animations when picking a notebook. Great idea to do your app planning sketches as its own notebook.
* First impression while writing: Nice inky strokes, I like the colors.
* Second impression: Hmmm...this seems a bit laggy compared to Noteshelf or Penultimate. <flip over to those programs> Yup, definitely laggier (I have an iPad 2). Probably only a few milliseconds lag, but noticeable.
* Third impression: I like the rewind interface instead of an undo button. Very cool.
* Fourth impression: No zoom or magnifying glass? bummer.
* Final decision: Nice, impressive, innovative UI but unfortunately especially the lagginess will cause this to not replace Noteshelf as my default go-to notebook. The lack of zoom is also a bummer, since with a magnifying glass you could add so much more detail, it makes up for the iPad's lack of pinpoint accuracy.
3.5/5 (edit: just realized i'm not on the app store so I can give decimal ratings :P)
P.S. Also, a "hand guard" area to ignore touches as in Noteshelf would REALLY be nice to be able to draw without having to make sure you never touch the screen with your hand while drawing.
I had incredible difficulty with the rewind/undo interface. Almost as often as I bring up the rewind UI, it'll do some other action instead, like drawing little dots, or zooming in/out, or bringing up/dismissing the tools palette.
When the dialog is finally brought up, it doesn't respect my finger motions. I'll drag my one finger a full 360 around my other finger but the pie chart moves less than 5 degrees in total, jerkily. Or, it flaps forward and backward rapidly as I smoothly move my finger in one direction. Maybe there's a heuristic that's trying to pick a "pivot" finger and a "rotating" finger, and it's picking wrong each time. I dunno.
Willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because the rest of the app is so well done, but, this brokenness of such a key feature makes a bad initial impression.
It sounds as if you're rotating one finger around the other? The idea is to use two fingers together (like one big finger) to do a pan in a circular motion.
In all my messing around it did not occur to me to try that. Thanks! Solution blinders in action! I suppose a little animation would have gone a long way towards clearing that up initially.
Even doing it correctly, I still feel it's a little too slow, and still relatively easy to flub it into closing the book. I applaud the idea, though.
A tip (workaround) for the missing hand guard, as often done with Wacoms: Wear a glove (e.g. wool) on your drawing hand. It will not register any unintended touches, and your hand will glide easier over the iPad, allowing for smoother curves and straighter lines.
There are many products in this space on the app store, and probably one to suit every taste. Procreate is more capable - layer blending, design your own brushes. Then there's Brushes, beloved of David Hockney. Plenty of notebook apps too: Notability is particularly versatile, Autodesk has SketchbookX, SketchClub and SketchPad are fun, SketchShare is multiuser via wifi, ArtRage is .... OK better stop.
Paper has a pleasing feel but the minimalism won't suit everyone.
I've tried most of the sketching/drawing focused apps except ArtRage, with pro and procreate and the now seldom used brushes, I never felt the need for ArtRage - is there any good reason to pick it up?
I was quite underwhelmed by paper after being exposed to the others, and I have notability as well.
I couldn't tell at first if this was an app or just a sarcastic advertisement for actual paper as an alternative to tablets. Maybe that doesn't say much for my powers of observation, but it's also a testament to the product. At first glance, a white iPad running this app is not unlike a pad of drawing paper. Good job.
Imagine the amount of work involved in making something look like paper. It really seems to border on a big waste of time. Computers can do lots of things paper can't, and paper can do lots of things computers can't. So why spend countless man- and machine-hours emulating minor details (grain, texture, absorption) of one in the other?
I still can't tell what the heck the product actually is. Is it a new tablet? A remanufactured iPad? Some sort of stylus. Some sort of app? Something offered by Tumblr?
The app looks really, really cool, but I think this input lag demonstration by Microsoft has really spoilt me in the same way that I can no longer look at mobile devices without Retina and not cringe.
What are the chances that real hardware response will get down to the 1ms range in the near future? I'm thinking that each interface, from the touch pad to the CPU to the display, will introduce significant lag.
Bought this this morning. I'm a figurative artist, for over 30 years, and this is a very nice tool. Especially for a version 1.0. The stroke dynamics are very good, and I'm running this on a first generation iPad. I've been sketching with it off and on all day, and have really grown to like it.
Things it needs:
* Pinch zoom in and out. Gotta have this. It works great when you are drawing at the scale of the whole page, but detail work suffers as the sampling of the device isn't good enough. (Nor are my fingers! This is why artists and illustrators often draw and paint as large as possible.) When they add zooming, and they say on their website they are, they need to be sure and adjust the tool's scaling to match the view.
* The limited color palette is fine, but I need to be able to pick the colors.
* More tools are a given, especially since the program itself is free and they are making their money by selling extra tools. I've already plunked down my eight bucks for all that's available.
The minimalist interface is fantastic. When you are drawing, and I'm speaking as a person who draws observationally, you want the tool to be as spacial and object oriented as possible. This doesn't mean you have to mimic "real world" drawing tools, but it does mean that the interface needs to not emphasize numerics and linguistics. The organization needs to be very simple; from a drawing point of view, if I have to drill down through a series of hierarchies I might has well type in menu selections from a command line. My attention needs to be on my subject and my drawing, not on a UI.
yes. I bought a thinkpad tablet specifically for pen input. It's not bad but you need a wacom stylus, as it allows for a feature I call "pre-write cueing" that simulates a shadow/cursor of where you're about to write.
You also need a retina display. You stare much closer at the screen when writing and notice the pixelation much more closely.
If they had gone with the traditional free lite version / paid premium version model, you would lose all of your drawings when you upgraded. This is just a free trial for the real product which can be unlocked at any time with minimal friction. Personally, I prefer this to having to hunt in the app store for the "premium" version if I decide to make the switch.
Doing this also gives the developers the option to introduce paid updates in the future, which is potentially good or bad.
As of iOS5, free and paid versions of apps (or any apps by the same developer) can share data, so the issue of losing data when upgrading has been solved.
There is also no reason the developer can't link to the paid version direct from the app - no heed for hunting.
I don't mind them charging in-app for features in principle. but I found that the free version wasn't enough for me to draw anything serious so it didn't really let me try out the app.
I think it would have been better to go with a fully featured free version with say, just one notebook with limited pages. That way users could use the app fully, and upgrade if they used it enough to need more capacity.
This price model will motivate the developers to create products that exactly tailor all the needs of their users, and the users could potentially (and probably will) save money buying a subset of the products they deem necessary. A flat fee will make the developers focus on top X priorities, leaving a segment of the user base possibly out of luck.
For a drawing app, feel and responsiveness are incredibly critical, with features being a distant second. These qualities are essentially impossible to convey without trying it out.
I feel it's actually more respectful of the user's time to let them figure out whether the app will work for them for free, rather than forcing them to commit to a purchase of something that may not in the end be suitable for their needs.
(insert discussion about being able to return apps for a refund here)
I'm curious about the bluetooth 4.0 LE pressure-sensitive stylus (http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/03/blue-tiger-stylus/); I've started to get really excited about 4.0 LE for electronic leash and other applications.
I actually don't like the rewind interface. It is an innovative way to use circular gestures, but it was frustrating to use. I'd rather have a circular context menu.
I do like the moleskin feel to it and the graphics. Good work!
How come the "nice designed" web sites is always the same, with the same font, large images, and soooo long to scroll. It's like a statement saying "we mind about design, we just don't have any creativity."
It seems to me the problem for detailed drawing is more of a hardware than a software problem at this point. It's very solvable on both sides it's a matter of timing the solution to hit the market when the major players in the pad space get to the right level of support for detailed styluses.
Clever alternative input methods to take an end run around screen resolution would be amazing if they're accurate enough.
I'd love to see someone give paper this 1 paper-cut.
Follow the link, watch the video that pops up... some guy walking around fiddling with a tablet. What's being sold here? The tablet? Some software? Services? No idea... watch for thirty seconds... still no idea... click the "about" button... more pictures of someone's shoes. Maybe they're selling shoes.
(Business hat) I wonder what would prompt someone to make yet another drawing app for the iPad? It's a fairly full space with entries from the major players, and the market of skilled artists is fairly small and is never going to blow up into a #1 hit.
I haven't played with this yet, but have to say the video splash on http://www.fiftythree.com/ 's homepage is awesome. So much more effective than some LaunchRock splash photo.
This app is being reviewed / hyped by every MacBook/ iOS site. No matter how good the UI is, they have pulled off a massive PR coup. How did they do it?
I noticed that too but then I kind of felt like that's the point. Simple. Kind of like having a box of 9 crayons instead of a box if 200.
The more options they give you the more time spent use them instead of drawing?
At the same time though, I do wonder if the sketchbook UI is really the main point. Going through images 1 at a time or with a grid of thumbnails in Art Rage or Sketchbook is much more cumbersome than this one pinch to fold, flip to next page, tap, draw.
It doesn't ask you to load or save, it just acts like paper which is quicker.
I wonder of those other apps added that type of feature if the limited options would still be a positive or a negative.
Great app, guys. I love the design of the app and your website. Really fits the whole artistic New York hippie vibe. Keep up the good work and ignore the inevitable onslaught of negativity you read here...its par for course lately.
mmm looks delicious. I have been an avid user of the Sketchbook Pro way-of-things since Studio Paint. I have ordered a stylus to try this on my girlfriends iPad.
Unfortunately no. In an interview with The Verge one of the developers said that they were open to the idea of moving to new platforms, but that their resources were too tight for the time being. Imagine this on a future version of the Galaxy Note. Perfect application for the increased fidelity of the Note stylus.
The problem isn't that nice drawing software like this doesn't exist, it's that styli on iPad still suck. The capacitive screen (even on "new" iPad) only has about a 6mm capacitive resolution, so you're stuck fudging the fck along with a sausage for a stylus. Ars had a good review[1] on the current state of styli, and they said much the same. I've personally owned about four iPad styli and none come close to what I am capable of with an old Graphire.
We need pressure sensitivity, finer resolution, and proper calibration for this to work well. Everyone wants to replace drawing stuff with iPad (including myself) but until iPad supports Wacom-esque pressure sensitivity, feel and resolution on iPad everything you do there will likely be too rough compared to what you could get with a Bamboo on Painter/Illustrator or what could be drawn directly on paper, scanned in and retraced with said Wacom. Even the Galaxy Note / Lenovo Tablet / etc. are better for this.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2012/03/does-the-stylus...