PogoStylus
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Ten One Design sponsoring Pogo Sketch iPad art challenge
Last summer, Ten One Design sponsored a contest for artists who were using the Pogo Stylus with drawing or painting apps on the iPhone. The contest was quite popular, and some of the entries were astoundingly good. Well, things change, and now the canvas of choice is the iPad. Today, Ten One Design announced the 2010 Capacitive Canvas Challenge, also known as the 2nd Annual Pogo Art Contest. Grab an iPad, a Pogo Sketch, and your favorite drawing app, work up some beautiful art, and then post it to the contest site before 11:59 PM EST on October 29th. If you're picked as the Grand Prize Winner, you'll get a booq Boa squeeze laptop bag filled with $1000 worth of goodies (including $300 cash, a Twelve South Compass iPad stand, and the lovely DODOcase). There will be four secondary winners as well, who will receive some goodies from Ten One Design, an iTunes Gift Card, and an iPad stand or case. You have to be at least 15 years old to enter, and you must use the Pogo Sketch for your iPad artwork. Finger painting is not allowed. The winners will be selected on the basis of Artistic Skill, Creativity / Originality, Realism, and Judge's Choice, and you'll see the works of the winners on November 5th on the Ten One website. Good luck to all who enter! Maybe we'll see the work of some creative TUAW readers up there in November.
Pressure-sensitive drawing headed to iPad in free software library (video)
"The iPad's IPS panel is pressure-sensitive, you say?" No, that's not quite right, but with some clever software and a special capacitive stylus, the folks at Ten One Design built a convincing proof of concept anyhow. While we're not quite sure how it works, the current theory states that the soft tip of the stylus expands like a brush when you press it down, generating a "larger press" that can be detected by the hooks in Ten One's code -- which they soon plan to share as a free software library (assuming Apple allows) with developers around the world. See it in action in a video after the break, and if you're feeling your inner Rorschach today, let us know what you see in the above drawing.
Pressure-sensitive drawing on the iPad
Ten One Design has made a reputation for themselves by providing tools and technology to turn touch-sensitive surfaces into drawing tablet style interfaces. They sell a Pogo Stylus that works along with the capacitive touchscreen of the iPhone to make it an even better tool for artists. And in the video above, they're showing off a tech demo that seems to have a modified version of the Pogo Stylus that makes pressure-sensitive drawing possible on Apple's iPad. Unfortunately, Ten One doesn't have software to sell yet; the tech above uses a private API call, which means it couldn't be approved on the App Store. As far as I can guess, they're somehow passing pressure information back through the stylus to the iPad, since the iPad's screen itself isn't pressure sensitive at all. No matter how they're doing it, though, it's cool. I don't think this is exactly what Jobs expects the iPad to be used for, so it's not likely that we'll see official pressure sensitivity on an iOS device very soon. But it's cool to see a video like this that shows off the potential. Update: As a few of our observant commenters noted, there's no Bluetooth call here -- the private API call is just tracking the size of the touch on the iPad's screen -- bigger touch means more pressure and a wider stroke. That does seem like something Apple could eventually implement, so hopefully they will make that official in the future.
