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Adonit boosts stylus-driven sketching with Forge
If you're into tablet-style sketching, you're likely familiar with apps like FiftyThree's Paper or Adobe's Sketch and Line. Now, stylus maker Adonit has a sketching app that's designed to not only get the most out of its drawing accessories, but to boost your productivity as well. The software is called Forge, and its simple interface keeps tools handy, but out of the way so you can focus on the task at hand. When you need to create multiple versions of the same sketch -- a logo project, for example, -- the app allows you to easily copy the drawing and build on top of it, organizing the old and the new on separate layers. As a designer myself, that's been the most useful thing about Forge: the ability to try new things with the same idea quickly and easily, without mucking up the original.
Daily iPad App: Tayasui Sketches is a basic, but beautiful sketching app
Casual artists looking to expand their sketching skills to the iPad should take a close look at Tayasui Sketches. The app landed in the iOS App Store earlier this month and rivals Paper as one of the best easy-to-use sketchbook apps. Sketches reminds me of an artist's workbench with a canvas in the middle and a handful of tools neatly arranged on the side. Sketches includes six drawing tools, one fill tool and one eraser to get you started. You can use a US$1.99 in-app purchase to buy the complete set of 12 tools and their interchangeable tips. Besides the new tools, the pro version also gives you the ability to change the size and opacity of your tool tip. Sketches may look simple on the surface, but there are a few key features that make the app a useful tool for serious sketchers and not just child's play. First and foremost is the ability to zoom in on the canvas and add small details to a drawing. It's great for adding a wrinkle to a forehead or the veins on a leaf. You can also draw a shape and fill it in with a pattern in one or two taps. You can even tweak the colors using a level tool that'll let you get the right hue, saturation and brightness. About the only thing missing from the app is support for notebooks. It would be wonderful to be able to group your individual sketches into a notebook to organize them. Tayasui Sketches is available for free from the iOS App Store.
The Nomad Flex paintbrush stylus will let you paint on a touchscreen (as well as you already can)
We've talked about the Nomad Brush before -- it's a capacitive paintbrush stylus that's designed to be used on a touchscreen canvas, letting you paint across your iPad's (or iPhone's, though the size of that screen makes it a little tougher) touchscreen with your favorite art-making app. Now, Nomad has introduced a new brush they call the Flex, which has a new synthetic brush tip to use, and comes in what seems to me like a slightly longer size (though that may just be my bad memory). The Flex is available to the public starting this week, and Nomad kindly sent a couple along to TUAW for us to try out and review. In short, the verdict is that this is just another tool for aspiring artists to use. If, like me, you can't draw much more than a stick figure with a smiley face, a house and some of those M-shaped birds, then the Flex won't make you a much better artist. It might make you feel like one, at least, because the brush's capacitive tip does respond quite well to the iPad's screen. I used the Autodesk Sketchbook app to do some test painting, and when I first started, I mashed the brush down on the screen like a standard stylus, pressing it in and then swiping it around. With a little bit of practice, though, I found that the brush would register on the screen at even the slightest touch, so that when I stopped thinking about it as a stylus and started thinking about the interaction as paint on a canvas, it actually worked fairly well. Again, I have zero experience with real painting outside of what I did in kindergarten, but I do get the impression that in the hands of someone who knows how to wield a paintbrush, the Nomad Flex would be very useful. As I discussed with the Nomad's makers earlier this year, there are a few drawbacks to a brush like this. First, Nomad itself doesn't make a painting app to work with the brush: They recommend a few, but you're essentially using third-party apps of your own choice, and those each come with certain issues and features of their own. Painters used to blending colors and the physical properties of paint may obviously find problems with digital painting apps, and the paint on screen may not move around they're used to seeing paint on canvas move. For someone already used to holding a paintbrush while making art, however, the Nomad Flex seems like an excellent tool. I do have one hitch, actually. In Sketchbook, you will sometimes need to just touch on the screen for the app's UI, in order to change around the brush's color, for example, or switch up your brush's width. I instinctively turned the Nomad brush around, thinking that there'd be a capacitive stylus on the opposite end of it. But no dice -- the brush ends in what seems like a metallic stub that could tap on or even crack your screen if it hits hard enough. It seems to me like a no-brainer to turn the other end into a standard stylus, but Nomad hasn't done that for some reason. Just for the heck of it, I also tried using the Flex for something it's not designed for: Playing the great line-drawning game Jack Lumber. I scored fairly well in the level I played, but I have to admit that by the end of it, I preferred the familiar feeling (and responsiveness) of dragging my finger across the screening. Painting with the brush allows you to be a little more expressive, but games, it seems, are designed for a good old hand-attached digit. That silliness aside, the Nomad Flex is a great stylus paintbrush, and if you're a painter who prefers swiping some fibers across the screen rather than your own finger, at $29.99, I would definitely recommend trying it out for sure.
Apple reveals next-generation apps for the new iPad: Infinity Blade: Dungeons, SketchBook, SkyGamblers (video)
While Apple's ensured all of its home-baked apps are making the most of the new iPad's retina display and new A5X chipset, it also had a handful of third-party app developers ready to show what the new hardware's capable. First up was Namco, who revealed the iOS-exclusive SkyGamblers, an Ace Combat-styled jet combat simulator. There looks to be a whole load of detail crammed into both the plane models and background -- something all those extra pixels can certainly help with and something we'll want to take a closer look at when it lands later this month. Taking a different approach, Autodesk's SketchBook app took the opportunity to show off the level of detail its sketches were now capable of, alongside a new engine for the ink. Now, we're not exactly sure what that entails, but we're sure it's going to make our works of art really zing. The app can even export images larger than 100 megapixels and will be out in April. Finally, Infinity Blade developers Epic Games took to the stage to unveil Dungeons -- the next iteration of the swiping and slashing gladiatorial battler. It appears the battle system has been recast once again and HDR lighting ensures the game will arrive dripping in optical honey. We'll be taking up swords to get a hands-on with these very soon. Update: We've just added the trailer to the next chunk of the Infinity Blade saga. It's right after the break. For more coverage of Apple's iPad event, visit our hub!
Wacom Inkling digital sketch pen hands-on (video)
Wacom's new digital pen can't help but stand out from the competition. It's a specialized device that makes no apologies for catering to graphics enthusiasts at the expense of casual note-takers. Moreover, it does something pretty amazing: instead of just turning your sketches into simple bitmaps, it can also export them as vector-based images with multiple layers, which means they can be directly used as the basis for more complex and final art. The Inkling will cost £150 ($230 converted) when it reaches European stores in October, but in the meantime we've got some early hands-on impressions right after the break. %Gallery-133144% %Gallery-133182%
Alexander Graham Bell's sketchbook reveals ridiculously wonderful imaginings
The image above is a page from Alexander Graham Bell's sketchbook, a self-portrait from the 1870's, is just one page from the large collection of the inventor's papers, now housed at the Library of Congress. Bell's sketches which document the invention of the telephone are the most fascinating of the lot, and happily, the Library has digitized them and made a large selection of them available online.
Adobe Ideas for iPad gets feature boost
Adobe updated Ideas, its vector-based sketchbook application for the iPad, earlier this week. The 1.2 version of the iPad application is available for free and lets users grab a capacitive stylus or their finger to create a drawing or add annotations to images. This latest version adds a new premium layer functionality that lets you add up to ten drawing layers and one photo layer for each sketch. You can also change the layer order and opacity as well as rotate, move and scale each layer using this new tool, which is available as an in-app purchase. Originally introduced in April 2010, the Ideas application lets you zoom and pan as you create so that you can focus on selected areas of your sketch. As a bonus, you can output your creations to an external VGA display using the Apple VGA adapter. Other new features include the ability to move the toolbar from the left to the right side of the drawing canvas and improved stroke smoothing. If you are looking for a basic sketch application, check out Adobe ideas on the App Store.
MSI shows off convertible 'SketchBook' laptop concept
Well, it looks like MSI isn't waiting for Computex to show off some of its wild, new concept devices -- it's just unveiled this so-called "SketchBook" at an event in Amsterdam. Offering a new twist on the convertible laptop, this one doesn't actually convert into a tablet, but rather features a rotating base that has a keyboard on one side and a full-size graphics tablet on the other -- hence the name. Unfortunately, MSI is staying mum on any other details at the moment -- let alone pricing or availability -- but our counterparts at Engadget Spanish did get a chance to check out an early, non-functioning prototype of the device. Check out a shot of it after the break, and hit up the source link below for the complete hands-on.
iPad apps: creativity unleashed
We love to create things: drawings, movies, photos, songs, and, on occasion, stunning literary imagery with the help of text styling. While Apple didn't necessarily blow us away with its offerings on this front for the iPad (no GarageBand, iPhoto, or iMovie, for instance), 3rd party developers are naturally happy to oblige. We were frankly surprised at some of the depth and functionality we discovered in the App Store, but while what we have here is a nice start, we're even more curious to see what sort of creativity these developers can coax out us with a few months of iPad experience under their belts and a better handle on the strengths and weaknesses of the system. For the time being follow us after the break as we run you through some of our existing favorites. Not enough apps for you? Check out some of our other roundups!
iPad apps: defining experiences from the first wave
There are now over 1,348 approved apps for the iPad. That's on top of the 150,000 iPad-compatible iPhone programs already available in the App Store. When Apple's tablet PC launches, just hours from now, it will have a software library greater than that of any handheld in history -- not counting the occasional UMPC. That said, the vast majority of even those 1,348 iPad apps are not original. They were designed for the iPhone, a device with a comparatively pokey processor and a tiny screen, and most have just been tweaked slightly, upped in price and given an "HD" suffix -- as if that somehow justified the increased cost. Besides, we've seen the amazing potential programs have on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and webOS when given access to a touchscreen, always-on data connection, GPS, cloud storage and WiFi -- but where are the apps that truly define iPad? What will take advantage of its extra headroom, new UI paradigms and multitouch real estate? Caught between netbook and smartphone, what does the iPad do that the iPhone cannot? After spending hours digging through the web and new iPad section of the App Store, we believe we have a number of reasonably compelling answers. Update: Now includes Wormhole Remote, TweetDeck, SkyGrid, Touchgrind HD, GoToMeeting, SplitBrowser, iDisplay, Geometry Wars and Drawing Pad.
Mega-super TUAW shootout of the iPhone UI sketchbooks
Part of my work requires me to mock up iPhone apps, often to show developers how I would redesign a user interface to work better than something they've come up with. Over the past few months, a number of paper sketchbooks have appeared on the market, all designed expressly for this purpose. I decided to try out all of the sketchbooks that I could find in a cursory Google search, just to see which one would work best for me. Of course, that meant that I had to write a review!The three products I discovered and tested were App Sketchbook (US$16.99), iPhone Application Sketch Book (US$14.99), and The Developer Sketchbook for iPhone Apps (US$19.99). All of them are designed for the same reason, to let iPhone devs or business analysts describe how they want an application's user interface to look. Follow along as I take a look at these three sketchbooks, as well as a metal stencil template for drawing UI elements.
A sketchbook for iPhone apps
Want to sketch out your iPhone apps? There's a notebook for that. App Sketchbook is a pretty nifty notebook for iPhone developers who want to sketch out their products out on paper as part of the brainstorming process. App Sketchbook has three pre-drawn, full-sized iPhone templates per page with ruled lines beneath for notes. A pixel ruler runs alongside the template. You can use them in conjunction with iPhone UI stencils to get your ideas down on paper. The App Sketchbook is a wire-bound notebook with 100 double-sided pages. It costs $12.95USD. Edit (1:30 PST): Apparently make that $16.95USD as apparently the Web site updated right around the time I made my original post. A screencap of the original price is available here.
NCsoft Europe continue charity work at UK Comics Expo
As they've done previously, the NCsoft Europe team spent the past weekend at the Bristol, UK Comics Expo, where they once more teamed up with the Draw the World Together artists to help raise £1,666 (over $3k American) for charity. The event was as successful as past events have been, and there's a Flickr group filled with sketches for your perusal.Moving forward, NC Euro has also just announced that they'll do it up again at the upcoming UK Games Expo on May 31st and June 1st. Not only will the DtWT artists be in attendance, but they'll also be selling copies of the Draw the World Together Sketchbook, which contains artwork of the CoX heroes and villains, and features a unique cover by Dave Gibbons, the artist of Watchmen! For just £5, it's a steal! Not ... not literally, of course ... unless you're trying to get beat up by Ms. Liberty, which, come to think of it, wouldn't be a bad way to go ...[Thanks, Stephen!]
