Adobe's New Pen and Ruler
fastcodesign.com
fastcodesign.com
Coincidental timing as I have been looking at getting a stylus or Wacom tablet for sketching layouts and quick notes while at my desk. My Jot Pro with Penultimate has been a bit average, unfortunately.
At that <$250ish pricepoint, Wacom's main offerings appear to be the Intuos stylus or their non-pro touch surface line. In the case of the former, you're drawing on your iPad and your stylus is hitting the same surface as your "ink". Another benefit is being able to easily sketch on the iPad on the couch or wherever. Issue for me with this one is that it needs Bluetooth 4 and my iPad 2 doesn't cut it.
With the pen and touch line, you're anchored or near your laptop/screen and sketching is detached from the "ink" on screen. But everything drawn is right there where I'll likely want it in Photoshop, etc.
Not sure that this Adobe Slide ruler would be all that useful and the pen would come down to app support and responsiveness. From Adobe's video, it's hard to see what the lag on the pen is like. Ink requires a more recent iPad too.
Anyone got a current solution they're happy with? I'm thinking that I might need to upgrade my iPad at least.
In the end you obviously should try both and decide what suits you best, but I would choose my 5year old $70 Wacom over any tablet+stylus solution any day.
It may be subjective, but the advantage of drawing directly on screen is tremendous - it truly feels like paper, as opposed of drawing "blind" while looking up at a screen.
I went to the adobe launch event in NYC yesterday and was blown away by the demos and by how simple and intuitive the device is. So far, i'm very pleased with it - lets see what a week of use will bring...
After using for years with separate tablet/screen, I cannot say I "dislike" the combination. It allows you to draw upright, which is very comfortable after you get used to it. I've been using drawing desks for years, and I would say it's more comfortable than using a tilted plane.
It's also weird (in a positive way) how you can fully see the effect of the stroke on the screen, which are normally hidden by the hand/pen.
That being said, I definitely prefer "feedback" if I'm writing, for instance, so I can relate to your sentiment even though I couldn't try a cintiq professionally yet.
I find that there's a pretty big split between people who really love the Cintiq and its ilk, and people who would vastly prefer to draw on a separate tablet. I'm in the latter camp: the lag is more perceptible when my hand is right there, plus slight inaccuracies in location really throw me off, and the real dealbreaker is that I'm a righty, and my hand is not transparent. Also ergonomics - I don't have to hunch over my "drawing table" any more, I can have the screen at the perfect height to keep my neck happy, and the tablet at just the right place to keep my arm happy.
I mean obviously if you're using this new Adobe tool you're not going to have the "hand obscuring menus" issue, as it's a UI designed for touch - but then again you're also using a simple art tool, rather than a giant toolbox like PS or AI. Which is fine if that simple tool happens to cover all your needs. Not so fine if it doesn't.
I know pros who love their screen tablets, I know pros who have no interest in them despite easily having the cashflow for one.
Oh yes: Graphire was the entry level brand, it's been replaced by Bamboo. Intuos has always been the pro line. The tech has advanced over time, I think a Bamboo today is better than an Intuos of five years ago. The Cintiq tends to use the better quality of digitizers found in the Intuos.
This is still a capacitive screen, so you cannot rest your hand on the screen, like you would do normally with a true stylus. This is of uttermost importance for pressure control. And hey, you can use a regular ruler, like I normally do on wacom tablets.
I also cringe at the design of the stylus itself. I did try the Galaxy Note for almost 6 months, and decided it wasn't even worth the "Note" in the name. The stylus would lose 5% of the strokes at first (improved with "training"), and did so with an horrible lag, which you notice much more if the tablet is directly on the screen. The stylus was also too small to be comfortable (similar for the Lenovo Tablet 2).
I much prefer the HP or Toshiba styluses, which are much more like a regular Pilot/Micron drawing pen. I don't understand why they keep reinventing the "pen" (I also dislike the regular Intuos/Bamboo pen by the way - too big).
I don't really need "Cintiq" level. I did try the Surface 2, and it was much better than the alternatives, but it was too heavy and battery life too short. Couldn't try the Helix yet, but all in all, wacom-style pens is a must if you care about note-taking.
I'm disappointed by announce of the Surface 3 due to the lower pressure resolution of the stylus, which is a shame because this means much more narrow response customization. Double shame due to the higher-res screen would be really great for drawing. But I will try it as soon as it will be available in a shop nearby.
Sorry for the big rant/summary, but I still couldn't find a "portable tablet" that I could reliably use for note-taking :(. After my experience with capacitive pens, I really don't believe this can be taken seriously for drawing.
I love sketching layouts and ideas, but tend to put off doing it on paper because then I have loose sheets everywhere or multiple notebooks, or pages that have a combination of sketches and other to-do notes.
Never tried a Wacom before, so very keen to give it a go!
I've been using Illustrator for a decade. I've fiddled with the key commands to make the tools I like to use a quick key press away. I've recorded macros and assigned keystrokes to them (and am currently swearing a lot because a recent update broke some of them). I've written little scripts.
And yeah, all this helps the flow. I work a lot faster then I did when I was first using AI.
I have been thinking about this lately, and want to survey my artist friends to see how many of them have also extensively customized the interface of their favorite art tools. I have an intuition that it's one of the signs of being a pro: you've explored enough of the deep set of tools within a modern art program that you can say "this is an important part of my process" and make it more accessible.
I was hoping Nvidia would launch another Tegra Note tablet with its cheap but very accurate stylus, but at 10", and for $300 or less, but it should've arrived by now, and it hasn't.
There's also Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805 processor, which promises "ultrasound inking" [1] of some sort, that seems like a pretty cool technology, but might also be supported only by a few devices, at most. So I think it's ultimately up to Google to make a bigger push for this, but unfortunately I think Google has zero interest in this.
Too bad about the name change, I thought the name Napoleon (because it's a short ruler) was charmingly clever.
This stylus from FiftyThree also looks promising: http://vimeo.com/98146708
I tried to find the "pressure" API in iOS 8, but I just found a new majorRadius field (with an error tolerance). Android supports a bunch of information (including "pressure" and radius) -- I bet you get pretty rich data on devices with dedicated stylus support.
I was able to connect to the Pencil from Android via BTLE and observe the tip being pressed and released (though not the eraser for some reason; maybe I have to write some value out for that characteristic to come alive?) -- maybe later this summer I'll try to make a basic Pencil-compatible Android drawing app :).
So you could use the accelerometer independently of the touchscreen for gestures like flicking ink blots or swishing the "brush" in "water" -- or maybe you can do some fancy things on the screen like tapping on the same spot for stippling (using the accelerometer to approximate height and velocity, independent of the final pressure on the tip). There's so much fun stuff to do here!
The Ink and Adonit touch pixel point, which are basically the same (We manufacture the Ink and Slide for adobe) use a pressure sensitive tip in the pen itself, and communicate that pressure over Bluetooth. This gives you a much higher resolution on the pressure, with the trade off of the BT stack latency.
Sure, the iPad software that accompanies these programs is pretty wimpy, but I can easily work around these limitations with some post processing. However, every artist's workflow is different, so other people might have more difficulty working around the limitations.
I understand the novelty of drawing on an iPad. But I've tried it many times and it's just not accurate at all. You just have to look at the tip of those pens to understand that. IMO Cintiq is the only way to go if you're serious about "art". On the other side, if you use that kind of things for notes and rapid prototyping, why not.
http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/exhibitions/david-hockney
But check my other comment for Procreate (iPad app). It's impressive what people have done in it, even in 4K resolution.
I understand where you're coming from. I started drawing when I started reading comics. The lack of accuracy does suck.
But it's possible to do good work http://kylelambert.co.uk/.
Edit: darn, after some research it looks like this pen uses regular capacitance... Unless they solved the accuracy issue that existed with earlier pens, the review I saw must have been misleading... I thought this used a new technology.
(Scroll down to the Gallery).
There are Flickr etc groups with sample images from simple users, and the do quite impressive work. In fact several professional illustrators use it.
So it's not like one guy's MS Paint novelty act.
Architectural drawings and design sketches such as dresses or electronics often have straight lines - but during creation process you just don't think that a side of something is "two dots connecting"