5 ms·

Adobe's New Pen and Ruler

145 points by jasonlmk 12y ago

jljljl 12y ago
I guess this is the result of Adobe's Might & Napoleon experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULKXTKZor3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULKXTKZor3A Too bad about the name change, I thought the name Napoleon (because it's a short ruler) was charmingly clever.
- justinator 12y ago
  But, Napoleon wasn't short, compared to his contemporaries.
  - hornetblack 12y ago
    Napoleon wasn't short by most measures. The myth comes from two issues: Napoleon used tall soldiers in his personal guard, and British people said it to make fun of him.
  - Recoil42 12y ago
    Sure, but the public perception is that he was.
joezydeco 12y ago
There will be a flood of products that take advantage of the touch "pressure" that iOS8 will allow developers to access. This stylus from FiftyThree also looks promising: http://vimeo.com/98146708 http://vimeo.com/98146708
- i_am_ralpht 12y ago
  It's really interesting to me that most of these are just Bluetooth-connected buttons. There's no pressure or angle sensitivity in the FiftyThree Pencil, it's just a button. 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 :).
  - tritchey 12y ago
    FWIW, the Ink is a lot more than that, including accelerometer data, and pressure sensitivity.
    - i_am_ralpht 12y ago
      That's cool; thanks for sharing. 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!
      - tritchey 12y ago
        Definitely, that is what we hope developers will start using it for. We expose the accelerometer data in the SDK, so developers can get access to the data. We also use the relative pen position to the iPad to sort out some offset issues to make sure the line appears to be coming from the tip itself.
        lsaferite 12y ago
        Does it also include a gyro sensor?
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    In a capacitive touchscreen there really is no way to measure how hard your finger is pressing on the screen. What you can measure is how large of a footprint your meat-finger creates when it smashes down on the glass. The center of the point hasn't changed, but the radius of the circle has.
- tritchey 12y ago
  The touch pressure for paper is done with a new touch Radius property. The radius property on touches was available as a private API, but only made available publicly in iOS 8. 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.
  - mietek 12y ago
    Is there any way to buy Ink & Slide in the UK?
eggy 12y ago
I'll stick with my windows tablet and Sketchbook Pro. It already has compass, ruler, French curve and perspective available with the stylus or my finger. The whole point of an iPad is portability, not add-on gadgets. The software interface looks cool though.
lettergram 12y ago
I don't really like the feel of using these. I would much rather just tap two points draw a line and drag it where I want it. Why not use an entirely new design to make use of the technology?
- emp 12y ago
  When sketching concepts, line weight is created in various ways and used to bring a sketch to life, conveying information such as 3d depth, important areas, material strength, motion, mood, as well as the designer's particular style. I don't think this is intended for CAD and vector drawings.
- drglitch 12y ago
  Adobe said that the Line and Sketch apps are free (as well as photoshop mix), and in Line, there is a "soft ruler" you can use with any stylus or even your finger, minus the touch sensitivity of course. 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"
prawn 12y ago
Adobe's Ink and Slide page is here: https://www.adobe.com/products/ink-and-slide.html https://www.adobe.com/products/ink-and-slide.html 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.
- pash 12y ago
  Adonit announced their new Jot Touch [0] today, perhaps not coincidentally. 0. http://www.adonit.net/jot/touch http://www.adonit.net/jot/touch
  - 2muchcoffeeman 12y ago
    Hope it's better than the Jot Script. That is truly awful.
  - tritchey 12y ago
    Not a coincidence. Adonit manufactures the Ink & Slide for Adobe, and apart from some cosmetic differences, and an additional button, the JTPP has all the same functionality as the Ink.
- moistgorilla 12y ago
  It's more then 250 dollars but I love my galaxy note 10.1 2014 edition. Got it refurbished in a groupon buy for about 350 and it works perfectly. The digitizer is wacom and the display is amazing.
drcode 12y ago
I would marginally be considered a "professional artist" and I am salivating about these devices after seeing them in action. For me, the combination of accurate stylus, retina display, and that slider thingy are a dream come true! 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.
- awa 12y ago
  Why not use a surface pro in this case?
- baby 12y ago
  > "professional artist" 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.
  - zachrose 12y ago
    Still though: if it's good enough for David Hockney, it's quite good. http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/exhibitions/david-hockney http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/exhibitions/david-hockney
    - coldtea 12y ago
      Well, it's not like he does any detailed drawing. So his needs are simpler (for Mondrian, even more so, lol). But check my other comment for Procreate (iPad app). It's impressive what people have done in it, even in 4K resolution.
  - cormullion 12y ago
    But accurate enough: http://studiojason.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nikko2.jpg http://studiojason.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nikko2.jpg
higherpurpose 12y ago
I wish Google put more focus on better supporting highly accurate pens in all Android versions. Right now only Samsung does that, pretty much, and even they have started losing interest a bit, I think, and they've made their latest Note tablets very expensive, too. 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. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9w2oEWZ-mY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9w2oEWZ-mY
dsplatonov 12y ago
i wish i have such devices integrated with sketch
- lgmspb 12y ago
  I'm wondering why sketch is not yet acquired by Adobe...
  - dsplatonov 12y ago
    I'm wondering why Adobe is not yet acquired by Adobe - this is a real question
chondos 12y ago
Innovative idea, but partially just a band-aid for the iPad's shortcomings. This product won't offer pressure sensitivity and freedom to put your palm on the surface that you are writing on... No thanks. Unbelievable that the iPad has no active stylus/Wacom surface yet. Are they still living by Steve Job's words that if it comes with a stylus, they screwed up? Wacom themselves make tablets for art/creation. Guess what OS it runs? Many artists are getting Surface Pro tablets to do artwork.... Wake up Apple. Aren't you supposed to be providing innovation for artists? Woz' criticism's are correct, The iPad is not designed for creating, just consuming.
thisjepisje 12y ago
Would be great if it worked with Wacom tablets.
egypturnash 12y ago
“When a musician plays, if they have to constantly look through dropdown menus to find the next chord, the music would not be very good. It’s farfetched and maybe not possible, but we’d love for, some day, artists to play Photoshop, to stay in flow, to be expressive without interruption.” 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.

145 points by jasonlmk 12y ago

I guess this is the result of Adobe's Might & Napoleon experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULKXTKZor3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULKXTKZor3A Too bad about the name change, I thought the name Napoleon (because it's a short ruler) was charmingly clever.

justinator 12y ago
But, Napoleon wasn't short, compared to his contemporaries.
- hornetblack 12y ago
  Napoleon wasn't short by most measures. The myth comes from two issues: Napoleon used tall soldiers in his personal guard, and British people said it to make fun of him.
- Recoil42 12y ago
  Sure, but the public perception is that he was.

joezydeco 12y ago

There will be a flood of products that take advantage of the touch "pressure" that iOS8 will allow developers to access. This stylus from FiftyThree also looks promising: http://vimeo.com/98146708 http://vimeo.com/98146708

i_am_ralpht 12y ago
It's really interesting to me that most of these are just Bluetooth-connected buttons. There's no pressure or angle sensitivity in the FiftyThree Pencil, it's just a button. 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 :).
- tritchey 12y ago
  FWIW, the Ink is a lot more than that, including accelerometer data, and pressure sensitivity.
  - i_am_ralpht 12y ago
    That's cool; thanks for sharing. 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!
    - tritchey 12y ago
      Definitely, that is what we hope developers will start using it for. We expose the accelerometer data in the SDK, so developers can get access to the data. We also use the relative pen position to the iPad to sort out some offset issues to make sure the line appears to be coming from the tip itself.
      - lsaferite 12y ago
        Does it also include a gyro sensor?
- joezydeco 12y ago
  In a capacitive touchscreen there really is no way to measure how hard your finger is pressing on the screen. What you can measure is how large of a footprint your meat-finger creates when it smashes down on the glass. The center of the point hasn't changed, but the radius of the circle has.
tritchey 12y ago
The touch pressure for paper is done with a new touch Radius property. The radius property on touches was available as a private API, but only made available publicly in iOS 8. 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.
- mietek 12y ago
  Is there any way to buy Ink & Slide in the UK?

eggy 12y ago

I'll stick with my windows tablet and Sketchbook Pro. It already has compass, ruler, French curve and perspective available with the stylus or my finger. The whole point of an iPad is portability, not add-on gadgets. The software interface looks cool though.

lettergram 12y ago

I don't really like the feel of using these. I would much rather just tap two points draw a line and drag it where I want it. Why not use an entirely new design to make use of the technology?

emp 12y ago
When sketching concepts, line weight is created in various ways and used to bring a sketch to life, conveying information such as 3d depth, important areas, material strength, motion, mood, as well as the designer's particular style. I don't think this is intended for CAD and vector drawings.
drglitch 12y ago
Adobe said that the Line and Sketch apps are free (as well as photoshop mix), and in Line, there is a "soft ruler" you can use with any stylus or even your finger, minus the touch sensitivity of course. 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"

prawn 12y ago

Adobe's Ink and Slide page is here: https://www.adobe.com/products/ink-and-slide.html https://www.adobe.com/products/ink-and-slide.html 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.

pash 12y ago
Adonit announced their new Jot Touch [0] today, perhaps not coincidentally. 0. http://www.adonit.net/jot/touch http://www.adonit.net/jot/touch
- 2muchcoffeeman 12y ago
  Hope it's better than the Jot Script. That is truly awful.
- tritchey 12y ago
  Not a coincidence. Adonit manufactures the Ink & Slide for Adobe, and apart from some cosmetic differences, and an additional button, the JTPP has all the same functionality as the Ink.
moistgorilla 12y ago
It's more then 250 dollars but I love my galaxy note 10.1 2014 edition. Got it refurbished in a groupon buy for about 350 and it works perfectly. The digitizer is wacom and the display is amazing.

drcode 12y ago

I would marginally be considered a "professional artist" and I am salivating about these devices after seeing them in action. For me, the combination of accurate stylus, retina display, and that slider thingy are a dream come true! 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.

awa 12y ago
Why not use a surface pro in this case?
baby 12y ago
> "professional artist" 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.
- zachrose 12y ago
  Still though: if it's good enough for David Hockney, it's quite good. http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/exhibitions/david-hockney http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/exhibitions/david-hockney
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Well, it's not like he does any detailed drawing. So his needs are simpler (for Mondrian, even more so, lol). But check my other comment for Procreate (iPad app). It's impressive what people have done in it, even in 4K resolution.
- cormullion 12y ago
  But accurate enough: http://studiojason.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nikko2.jpg http://studiojason.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nikko2.jpg

higherpurpose 12y ago

I wish Google put more focus on better supporting highly accurate pens in all Android versions. Right now only Samsung does that, pretty much, and even they have started losing interest a bit, I think, and they've made their latest Note tablets very expensive, too. 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. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9w2oEWZ-mY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9w2oEWZ-mY

dsplatonov 12y ago

i wish i have such devices integrated with sketch

lgmspb 12y ago
I'm wondering why sketch is not yet acquired by Adobe...
- dsplatonov 12y ago
  I'm wondering why Adobe is not yet acquired by Adobe - this is a real question

chondos 12y ago

Innovative idea, but partially just a band-aid for the iPad's shortcomings. This product won't offer pressure sensitivity and freedom to put your palm on the surface that you are writing on... No thanks. Unbelievable that the iPad has no active stylus/Wacom surface yet. Are they still living by Steve Job's words that if it comes with a stylus, they screwed up? Wacom themselves make tablets for art/creation. Guess what OS it runs? Many artists are getting Surface Pro tablets to do artwork.... Wake up Apple. Aren't you supposed to be providing innovation for artists? Woz' criticism's are correct, The iPad is not designed for creating, just consuming.

thisjepisje 12y ago

Would be great if it worked with Wacom tablets.

egypturnash 12y ago

“When a musician plays, if they have to constantly look through dropdown menus to find the next chord, the music would not be very good. It’s farfetched and maybe not possible, but we’d love for, some day, artists to play Photoshop, to stay in flow, to be expressive without interruption.” 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.