Having had my older iPad for over 5 yearsI took the leap and got an iPad Pro 12.9" with the Apple Pencil to help curb my addiction to the copious stacks of black notebooks littering my office.
The hope is to go digital for note taking but it has really opened the door to creative expression that I haven’t experienced since university.
There are a number of incredible leaps forward and it’s mainly due to the Pencil.
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Portability
The thing is like a sheet of glass the size of a magazine. I can stick it in a tiny shoulder bag and tote it around, stopping at my leisure to get all artsy, do some concept layouts or file some expenses whilst sitting in a park avoiding seagulls. No longer am I chained to a computer and Wacom tablet -
That Pencil
The key is the Pencil. It takes a machine that devolved into a glorified bathroom entertainment slate into a creation device that a is a steroidaly enhanced pen and paper; ink and pad; drawing board and rule. The thing is… it acts just like a freaking pencil! -
Extendability
I’m now so used to using multiple monitors that I feel really weird when doing stuff on my laptop solely. The giant iPad now makes my laptop a dual screen hyperbeast. Awesome. With apps like Duet or Astropad, not only do you get another display but also the features of a Wacom Cintiq with pressures sensitivity in photoshop and all the other apps that support that kind of thing. -
Apps
Now, whenever the iPad pro and the pencil come into conversation in creative circles the one app that gets all the attention is Procreate. It’s photoshop… on an iPad but the killer feature is the incredible responsiveness of the pencil that really takes advantage of that 120mhz screen refresh. You can scribble away like a madman and the thing keeps up.
If you want the sensation of real painting then the slower Artrage is much more realistic. The watercolour tool specifically is something to behold and it’s nice to have hardware that can keep up (kinda) with the brush. My stupidly fast PC has the same lag so I’m not blaming the iPad
For layouts I found Morpholio Trace Pro. It’s a pretty astounding app that takes a PDF and lays tracing paper over the top, also allowing you to scale the page so you can use scale symbols or rulers. It’s quite magic.
Notability was the notes app that I settled on, and it seems pretty cool. I really like the marker pen thing but you have to be quite careful not to be too messy. I still have to work out which notes go where though.
The missing piece in my workflow is SketchUp though. I know there is a pretty good viewer, which is nice for grabbing screenshots and sketching over but a fully fledged mobile version of Sketchup would be truly incredible.
Anyone found apps that help with our line of work?
