I just bought an ipad and now I just reset it, repacked it and am gonna take it back.
Wow I got caught by the hype on that one! I really thought it would offer a professional level illustrating tool but after buying about $40 bucks of different apps – all the most recommended design, paint and illustration ones – I have discovered its got horribly limited function – for example none of those apps have a select or magic wand function! Compared to Adobe Photoshop they all seemed lobotomised. In fact they all seem like doodle pads to be used in conjunction with a full blown graphic program on your other computer. So disappointed.
The swishyness of the screen is such a huge novelty that even though I have no need for almost all the preinstalled apps I just want to have it for some reason – it’s pointlessly beautiful. Literally it is like a crippled laptop – no keyboard except the clunky virtual one.
The whole wow factor of the touch screen has ignored one huge glaring problem – the human finger is one giant leap backwards in terms of accuracy, precision and control. Yeah you can take an image and twirl it with two fingers – cool! – but actually not anywhere nearly as precisely as you can with a keyboard and mouse – which suddenly makes the whole point of digital art apps a contradiction. If you want to do it well and with a whole lot more control and features – use a mac/pc.
I can see a new highly anticipated apple development in a few years – ipads with keyboards – and we’ll all go “Wait a minute” – and Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Further to this post I am going to actually review the preinstalled apps and the ones I bought.
The iPad comes with the following apps installed on the home screen:
Calendar: Useful but if you have a laptop with it – pointless duplication.
Contacts: Not useful for me but even if it is to you then ditto to the above.
Notes: Who cares. You really have an ipad to write to-do lists? Hmmm I might buy that if it had any kind of real usefulness that might induce you to actually pick it up for a purpose – I couldn’t detect any usefulness.
Maps: I’m already using my laptop for everything else with more functionality, multitasking etc and maps are the same. It is nice to swish and drag and bump a high resolution map image around – but $800 dollars nice?
Videos: Why? Because you bought it for holiday movies or kids in the car – I guess if $800 is nothing to you may be you did.
YouTube: With less function and options than a computer? – Nah.
iTunes: Obviously. I have found the iTunes store rather bereft of apps I would want. Try finding more than 30 ibooks for instance – where are all the others? Do you have to search by title or something – there was no book search function. In fact having browsed through all of itunes offerings there was very little if anything I thought was of any value – novelty yes, value…? Apparently doctors are using them as treatment aides – I will become uncomfortable if my doc pulls one out (not ‘out of me’ obviously – but that would be uncomfortable too).
App Store: See iTunes above.
Settings: Functional.
These four applications are displayed in the dock by default:
Safari: Straight forward if you’re using iPad to go online but again – why not a laptop?
Mail: Laptop.
Photos: A great way to display photos – yes an $800 dollar photo Album. Except I don’t have photos to display.
iPod: syncs with it. Get the ipod and be done with it I say – that is a functional device that I do get a lot of value from.
Now for the Apps I bought or got free:
Battle bears: Loved it on someone else’s iphone. Made me violently car sick on the ipad and please don’t tell me you would seriously spend $800 for arcade apps.
Adobe Ideas: Features a crude set of drawing features which like the other apps below were reminiscent of kidpix e.g. preset options with little ‘customizability(?)’. No customizable or parameter settings available. No transperant layer I could find – I suppose you insert a layer and drag the opacity to 0 but then anything you draw is invisible so I don’t know.
Inkpad: The only one with a selection tool of any sort but for a photoshop user the tangent sections with the lines and the anchor point boxes you get when you draw make little sense. I accept I’m being an ignoramus here as I recall Corel Draw had the same annoying style and obviously better artists than I use it. However – no magic wand and apparently no area selection or multi layer selection so basically useless.
Sketchbook Pro: I held out hope for this one but although it has the closest thing to a fully functional set of drawing features they’re still very limited. Again no selection tool. Also and this goes for all these apps – without a keyboard you have a one button interface – your finger or stylus – so getting around the features you want is a clunky and annoying process. SBPro makes a lot of hooplah about its 3 finger press which brings up a wheel for opacity and thickness but again all this back and forwards between editing and tools is far more clunky than simply selecting from a fully stocked toolbar.
Pen Ultimate: Perfectly imitates a nice looking notebook in which you can scribble with a selection of black, red or green vivid markers. Its not a graphic editing tool – simply a virtual scribble pad – but I liked it the most mainly because its simplicity matched the ipad’s lack of function – it worked well for what it was. Still not sure what anyone would actually use it for – concept notes for digital transmission perhaps?
Procreate: I got a huge manual with this one and thought ‘Yes, this is it!’ But it wasn’t. Again it simply lacks so many of the features you take for granted with Photoshop. Anyone who spends a long time making paintings with this – and there are a large amount of Procreate galleries out there – could I think probably make the same paintings in half the time with Photoshop.
And that’s it – those were the major graphic art programs I downloaded and trialled before finally giving up. There are others like Inspire – but the reviews led me away from those – I hate to think what a poorly reviewd ipad app is like given that this lot had high praise.
Lastly I will reiterate the major problem for all of these apps – a finger or any commercially available stylus is a stubby and useless appendage for drawing accurately with – I don’t care how much of a starving artist you are a finger is a crap substitute for a pen. I had dearly hoped to bypass pen drawing and scanning to going straight to work on a virtual surface but due to the nature of ipad’s capacitive touch technology styluses still have to be thick – think an unsharpened pencil. I have seen DIY designs for fine point styluses that use a ring of tin foil suspended like a foot pad at the tip of an old pen. So there is proof of the need – I simply decided that given the vacuum of useful features and the seven day return window it was all stacking up to mean this: The iPad is an $800 novelty toy. If you have $800 to throw at such a thing you should give it to charity because that is an obscene amount of money to pay for a toy.