iPad Air 2 – Change is in the air

All that you can do with the Amazing iPad

SketchUp Mobile Viewer on the App Store on iTunesAn excellent video from Apple to show what can be done using the iPad Air 2. It is very fast and exciting in the way that it portrays people using the iPad and you really need to spend time afterwards looking at the website to see all of the applications that were portrayed in the video. There are a huge number of applications to choose from in the App Store and sometimes it can be hard to know which ones are the best ones to buy. It can be necessary to have more than one application of the same type due to the fact that you need the overlap of functionality from one app to another. Certainly I find this to be the case with drawing and painting applications for the iPad. There are things that I can do with ease in Pixelmator for iPad app, but then there are other things that I would like to do with it but I can’t. So I need to have other apps like Sketchbook, Art Studio and ArtRage loaded up too. Pixelmator is a very good application, but it still has some way to go in terms of offering all of the functionality that I would like to see for my drawing and painting on the iPad. I find that I’m moving from Pixelmator to Procreate and also to Sketchbook when it would be good to have all of the stuff I need in one application. Remembering all the interface details of each application isn’t easy when constantly swapping.

Post-it notes captured

The company that sells Post-it-Notes want you to buy the pieces of paper that you stick onto boards. What they are doing now is to allow you to make a photo of these post-it notes and you can then organise them within the application. When you’ve done that, you can share your organised post it notes board with any people that you might have been collaborating with. You can also send it off to office applications. Obviously these people are fans of Microsoft products because they say that you can send it to PowerPoint, Excel as well as Dropbox and plenty more. You can also edit notes and use a digital note feature to add to the notes you’ve captured. You have to take into account that there are still some people that like to do things in the analogue way and to write things on bits of paper. At least with this application you do have the option of bringing it into digital. So when those bits of paper are thrown away into the bin you will have some record of what you’ve done.

Getting sketchy with it – Tayasui

I have a lot of different sketching and drawing apps for my iPad. My favourite would be Procreate, I really like Art Studio and Pixelmator for iPad. I have another more recent favourite and that would be Sketchbook which is made by Autodesk who are famous for making the CAD programs. However it is always nice to have a look at other sketching applications and so I’ve looked at Tayasui which featured in this video by Apple. I quite often find that some of these sketching applications that are given special attention by the App Store editors are quite simple and don’t have the facilities of the apps that are already my favourites. I expect this is because these people making the choices are not artists and only really need the bare minimum to suit their level of artistic expertise.

Tayasui
Tayasui is a free application with in app purchases and would be on a similar level to the application called Paper by Fifty Three. You can only have four layers of drawing even after the purchasing of the extras and this is certainly not enough. Within the extra tools I’m impressed that there is a brushes editor seeing as with Pixelmator for iPad you don’t get this sort of functionality. The application does support pressure sensitive stylus usage, but this is only in the paid version and also only on the iPad. I notice that it is possible to try out the ProTools, free for one hour That would be probably long enough to you to decide whether you want to upgrade or not.

CAD on your iPad with AutoCAD 360

AutoCAD 360CAD applications have traditionally been quite expensive on desktop computers due to them being quite specialised. We now have an application to do Computer Aided Design on the iPad with AutoCAD 360. Once again this is from the Autodesk company that is known for creating this sort of application. You can get this app for free, but then to get the full functionality you need to buy a subscription. If you are a professional using this type of application on a daily basis maybe you would be inclined to lash out the hundred dollars annual subscription for the Pro Plus version. I suppose if you were working on a single project, that a month’s subscription of five dollars might be all that you would need. According to the reviews on iTunes many are finding that the free version is insufficient for most things and one person suggested that she would be better off using Paint on Windows 95. I will have a look at this and make a longer review on NoStylus at some point in time.

Variety is the spice of life with the iPad

The Change video, advertising the iPad for Apple is fast and as bold as you would expect from this type of video. Only a couple of seconds are spent on each application and obviously everything is totally cool. So you have the education angle with the app called Molecules, there is OBD Fusion for looking at your car’s performance and Animation Creator HD which tells you that you can easily create awesome animations any time. I would be quite tempted to have a look at this one as it is only four dollars to buy. I will do a little bit more research about this application to see what it can do.

Other applications mentioned were Inventory Control with Barcode Scanner, The Human Body, 123D Catch, Whale Alert, WunderStation and Garden Plan Pro. So with these applications you can sit in your garden that you have designed and be alerted in case any whales are nearby. You will have all of the weather information so that you don’t get caught in the rain while you are creating your 3-D models, perhaps of the human body. Once you have used your 3-D printer you will be able to make sure nothing is lost as everything will be barcoded and scanned. All in all – Everything is taken care of with the Amazing iPad and the brilliant apps you can buy.