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It doesn’t matter whether you’re a skilled artist or a newbie; ArtStudio for iPad is for you. This drawing app has something for everyone. Once available for the iPhone platform, it has now been optimized and makes very good use of the iPad’s larger display. ArtStudio is back, has better UI and all for the still low price of $.99.
Review ArtStudio for iPad offers the best UI of any painting app available. The app provides an amazing range of options from choosing your canvas size to the type of brushes to use. There app comes with 3 canvas sizes to choose from, 25 brushes along with tools you’d find in some of the best editing software around such as eraser, smudge tools, glow and many more. For those familiar with Photoshop, this app also allows for working with different layers. Five of them, to be exact and all come with numerous options, as well.
Here’s an interesting demo video from Comcast that features an iPad as a remote control with a few extras. In the demo, Comcast’s Brian Roberts shows how to use the app to search for programming (both TV and On Demand), change channels and even program the Comcast DVR. Pretty neat.
Once paired with your cable box, simply browse the TV schedule or the On Demand options. To jump to a show, simply tap its name and presto! The cable box changes channels. Likewise, you can tap an On Demand feature to start it playing. The keyboard will make searching a lot easier (think Apple’s Remote app with the Apple TV).
It’s no secret that the iPad is popular with pilots. TUAW has provided coverage of pilot kneeboards for holding iPads in the cockpit, many iPhone apps for pilots that are now making their way to the big(ger) screen, and we’ve heard from commenters who fly for a living that they think the iPad may be the greatest thing to appear in the cockpit since Charlton Heston.
One British firm is now starting to use iPads as electronic flight bags, although not on “real” aircraft. The company, Virtual Aviation, operates Airbus and Boeing full-motion flight simulators at London Heathrow and Gatwick airports. While these expensive and realistic simulators are most often used for pilot training, Virtual Aviation also provides public experience flights and corporate team-building events.
I knew all along that the iPad would turn out to be an amazing device, but a blimp controller with integrated cockpit view? No, I didn’t think of that.
The iPad is great for a lot of tasks, but one area of potential appeals to me more than any other: brainstorming and note taking. I’m not alone, judging from the outcropping of specialized apps for doing just this. I haven’t had the time (or money) to hunt down and experiment with every note-taking app in the App Store jungle, but I wanted to highlight a few that have stuck out in my search for the quintessential app for idea capture and retrieval. I’m skipping over some of the apps that I consider to be obvious (albeit excellent) choices (e.g. Evernote), mostly because they’ve already been covered on TUAW, often repeatedly. This is not to belittle them, just to keep things fresh.
Mind Mapping
The first few on my list are mind mapping applications. Mind maps are the easiest and most intuitive way for me to take notes and brainstorm ideas, so that’s what I look for first. It’s hard to beat a pencil and paper, or even a screen with a full keyboard and keyboard navigation, but some touch-based apps do it just about right. One of the best I’ve found is iThoughtsHD (US$7.99). It makes it relatively easy to jot notes in a mind map format, with options for node color, icons and organization. It can expand and contract nodes, branches can inherit their parent’s options, and you can manually or automatically organize and space out your map. You can add new child and sibling nodes by tapping and dragging, or use handy buttons at the top of the screen. It can import and export maps via WiFi transfer, Box.net and email attachment. When it comes to formats, it handles just about everything I can personally think of, including Novamind, MindManager (6 and 8), iMindMap, XMind, Freemind, and others, as well as multiple image formats. Read on for more mind mapping and note taking apps for you and your iPad.
Next in line for me has been MindNode ($5.99), which is also available on the iPhone and Mac desktop platforms. Its interface may actually be a little more intuitive than iThought’s, and it only lacks a couple of export options (it handles MindNode format, as well as FreeMind, PNG, text outline and OPML outline). It auto-colors your branches, which can be handy when speed is of essence. Its overall aesthetic isn’t quite as pleasing to me as iThoughtsHD, but it does the job well, and for a couple bucks less.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a skilled artist or a newbie; ArtStudio for iPad is for you. This drawing app has something for everyone. Once available for the iPhone platform, it has now been optimized and makes very good use of the iPad’s larger display. ArtStudio is back, has better UI and all for the still low price of $.99.
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