drawing

As mentioned on an earlier Happy Hour podcast, I have a giant collection of iPad styluses, having tested dozens of them since the first iPad debuted in 2010. Earlier this week, my colleague Zac Hall reviewed the best (and most expensive) iPad stylus, Apple’s brand-new $99 Apple Pencil, which is hard to find in stores, and only works with the 12.9″ iPad Pro.

Since the Apple Pencil is two to six times as expensive as some other options, I wanted to spotlight its key strengths and weaknesses relative to rivals, all of which are more broadly compatible and readily available to purchase. During testing, I discovered that the Apple Pencil actually benefits from a surprising little Apple software cheat to make an ultra-fine first impression…

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Development team FiftyThree has announced that its popular drawing app, Paper, will be available for the iPhone soon. Since its release in 2012, the application has been exclusive to the iPad.

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What kind of parent are you if you don’t plunk down $80 for one of these OSMO things right now? I just got one. Amazon reviewers gave it an impressive 4.8/5 stars and it comes with 4 apps. The latest, Masterpiece for iPad [free, App Store] lets kids learn to draw by a type of tracing using the iPad camera illustrated in the excellent Sandwich video above.

After the kids are done you can send it all over the place or print it out. There is a nice video capture feature as well that replays the drawing which looks like it will pump up your kids for the next drawing.

The OSMO game system has three other games at present: Words, Newton and Tangram

It looks pretty cool but I’ll see if I can corral my 6 year old into a review.

Press release follows:
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Paper by FiftyThree, the popular illustrating app for iPad, is making a significant change to its app price today. While Paper for iPad has been free to download and use since its debut, the app has also had tools for drawing and illustrating available for unlocking through in-app purchases as well.

Starting today, FiftyThree is making the all tools offered in Paper free for everyone to use. FiftyThree is now including the Draw, Sketch, Outline, Write, and Color tools for every Paper user. Previously, the essential tools were $3.99 to unlock as a package while individual tools could be have for $0.99 each.
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FiftyThree, the developers behind the popular drawing app Paper, today announced it’s releasing an SDK that will let all developers take advantage of its Pencil stylus for iOS devices. First launched last year alongside an update to Paper, Pencil is a $60 Bluetooth stylus for the drawing app that aims to offer a realistic pencil-to-paper drawing experience.

The SDK will allow for a smooth experience with the Pencil stylus in other apps and that also means in some cases FiftyThree will be working to improve the apps of its direct competitors while hopefully selling its stylus as a platform in the process. Devs will get access to palm rejection, erase, easy pairing, and all the pencil and touch classifiers the company uses in the Paper app. Support for surface pressure is also arriving with iOS 8:
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We posted high-resolution images of both the black and white versions of the next-generation iPhone back plate yesterday. Although we could determine many new features of the device, such as the redesigned speaker grills, repositioned earphone jack, and FaceTime camera, the exact display dimensions are still unknown. We noted one of our images depicted what appears to be the next-generation iPhone front glass with enough room for the much-rumored, roughly 4-inch display, but new schematics surfaced today (via Cydia Blog) that show a diagonal opening of just slightly over 4-inches. The designs also shows the repositioned FaceTime camera above the earpiece.

Although calculations of the display show an opening less than 0.1-inch over 4-inches, the display could likely measure a flat 4-inches diagonally as the front panel is typically slightly larger than the display. We noted yesterday that our sources informed us that the next-generation iPhone front glass images we posted feature the same width of the current iPhones, which would comfortably allow for an approximate 16:9 aspect ratio. We cannot confirm the schematic is 100 percent legit, or not just a past prototype, but also all the recent evidence points to a 4-inch next-generation iPhone that we expect to see this October.

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