A photo and drawing app for the iPad.

Adobe deserve congratulation for being one of the first to release a drawing and photo app for the iPad.

Named Ideas tools like this will become de rigeur for creative types. Certainly, no storyboard artist in the movie industry will be able to live without one.

Adobe Ideas – today’s Etch-a-Sketch

It took me two minutes, using a finger, to sketch a design for a variable inclination device which my son and I will build to illustrate some basic concepts in physics – friction (as the roll is moved the angle of the incline changes), tension (the rubber band holds the roll in place), and elevation (the roll is an elevation adjuster). Using an electrostatic stylus the sketch would be far better, of course. Ideas permits the insertion of background layer photographs from the iPhoto album on the iPad thus:

The exported file takes the size of the largest component (in this case the photo) and when your email is sent it is in PDF format (well, we are talking Adobe here), but do you get my drift? Need to annotate, create, draw, illustrate? This is the tip of the iceberg and lays low the unthinking statements that the iPad is purely a retrieval device. A related tool in Adobe Stylus allows you to generate a color palette showing the dominant colors in an image – imagine that for interior designers, decorators, anyone who thinks about colors and their arrangements and harmonies.

I have a Pogo stylus on order, in silver to match the back of the iPad, natch! I hope mine arrives before all the photographers and art directors at Vogue and Harpers’ snap them up for illustrating how they want studio photographs manipulated.