Procreate 1.6 was always going to be an ambitious update and the result is something the four of us at Si are all very proud of. The feedback we’ve received from you guys is absolutely incredible and it got me thinking, “Could Procreate win an Apple Design Award?”.
Some of you guys will be able to help in getting Procreate in front of Apple’s eyeballs. I say some, as you will need to have an Apple developer account to cast your nomination. All you need to do is head to this page on Apple’s website and click the ‘submit your nominations’ link on the bottom left. You will then sign in with your developer ID and be asked to comment on which app you think deserves to win (hint: Procreate!). The categories Apple use to judge a developer’s app are as follows:
Apps that are inviting, engaging, easy to use, intuitive, and compelling.
Apps that take advantage of the latest hardware, OS releases, and technologies to offer rich functionality, high performance, and extensive system integration.
Apps that are revolutionary, inspiring, and do things in new and creative ways.
To save a bit of time in typing, here is the title and app link to copy and paste:
App name – Procreate – Sketch, paint, create.
App link – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procreate-sketch-paint-create./id425073498?mt=8
If you agree that Procreate fits the criteria above, we’d love it if you could help make 2012 even bigger by nominating us for an Apple Design Award!
After many months of intensive work, Procreate 1.6 has finally reached Beta stage!
We set an ambitious feature list for the 1.6 update, and we’re pleased to announce that almost all 60+ features will be shipping with Procreate 1.6. We’re continuing this focus, by aiming to wrap-up all Beta testing this week with a submission to Apple immediately after!
The only items that did not make it into 1.6, was iPen and X0 support. We felt the iPen did not meet our standard, for app support. The X0 was close, but suffers from similar issues. The Stylus can only be used in Portrait mode with the IR dongle facing the upward. Any other orientation will cause significant calibration issues. The most significant being when the IR dongle is facing downward, your hand completely interrupts the IR signal which means it stops working. These styluses are going to be great for note taking, but they are not ready for artists.
For those of you who are looking for more than a regular capacitive stylus, Procreate 1.6 will include support for the Jot Touch, as demoed at CES.
All other features, including full retina support plus some other little surprises will be heading your way very soon. And like last time, once Procreate 1.6 is submitted to Apple, we’ll be issuing a release date. The long wait is almost over!
The new iPad arrived at Si today and we’ve had some time to examine how Procreate performs on this new hardware. Before we get into it, lets just get one thing out of the way. This is an absolutely stunning device. The screen is brilliant in so many ways–it’s sharper, brighter and has much better colour display.
Now lets get into the technical stuff. Surprisingly, the current version of Procreate (1.5) seems to run on the new iPad with only two non-critical issues. The canvas is obviously not optimised for the retina display and it paints about half as fast, as before. This is expected, because Procreate 1.5 has not been optimised for the new GPU.
The hardware specs indicate the new iPad contains a Dual-core 1GHz A9 (the exact same CPU in the existing iPad 2) 1GB RAM and a PowerVR SGX543MP4, which is an enormously powerful Quad-Core GPU. This is big news for Procreate users. Because the CPU has not been improved in this new iPad, most image editing apps will now be doing 4 times more work, on an old CPU. Not so with Procreate! Procreate is one of the only apps to really take advantage of this new hardware, being a graphics accelerated app by nature. And, because Procreate is already pushing 4 times more pixels than the average app with the default HD canvas (1920×1448 px) this massive boost to the GPU is exactly what we had hoped for.
v01d spent most of today optimising Silica for the new iPad and todays results have been astonishing–Procreate 1.6 utterly screams on this beast. It’s making the most demanding GPU painting tasks look like child’s play. The stunning retina screen now displays your HD artwork in exact 1:1 ratio, so your artwork is razor sharp and the new pro tools look & work even better than before. Procreate 1.6 is in a league of its own on this device.
Because we are so close to completing 1.6, there will be no patch to address the minor issues with Procreate 1.5. Instead, Procreate 1.6 will be fully optimised for the new iPad! We’ll also be making an announcement on the progress of Procreate 1.6 in the next few days. Its getting very close now!
