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:

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!

Procreate (in)famous competition winner!

We’d like to officially congratulate the winners of our first Procreate competition! Wei Ken Tan took first place with ‘‘Why So Serious‘ and Laurent Canniccioni grabbed runner up with his ‘What if’ series (Army Of Muppets, Love Sick, and The Joke’s on you). It was incredibly close and out of several hundreds of votes, only 38 separated the two.

A big thanks goes out to everyone who entered the comp. We knew there were a stack of talented artists out there and you guys certainly stepped up to the challenge. There were some very clever and creative entries.

Now that the competition is over we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can make future comps better. It was our first, after all! Perhaps you have thoughts on the following:

Time frame: Was it too short or too long?
Judging methods: Who should decide on the winner(s)?
Theme: Do you have an idea an awesome series of interesting entries?
Sharing: How do you want the community involved?
Hosting: Pros and Cons of where to hold the competition? eg. Facebook, Flickr, etc.

What do you think, guys?

A Musical Interlude

Late last year we were very excited to get an email from a talented Director by the name of Whitney Alexander. Whitney had sent us a WIP music video that he and his team were working on. The song was called Western Sunrise, by Art Decade. What caught our attention was when he said Procreate played a big part in their process. We loved what we saw and stayed in touch for months as the video progressed.

Last night Whitney sent us a link to “The Making of Western Sunrise”. We watched the completed music video and the “making of” video and proceeded to pick our jaws up off the ground. What’s really awesome is it’s a great song, a great music video AND a great insight into how it was made.

It’s rad to see Procreate being used in such a creative manner. Check the videos out for yourself and give these guys some love, they’ve all done an amazing job.

Now, back to 1.6…

The last couple of weeks have seen us working with our friends at Adonit, getting Procreate and the Jot Touch ready for the big unveiling at CES 2012. Now that it’s out there, it’s great to see the stylus is already generating buzz within the industry.

Adonit promises the soon-to-be-released stylus delivers pressure sensitivity, palm rejection, multiple buttons, and communicates via bluetooth (without the need for a dongle). And, even though the unit on show at CES is just a prototype, the final product will be ready for sale in a few short months.

Thanks to the speed and accuracy of Silica’s OpenGL painting engine, Procreate is the best app to provide realtime pressure feedback. Out of the box, Procreate 1.6 will make full use of the Jot Touch feature set.

You can keep track of the progress on the v1.6 update to Procreate on our 1.6 progress blog post.

To read more check out the Macworld article!

While Sorted 3 is on ice, we thought it only fair (since you guys are being so patient) to share a preview of the yet-to-be-seen iPhone version. We’ve thrown together a quick video to show how Sorted has been adapted to fit on the small screen.

Hopefully this video fills in a few blanks for you guys! As soon as Apple solves its iCloud blues, we’ll be getting this bad boy straight to testing.

Even though we’ve been incredibly busy building the new Sorted, we haven’t forgotten about Procreate!

Procreate 1.6 project Blackstone, has been under design for the last few months and I’m please to let you know, the update is now in development phase! We’ve put most of our time into two key areas: the artwork gallery and brush management.

Shipping with 1.6 will be a new sleek and powerful thumbnail interface which will allow you to move and organise your artwork super easily. It will also allow you to easily edit and share multiple artworks along with the ability to create stacks (Just like folders). Overall, we think it might be one of the nicest artwork galleries made for iPad.

The second area of focus is the brush management side of Procreate. We’ve spent a large amount of time analysing the core issues, along with your suggestions. One aspect has became pretty clear during these workshops. When we designed Procreate originally, we shipped it with pencils, ink pens, markers and paint brushes–but we didn’t define them. Each of these tools had no name, no default size and could be modified or even replaced completely. Because they weren’t obvious, many people missed those tools.

So two things coming your way will be the ability to name your brushes and create your own brush sets (groups). But, we’re also going a step further. 1.6 will ship with two sections inside the new brush menu; Pro tools & Custom tools.

Pro tools will contain sets of highly refined tools, for sketching, inking, painting and airbrushing, among others. These tools will ship with a predefined behaviour which cannot be modified. But don’t let that put you off. can also be modified. By default, these new tools are really nice.

The second section, custom tools, will allow you to make your own brushes and organise them into your own sets. You can organise and modify almost every aspect of this section, so if you use and create custom brushes frequently, this section might your new home. Both sections, will be unified in a single brush interface for ease of use.

As always, we’re refining a whole bunch of other stuff in this next update and the list below shows our current working feature set. Like last time, we’ll be crossing them off as we go! Green items indicate completion whilst black items are in progress.

New artwork gallery
• Thumbnail grid layout: Landscape & portrait
• Drag & drop artwork thumbnails to organise
• Drag & drop artwork thumbnails to create stacks (groups)
• Select multiple artworks to action (delete, share, duplicate)
• Rename artwork thumbnails
• New ‘create canvas’ workflow
• New ‘export’ dialogue interface
• Export multiple artworks to email (PNG or JPG)
• Export multiple artworks to photos (PNG or JPG)
• Export multiple artworks to iTunes
• Export to twitter

New Brush management
• New brush menu interface
• Refined advanced options UI
• Better slider readouts
• Improved slider min & max points
• New advanced brush ‘general’ settings
• Option to display brush preview as a stamp
Pro tools section
• Sketching tools
• Inking tools
• Painting tools
• Wet painting tools (Merged into Painting)
• Airbrushing tools
• Texture tools
• Duplicate any Pro Tool
• Drag & drop to organise
Custom brushes section
• Create custom brush sets (groups)
• Delete custom brush sets
• Rename custom brush sets
• New custom brush creation UI (Same functionality–faster process)
• Name custom brushes
• Delete custom brushes
• Duplicate custom brushes
• Drag & drop brush sets
• Drag & drop individual brushes
• Drag & drop brushes into brush sets
• Import Preset Si shape and grain files

Interface refinements
• Improved contrast app wide
• Increased menu transparency
• New Si popover design
• Refined App icon

New options available in painting mode
• Insert a photo from camera
• Export canvas to email (PNG or JPG)
• Export canvas to iTunes as PSD
• Export canvas to photos (PNG or JPG)
• Export to twitter
• New help options
• Re-designed app settings

General improvements
• Tapered brush strokes
• Maximum size
• Maximum opacity
• Grain & shape orient to device orientation
• Improved Precision sliders app wide
• New drag to adjust slider (more accurate)
• Improved Tool ‘memory’
• New background option UI
• Show real canvas transparency
• New undo / redo gestures
• New precision eyedropper tool
• Zoom & rotate canvas (Pinch and rotate)
• ARC memory management
• iOS 5 improvements
• Jot Touch support
• XO stylus support
• iPen support

Update 8.2.12: As we close in on the completing all 1.6 features–we’ve decided to add two new editions to Procreate 1.6. Although these two new features are only small additions, we’re hoping they might come in handy for some folks. Because we not sure if they will make it into 1.6, they will remain classified until we get further along!

Update 16.2.12: We’re working almost 7 days a week here and we’re happy to announce that one of the new ‘classified’ features will ship with Procreate 1.6! And as you can see, we’ve just added and finished a third new minor enhancement. Again, the classified items are not major features–just small additions that will help make painting & sketching a little more enjoyable. The new eyedropper tool however, will almost certainly not make it into Procreate 1.6. Instead, we’re putting our energy into the areas of 1.6 that need some extra love.

On that note, a few days ago it become painfully obvious that Procreate 1.6 is pushing the iPad (1 & 2) to its absolute limits. Along with Gallery stacks, we’re working through a whole host of performance and memory optimisations. (And of course the usual hunting down and squishing bugs as they crop up). As we get through each of these issues and feature additions, Procreate 1.6 becomes more and more usable & enjoyable–and we can’t help but feel, this update is shaping up really nicely. The wait should be worth it guys!

Update 28.2.12: Procreate 1.6 reached the Alpha milestone a few days ago! 5 artists were invited to test the early 1.6 Alpha build, and the early feedback has been really positive.  And as you can see, all classified items are now completed. We’re busy woking away on some minor bugs and UX issues before we’re back to the last major features–Gallery stacks & stylus support!

Update 9.3.12: Gallery stacks is finally completed! This last feature has really transformed the Gallery into a beautiful place to house your artwork. WIth Gallery stacks completed, we are now feature freezing Procreate 1.6 and making the final push on to 3rd party stylus support. Wont be long now!