Air Stylus

[Synthetik]

Wanted to pass this on in case anyone was interested. Air Stylus and a pressure sensitive pen allows an iPad to become something like a wireless Wacom Cintiq tablet. So you could run Studio Artist on your personal computer and then control it using Air Stylus.

I haven't tried it out yet, but probably will soon. Has anyone else here used it?

[craig deeley]

The idea of pressure added to tablet use is exciting.

I am all about the stylus/tablet for digital work.

However, the movie at the link/home page makes actually using the stylus look awkward. 

I would be curious about what kind of distance from a desktop this can get. The whole point (for me) would be to get away from a desktops mobility (or laptop/direct drawing on the monitor surface) limitations. 

I am curious.

John, let me know how any testing you do works out for you and your folks.

[Synthetik]

I forgot, we did have a discussion here before about working with Air Display, which is an earlier app Avatron had for this kind of thing (minus the pressure stylus support part).

I did play with Air Display at that time to control Studio Artist from an iPad. I much preferred using a wacom tablet and my large screen monitor when i ran those tests.

The other thing i remember is that Air Display at that time added a weird custom video driver to your computer, which acted very strangely at startup. By strange i mean that the display would jump to visual noise during the computer's startup process, before that went away and you got a normal screen display. That part of it seemed very flaky.

I use the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus for a pressure pen on the ipad. It has a much better tip than the one they show on the pen in the Air Stylus video (i think). Although some people like that other tip because you can see through it.

It's using wifi to talk to your computer, so that should give you an indication of the range you can get in your house, based on where you can work with other wifi devices on the same wifi network as your main computer.

[craig deeley]

I recall the previous discussion.

I do not have an iPad. (honestly - I cant stand them. As a social/web tool/note pad the apple UI and options are not as easy to deal with as Android - for me - and I do not like the Apple store limitations and lack of easy communication with a desktop)

At least I dont have an iPad to date and cant use one as a production tool til they really make the surface something I can draw on. Apple is not making the iPad with artists in mind (no one is really making a tablet device with art in mind - so I cant blame it all on Apple) ; )

I don't think it will be too long before tablets get to be on a par with desktops - at least for light weight digital art work... Any little thing like pressure sensitivity sounds good...

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On a side - you mentioned the visual noise thing.

What System level are you running - when you see the visual noise? I have had that issue with newer (2011+) macs running 10.6.8 - I had to strip out a lot of applications, drivers and the like that affected the screen - before the problem went (was blown) away... But cant say which really was the culprit.

[Synthetik]

Steve Jobs had some personal beef against pen input for tablets. So that's why there was never any conception of using a pressure sensitive pen as an input device on Apple's part for iPads. Lot's of third parties have jumped in to try and provide a solution.

Of course since Apple didn't think to provide a fixed api standard for interfacing to pressure pens in ios, everyone of these external venders has their own proprietary api you need to code to. So it's a big mess under the hood.

Have you played with Microsoft Surface Pro tablets at all? You can actually run Studio Artist today on those tablet computers directly. And they include pressure pens. You just need to make sure you have the right drivers on them so that the Microsoft pen input gets converted into the appropriate wacom api calls that Studio Artist uses for pen pressure input. You need to install a driver that provides WinTab API support so that surface pro pen pressure works properly in Studio Artist.

I think there's a reason why most artists do not paint or with their fingers. Lots of reasons actually. You can achieve much finer control when drawing or painting when using some kind of pen input device.

So i do commend Microsoft for trying to be aware of that and include direct support for pen input into their tablet devices.

I think they essentially ignored artists with Surface 1 and 2, but with Surface 3 they are paying better attention to the specific needs of artists. But they also dropped back from using wacom pen technology to using n-trig in Surface 3. So you are now limited to 256 pressure points. Here's some interesting information on why they made the switch. Here's Mike Krahulik's thoughts on Surface 3 for artists.

To be honest i don't know what the status of pen input is on the Android side. Samsung has their s-pen spec, but i don't know if that applies to anything other than Samsung Android devices. 

[Synthetik]

My visual noise at startup issue with the Air Display mac side driver was on an imac running osx 10.6.8. Air Display was definitely the culprit, because the problem started immediately after i installed their mac side driver support for Air Display.

One issue i have with them is that there is no easy way to uninstall anything they put on your system.