When I first got my iPad, I was very impressed with the media capabilities. Watching Videos with NetFlix, Reading the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today and Epicurious is just gorgeous. It replaced my kindle the day I got it. And the games are decent, but there are still limits to what you can do with a touch screen (compared to a controller ) but the visual quality is outstanding.
Still, the one big draw back was creating content. Keyboard support is spotty, and there’s no easy way to flip between apps when you want to clip something from a website to put into a Pages document. Even creating emails felt like an iPhone app and not something you would expect to find on a useful computer with a screen this big. And don’t get me started about pen based input. It’s still a joke.
So I figured that the iPad would be mostly a reader or browser, until I saw Photosplash.
The first real program I used to create anything meaningful on my iPad was MaxJournal. During our vacation I kept a daily journal of what we did and attaching photos to it was cool. The iPad is still a nightmare to get photos on for me because I tied it to the iPhoto library on my home machine. Once you’re out on the road, getting photos onto it was not trivial. I had to upload them to a web page with another computer and copy them down. I know why Apple didn’t put an SD card reader on the iPad. There’s open, and then there’s open. Apple believes in open with their permission. But like Jobs wrote in multiple emails, if you don’t like it buy something else.
However, back to Photosplash. This is a very, very clever application that allows you to selectively color photographs. And for the first time, it’s a creative program that feels way more natural on the iPad than any other platform I could image. The gist of it, is that they made coloring with the tip of your finger feel intuitive, and natural. Like coloring with charcoal, or finger paints. The ability to zoom in – even beyond pixel depth, to smoothly trace a region or a line is just amazing.
In just a few minutes I was able to create these images, photos that would have taken me hours to do in Photoshop, mostly because I’d still have to figure out how to do it.
And for the cost of the program? It was well worth it. Now that I’ve seen it, it seems like it is possible – I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.
