I was so strong. I watched the keynote, saw the specs, and came away impressed. But what surprised me was that I had no intention to buy an iPad. I don’t have a lot of disposable income, and between a smart phone (can you guess what it is?) and a desktop ( yeah, I drank the Kool-Aid ) I couldn’t justify needing an iPad. So I ogled from afar, tracked the buzz, and hoped I would trip over a bag of money on the street.

When I first saw the iPad, I thought it’d be great for me with only two App additions (AppAdds?): a portfolio app, and a good sketchbook app. The current lineup of apps offered neither ( I suppose Photos would work as a stop gap portfolio in a pinch and Brushes could be a decent sketchbook ) until today when Adobe had to whip out Adobe® Ideas 1.0.

It looks like a great rough sketchpad for on the fly doodling in colour with resizable vector based brushes, plus some handy little features for building a colour palette and exporting the whole thing to Illustrator or Photoshop. This little app could potentially become the replacement for the trusty pencil/sketchbook combo most designers and artists rely on. Here’s the feature list:

Features:
• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable-size brushes using multitouch control
• Vector eraser
• Huge virtual canvas
• Automatic creation of harmonized color themes from your photos or images
• Ability to email ideas as PDF files for editing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or for viewing with any PDF viewer
• Gallery-style organizer to quickly scroll through your ideas and color themes
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• Easy creation of multiple versions of design concepts
• 50-level undo

Will I buy an iPad now? Probably not. Will I buy an iPad when they’re available in Canada? Probably not then either.  As a tool for an artist or designer it’s still a little lightweight for what I’d really want it for, and for what most of my peers would want it for. Which is essentially a powerful laptop with an accurate touchscreen. The iPad is not the hardware. Nor is Adobe Ideas the software that would replace  the scribbly nature of a pencil on paper sketchbook. I can still get ideas and annotation down faster in an analog. My ideas flow too fast for a capacitive screen to pick up my nuanced scribbles of my hand and still have me decipher them later.

In it’s current state, Adobe Ideas looks like a great… I hesitate to say it: toy. The hardware is too limited, to let the software be a true viable replacement for a professional to replace a small sketchbook and pen in a pocket. But I can see the day coming when apps and hardware will slowly replace my trusty 2B pencil doodles on a collection of spiral bound paper; and I’m pretty certain some future version of Adobe Ideas will be a part of it.