What can't the iPad do???

[mrathee]

Photoshop 1.0 released after two years of small development, and ran on much slower systems than an iPad. Of course we're not going to get Photoshop CS5 on the iPad, but I think it's very possible we'll see something along the lines of Photoshop 4 or 5 in a year from now.

I mean just look at Sketchbook Pro — it launched alongside the iPad, so it's definitely not taking full advantage of the hardware yet, but the developers are constantly updating it with huge functionality such as layers and tools. I've tried it for graphic design and, while you're still right that nothing is currently available to make it worth replacing a traditional computer just yet, it surprised me how capable it was; It's only really missing a few basic functions (being custom brushes, layer blending options, and support of larger resolutions) and then I could easily see it being comparable to a version of Photoshop from the late 90's / early 00's.

I am hugely impressed by what we have in such a short space of time, and I do believe it's a matter of a few more features and some hardware tweaks to bring graphic design suites on the iPad up to that of an early 00's PC. After that, I think we'll only need one more year and a 2nd gen iPad to have a graphics tablet that, in many ways, rivals a modern desktop computer running Photoshop.

Is is just my opinion though, as both a designer and iPad user. We'll ultimately have to wait and see though.

Just to clarify - when I said "full fledged" - I did not mean a standard version of photoshop running on ipad. Instead what I meant was an app that has all the tools to be used successfully be a graphic design professional. That was my definition of full fledged.

 

[einmusiker]

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