this month i shipped a big new update for SketchClub! it’s quite a big overhaul of the graphics engine. my goal for this update was to do these engine changes while preserving all the existing functionality, and intentionally leave new ui changes and other user facing stuff for a following update.
it worked out really nicely this way, and while flushing out some tricky glitches and device compatibility issues during the beta i ultimately did wind up sneaking in a bunch user facing changes too.
this past week SketchClub was part of Apple’s “Unleah Your Creativity” promotion in the App Store! it was featured on the front page of the App Store worldwide and on sale too for the Chinese New Year celebration in Asia.
it was super cool to see the app and art by SketchClub artists SKYW4kR and Wendy promoted in the store and on social media. fun start to the new year!
the Sketch Club 2.2 update is now out! iPad Pro support, brush upgrades, and lots of other nice improvements. check out the update vid for demos of some of the new stuff. :)
i’ve been loving the iPad Pro!
the speakers are fantastic. maybe it’s because with the screen being bigger they are farther apart or perhaps magic from how they distribute sound between the four speakers but you can really hear stereo effects nicely. it sounds amazing in movies and games.
the pencil is great. you unplug the non-pointy end to get a lightning connector you connect to iPad Pro to pair and charge. like other styluses though it is pretty easy to lose. a find my Pencil app like the find my iPhone app would be nice.
this is a 150 artist co-op on Sketch Club’s whiteboard with music from Phoenix!
it was maybe the most fun whiteboard weekend event yet! for these, people just hop into the whiteboard and doodle a bit on the theme then i render it all out as a fun music video at the end. the videos work a lot nicer now too that YouTube supports 60fps.
as with iOS 7 and 8, iOS 9 caused a lot of problems with Sketch Club. ahead of its release i had been testing with early versions of iOS 9 and fixing up all the issues i could find. there were also some Sketch Club beta testers with prerelease iOS 9 who helped find issues.
i got a new version of the app sent off to Apple about a week before iOS 9's release hoping it would be reviewed, approved, and land in the store right on time. unfortunately the review times have been extra long and it wasn't until many days after that it did. in the meantime everyone who updated to iOS 9 right away were stuck with some major bugs and incompatibilities and all i could do was let them know an update was waiting review with Apple.
the spring issue of the sketch club zine is now out!! download ittttttttttttt :)
woohooo!! my fave app and fave coffee place COMBINED at last! Sketch Club is the Starbucks App of the Week for Christmas week 2013! all the Starbucks in USA and Canada have these rad cards you can pick up for a free copy of the app!
woot! released version 1.17 of Sketch Club this past month! \o/
it was refreshing doing a bunch of native UI with this update. most of the community stuff has been web based with UIWebView and that’s definitely nice for fluid layouts and such but it’s rather slow and dealing with three languages (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) is a headache. that’s in comparison to native using just one language (Objective C) and getting nice fast hardware accelerated views and animations. maybe doing UI in HTML canvas could be a good way to do things in the future instead of wrangling silly markup and styles but at that point the Objective C APIs are again much better, run faster, and have better tools supporting them…
yay apple approved my new app Sketch Club and it's now in the app store!! (here's a direct link to it in the store)
what is Sketch Club??? it's a super rad drawing / sketching / painting app for ipads, pods, and phones. :) it's got sweet procedural brushes like sketchy and fur (based on trace aka mr. doob's epic html5 sketching experiment harmony and zefrank's scribbler). it's also got smooth (which is my own take on the connect to nearest points action) and side lines (umm great for fuzzy caterpillars?!). along with that procedural madness there are regular brushes like you'd find in photoshop but pared down to the most useful functionality and a vector brush for simplified smooth or polygonal drawing. also there are foreground and background layers to draw in, a photo layer for background or tracing, and canvas color.