At last week’s Adobe MAX conference, the Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch demoed the company’s content-aware fill tool running on a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and a color-mixing paint palette application running on Apple’s iPad, revealing Adobe’s intentions to enhance the functionality of their Photoshop application with touchscreen tablet devices.
Adobe has been contemplating how they can provide Photoshop users with a way of involving their tablet devices for many months, by asking them for feedback on what kind of capabilities they might like to see. The demos at their MAX conference show Adobe is serious about integrating iPad-like devices into the Photoshop workflow, and as a user of an iPad and the Photoshop application, this is really great news.
Adobe’s designers have been mocking up various tools that could allow users to use the iPhone and iPad as an extension to Photoshop running on their computer. On his blog, Adobe’s John Nack describes some of the companion features.
In a nutshell, you get:
- groups of task-based tools & commands (e.g. all your photography/retouching tools & buttons on one page, or all your painting ones, 3D ones, etc.)
- interactive, task-based tutorials that drive Photoshop, helping you get things done
The idea is to let you work faster–offering more organized access to tools & knowledge.
MacRumors describes that some of Adobe’s ideas on companion apps for touchscreen devices include custom toolsets, tutorials to help users quickly learn certain tasks, and applications that provide easy access to many of the commonly-used tools.
Despite being simply demos at the moment, it’s fantastic to see that Adobe are researching ways in which companion apps on touchscreen devices can enhance a user’s experience when using desktop applications. It will be exciting to see whether other software companies consider the same approach, and whether our iPads will accompany other software we use frequently on our Macs.
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