Fourteen apps that make great use of the Apple Pencil
Eye on Apple
By Jim Lynch, CIO
Apple’s new iPad Pro is now available at your local Apple Store and also in Apple’s online store. And one of the best things about the iPad Pro is the Apple Pencil, which allows you to draw and write with amazing precision.
But what about apps that actually make use of the Apple Pencil? Don’t worry, I’ve compiled a list of fourteen apps that will help you get the most out of the Apple Pencil [ Find it on Amazon–*What’s this?* ]. Each of the apps listed below has been enhanced to take advantage of everything the Apple Pencil has to offer on the iPad Pro.
Each of the apps in this roundup contain snippets from the official descriptions in the app store. To get the app or read more about it, just click through to open the app’s page in the app store. You can also read reviews by other users, and see the star ratings for each of the apps that has been enhanced for the Apple Pencil.
Some of the apps included are free and offer in-app purchases, while others have an up-front purchase price. When appropriate I’ve included the price of each app in the link to the app store.
Welcome to uMake: a groundbreaking and powerful, yet surprisingly simple and intuitive to use 3D design app that will help you set your ideas free. uMake empowers a new generation of creatives and professionals to design in 3D like never before.
– Easily sketch on 2D planes in a 3D space
– Import photos and use them as a reference for your next idea
– Control curve-weight and color
– Rapid creation with live-symmetry and mirroring
– Create extruded and revolved surfaces with ease.
– Be more precise by editing, adding, merging and deleting curve’s control points.
– Transform curves and surfaces by moving, rotating, scaling and duplicating them.
– Trim curves easily by marking a trim point and ‘flicking’ the remaining part off.
– Make beautiful circular designs using our Polar Array tool.
Procreate is the most powerful sketching, painting and illustration app ever designed for a mobile device. This complete artist’s toolbox helps you create beautiful sketches, inspiring paintings, and stunning illustrations anywhere you are. Procreate features ground-breaking canvas resolution, 128 incredible brushes, advanced layer system and is powered by Silica: the fastest 64-bit painting engine on iOS.
Create a canvas and start painting with any of Procreate’s exclusive dual-texture brushes. Use the immediately responsive smudge tool to perfectly blend color with any brush in your library. With Procreate’s incredibly high-resolution canvases you can print your artwork at massive sizes. Experience the revolutionary selection, transform, and perspective tools built exclusively for multitouch and finish your illustration with stunning cinema-quality effects. Procreate’s powerful and intuitive interface always puts your art in focus.
Procreate 3 has been updated with exciting new features for iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and iOS 9. There’s over 100 new features; including a gorgeous refined interface, brush engine upgrades, and Quickline: a new tool for straightening strokes.
Complete Anatomy is our new cloud-based sharing platform with innovative 3D tools that we feel has the potential to transform medical learning. As a small company with big plans, our first release introduces new tools to create content and a sharing platform that gives you the power to distribute to your peers.
Even with the massive effort our team has put into this project, there will be issues. We ask you to join us by submitting feedback, creating quality content and taking part in a movement that we know will change the way anatomy is taught. With your engagement, the possibilities of our collaboration are endless.
Our initial release includes:
– 3D Male model (female to be included soon).
– 12 Complete Systems (Skeletal, Muscular, Connective Tissue, Arterial, Venous, Lymphatic, Nervous, Respiratory, Digestive, Endocrine, Urogenital, Integumentary, and includes Heart and Brain)
– Skeletal and Muscular Premium Layers: Featuring bone parts/surfaces and origin/insertion points.
– Groups (Cloud Sharing): Create your own groups and invite users to join, or access content created by our medical experts. Share with your groups, publicly or within specialized categories.
– 3D Cut and Draw Tools: Instantly alter the model with innovative, patent pending, tools: Cut, Spurs 3D & 2D Pens, Growths, Fractures, Discover and Pain.
Evernote for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch gets you effortlessly organized with notes that sync between all your devices. Be productive anywhere:
– Write notes, checklists, and research
– Clip from anywhere on the web
– Discuss your work with others, right within the app
– Present ideas without creating a slide deck
What’s New in Version 7.9
– Add a colorful sketch to your notes
– Do more things at once with multitasking on supported iPads
– Updated for iPad Pro and Apple Pencil
Create expressive drawings and paintings without opening a sketchbook. Your artwork can be sent as layered PSD files to Adobe Photoshop CC or resized up to 4x in Illustrator CC to print high-resolution copies.
Thirteen tools — each with adjustable size, color, opacity and blending — produce the rich results you want. Includes a graphite pencil, an ink pen, markers and watercolor paintbrushes*.
Sketch on iPad Pro’s beautiful, large screen and take advantage of the extra space for your sketches and paintings.
Take creativity further with built-in support for pressure, shading and palm rejection with the new Apple Pencil. Draw thin or thick lines by adjusting the pressure of your stroke. Apply shading or change your brush characteristics with the tilt of your hand.
When inspiration happens, put it on Paper. Paper is the best way to capture and connect your notes, photos, and sketches. Create checklists, spotlight details in photos, and sketch diagrams with unbeatable speed and ease — Paper is like a wall of sticky notes for everything that inspires you.
Paper’s swipe-to-style formatting makes creating checklists and notes faster and more fun than any other app. The photo spotlight tool helps you quickly clarify essential details.
Paper’s unique visual notes are designed to help you get your point across quickly and precisely. Paper also lets you share your ideas any way you want to, including as professionally-formatted PDFs, Keynote and Powerpoint presentations.
This update “super-sizes” Paper for the iPad Pro, and updates our ink engine to take advantage of Apple Pencil. We’ve also added 3D Touch sensitive inks for the iPhone 6s/Plus. Finally, we snuck in another highly requested feature: reordering Spaces in the Home View.
Graphic is a full-featured graphic design and illustration application for iPad. True desktop-class editing and illustration tools on the go.
Graphic has all of the tools you need to create everything from detailed technical illustrations to beautiful works of art. Create complex designs quickly and easily, even on the go.
Layers, Text, Images, Object Groups, Multi-color Gradients, RGB / HSB / Hex color pickers, Brushes, Bezier Pen Tool, customizable Canvas Styles, Grid and Smart Guide Snapping, Image Masking, vector-based PDF and SVG file import/export, and much more!
Pressure-sensitive drawing support for the Apple Pencil.
Quickly wireframe ideas for print, web and mobile using actual assets like images, shapes, text frames, colors and professional fonts. Finish developing your project in Adobe Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC.
Conjure native objects with simple gestures. Drop in lines of placeholder text just by swiping a finger. Trace a quick outline for basic shapes or editable text boxes, and mark it with an X to make an image frame.
Arrange your objects using guides, grids, smart alignment and spacing controls. Select multiple objects at once for faster adjustments.
Work on iPad Pro’s beautiful, large screen and take advantage of the extra space to create your layouts. We added layout specifications for iPad Pro and Apple Watch screen sizes.
Welcome to Notability: powerful, yet wonderfully simple note-taking and PDF annotation.
Students, teachers, and business professionals use Notability daily to take notes, sketch ideas, annotate PDFs, mark-up photos, record lectures, provide audio feedback and more. It is uniquely designed for each device to provide the best note taking experience at school, at home, and at work. And with iCloud, your notes are always up to date.
Notability has been fine-tuned for Apple Pencil and iPad Pro giving you the most responsive, precise writing experience yet.
Adobe Photoshop Mix: The creative editing power of Adobe Photoshop with the freedom of iPhone and iPad.
Photoshop Mix makes it quick and easy to transform your photos anywhere you are. Cut out, combine and seamlessly blend pictures to create sophisticated multilayered images. Apply one of over a dozen Looks to select areas or your whole photo. Share with friends for fun. And refine photos further or incorporate them into other creative projects by accessing them inside new Photoshop Fix or sending them to Photoshop CC on your desktop.
Moxtra. Teamwork Reimagined. Moxtra is the collaboration companion that works the way teams do: flexibly and simply, in real-time or anytime.
Your iPhone/iPad/iPod has changed how, when, and where you work. And now you can take Moxtra with you to work faster and more productively. With the Moxtra app, you can switch from “What do you think about this?” to “Let’s meet and decide right now!” with a single click.
Work smarter, not harder, in a single workspace that provides conversations, content and meetings on demand. Move effortlessly between messaging, content collaboration, screen sharing, white boarding and real-time meetings, both 1:1 and in groups, as your needs change throughout the day.
Moxtra makes teamwork easier and faster – whether your project lasts one hour or one year, with five people or fifty. It’s just that simple.
LiquidText offers gesture based reading and annotation for documents (PDF, DOC, PPT, web pages).
Read in ways not possible on paper. LiquidText gives you the tools to focus on what matters, compare distant sections, take notes, build upon thoughts, and pull out key facts from the text. Improve the way you read on the iPad with LiquidText.
Annotate anything easily and quickly with TouchCast Studio. Add webpages, files, images, videos… nearly anything! Then record and share across the web.
Communicate confidently: TouchCast Studio lets you easily add visuals to your video, mark them up with the whiteboard and explain things with ease like never before.
When viewers watch, they can interact with the stuff in the video — like explore the webpage or download the file. A touchcast is a video that is fully browsable, responsive, and alive.
Ready, Set, Pro! We’re optimized for the iPad Pro with improved drawing in the whiteboard, annotate with the Pencil anytime and record TouchCasts with the bigger screen!
Stay connected everywhere with join.me – for free! join.me mobile apps include audio conferencing by phone or internet (VoIP) so you can see and hear anything in real time…on your time. And our superior screen sharing and mobile whiteboard means you can zoom in and see the details of every discussion – even on your iPhone®. Whether at home, at the airport, in the coffee shop – everyone can join in the conversation with join.me.
Host meetings with a single tap – for free! join.me lets you host, present documents and even whiteboards right from your iPad® or iPhone. Just one tap starts a scheduled meeting, a spontaneous meeting, or a conference call.
Introducing a new way to share your ideas – the join.me mobile whiteboard. Why take a picture of a whiteboard and email it to the team when you can create whiteboards on an infinite canvas by drawing, adding icons or uploading images and photos right from your iPad or iPhone? Best of all, your whiteboard becomes a living document that you can share, offline or online, with the whole team to access and modify. It’s a new, better way to work.
NEW! Apple Pencil compatibility with join.me mobile whiteboard
Developers are just getting started with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil
And there you have it, a great selection of iPad Pro apps that have been enhanced to make full use of the Apple Pencil. But this is only the tip of the iceberg compared to what’s coming for the iPad Pro. It’s still very early and many developers will be updating their apps in the months ahead to incorporate the Apple Pencil in unique and powerful ways for the iPad Pro. Stay tuned!
Additional reading: Great games for your iPad Pro
If you’re looking for some great games for the iPad Pro, be sure to read my post about 16 gorgeous games that take full advantage of the iPad Pro’s amazing screen. And also check out 16 games with spectacular sound that make full use of the iPad Pro’s four speakers. The iPad Pro is a terrific gaming tablet with plenty of power for today’s most advanced iOS games.
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