When you’ve got such a large designer following, it kinda makes sense that you would be looking into providing your audience with the best tools they can get their hands on. It seems like Apple’s been kicking around the idea of releasing competing products to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. A new patent, published today, shows that Apple worked on some ideas for changing brush size and brush color.
From Patently Apple:
By allowing a user to change an input tool property using an input gesture that may be independent of any displayed menu, the user may be allowed to focus directly on the input tool being used to generate the graphical object, for example, without a user having to periodically move his or her attention away from the input tool and towards a menu for altering an input tool property.
Everyone knows that Apple and Adobe have butted heads recently. It started with Flash, and went directly towards Adobe’s inability to innovate in their space, concluding with Steve Jobs’ frequent comments about Adobe. I can’t say I disagree either; applications like Pixelmator are doing a lot more to innovate the photo editing space than Adobe is currently, and they’re doing it at a much cheaper price-point.
But, like most patents that go public, there’s a very slim chance that these things actually make it to production. Actually, the chance is slimmer than slim; that’s just how unlikely it is at this point. If anything, you should be using these patent releases as an opportunity to speculate about exactly what the future could hold and where technology could be headed. It’s a neat little peek into the Apple research and development process, but it’s certainly not proof that new technology is around the corner.
