Touch Screen Drawing Made Affordable with iPad

It's amazing to think that just a few years ago the notion of touching a pen or hand to a display, in order to directly manipulate creative content, seemed either futuristic or at least entirely cost-prohibitive.

The iPad (and iPhone too) have completely changed the game by making direct artwork manipulation via touch screen interface something most artists and designers can actually afford.

Comparison

Let's compare what might have been your best option only months ago. Assuming that you already have a desktop computer and you wish to add direct input to your kit:

Desktop Software and touch screen interface option - to be fair I chose the low end options:

Product	Cost	Notes
Wacom Cintiq 12WX	$999	their larger device is $1,999
Corel Painter essentials 4	$49	their full Painter 11 product is $299
TOTAL	$1,048	for a tethered desktop direct-edit solution that a person may consider.

That's no small chunk of change to add a tethered desktop direct-edit solution to your existing computer rig.

Now, with the iPad you could gain similar functionality with:

Product	Cost	Notes
iPad wifi	$499	their most expensive model will be $829
Autodesk SketchBook Pro	$7.99	iPad version, for iPhone it's only $2.99
PogoSketch stylus	$14.95	arguments can be made about accuracy compared to Wacom, other stylus competitors available and will blossom.
TOTAL	$521.94	for mobile direct-edit solution that a person may consider.

In other words approximately $526 cheaper (or half the cost) entry point. And it's mobile!

There are certainly variables that may cause this kind of comparison to vary. However, the bottom line is that artists and designers can look forward to cheaper ways to get in "touch" with their artwork production. I can't wait to see how this evolves in the coming years.

ArtBistro Ranks their Top 25 Cities for Designers and Artists

ArtBistro.com: "Which cities offer the most overall value in 2009? While all of these communities have a healthy art and design community the emphasis on this list is the cost of living..."

Below is a quick summary. Read the full article here to get all the details:

1. Austin, TX
   
2. San Antonio, TX:
   
3. Salt Lake City, UT
   
4. Oklahoma City, OK
   
5. Raleigh-Cary Metropolitan Area, NC
   
6. Seattle, WA
   
7. Rochester, NY
   
8. Portland, OR
   
9. Denver, CO
   
10. Honolulu, HI
    
11. Nashville, TN
    
12. Virginia Beach, VA
    
13. Kansas City, MO
    
14. Pittsburgh, PA
    
15. Charlotte, NC
    
16. Boston, MA
    
17. Buffalo, NY
    
18. Columbus, OH
    
19. Indianapolis, IN
    
20. St. Louis, MO
    
21. Hartford, CT
    
22. Louisville, KY
    
23. Cincinnati, OH
    
24. Philadelphia, PA
    
25. San Diego, CA
    

Image credit: TheSeafarer via Flickr

Social Site Rankings (September, 2007)

Via techcrunch.com: "Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)?"



Read the full techcrunch article and see more nifty data tables...

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

CMS Matrix - Comparison shopping for content management tools

"(CMS Matrix) is provided as a community service to everyone interested in looking for a means to manage web site content. Here you can discuss, rate, and compare the various systems available on the market today."

This site offers a large list of CMS solutions to compare. Some of the data looks like it could be up to a year old. But I was impressed to see that they have everything from large systems to things like Wordpress and Contribute. (via Vitamin)