Ramifications of Pocket Devices
As things seem to be heading in a generally positive direction again, I’ve decided to start properly blogging once more. So let’s get to the fun stuff, shall we?
Now that I’m cheerily ensconced in California, working away in Hollywood and living in Woodland Hills, I’ve got a good 90 minutes on public transport of a day. This is Dead Time, where I can think, but not actually do much. I have a plan to change this, With Science, using an Asus Eee Slate EP121. This is, frankly, a Startling Device. The simple presence of the Wacom digitiser makes it fairly awesome, but the quad-core CPU and SSD backing store puts it well over the parapet into Proper Creative Kit. Good Photoshop performance is a given, and I’m hoping ZBrush and the like will have enough grunt in there to be properly amazing, 21st Century Art Kit.
Of course, this gave rise to Question Two. All good questions lead to more questions, don’t you think? In this instance, Question Two is “Whatever shall I use to press buttons?”. ZBrush, after all, lives and dies by the Left Corner Keys – CTRL, Alt and Shift. Without these readily pressable, it is for naught. So I started looking around for a Bluetooth keypad – something dainty of form-factor, no larger than the numeric keypad on my laptop. Possibly even something I could velcro to the back of the Slate for blind buttonology whilst sculpting as the wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round.
Saner minds prevaled. The critical nudge into Correct Thinking came from Adam “Sir LANs-a-lot” Lucas, who pointed me at edovia.com’s NumPad app for iPhone. A swift scrounge over the Android Marketplace showed up mkRemote from devBury, which turns my Nexus One into a mouse, and keyboard, with programmable macros, over TCP/IP (for free) or over Bluetooth for three dollars. Y’know. Half the price of a beer.
Magnificent.
While I was about it, I stuck a VNC client on my phone, and giggled not-quite-sanely to myself as I was controlling LightWave 10 over an Android ‘phone.
Good day for the tech love. Now all I need is for the Eee Slate to get back in stock…. it will be mine. Oh, yes – it will be mine!
I can’t wait to get mine. Given that right now I have an old Motion with a Celeron M inside, this new baby should feel like a super computer compared to it. Of course I’m just a hobbyist (I don’t need a tablet for my real job, which is programming) and I also don’t plan to use it for 3D, but even 2D can easily overtax the Celeron.
Speaking of 2D, the absolutely bestest 2D app for sketching on the TPC is Autodesk (formerly Alias) Sketchbook Pro. There are drawing programs and then there’s a completely different universe with only the Sketchbook Pro in it. The latest version is a lot cheaper than the previous one, and it has ZERO LAG on my freaking Celeron (with small-ish brushes, i.e. pencil, pen), so on the i5 the line will probably be drawn before I move the pen. It fully utilizes the tablet’s sub-pixel accuracy to produce the smoothest, most beautiful lines.