padBoard 1.5 is a big deal. A Big Deal.
padBoard 1.0 was developed in less than a week. padBoard 1.5 has been in constant development for the last 7 weeks, and I'm extremely excited to announce that it's been submitted to the store! This update brings a TON of new features, here's what's new:
- VGA Support for projectors! Now collaborate with students in a classroom or during a presentation!
- Much smoother drawing engine, 4100% as smooth as before. That is not a typo.
- Layer support! Now you and your collaborators don't have to draw over each other's ideas!
- More defined drawing area with a better frame image
- Your padBoard document is now saved when you exit the app so you can get back to drawing faster
- Slick new icon
- New intuitive Help menu
- New Options/About pane
- Fixed a bug with the eraser size overwriting the marker size
- 20% more efficient P2P communications
and that's just the big stuff! You'll likely notice that padBoard looks, works and just feels better and easier to use. I've put some considerable thought into usability for this release, and that will definitely jump out at you when you start using padBoard. It's an awesome app!
Part of the fluidity that's been added is thanks to the new drawing engine. After some fun figuring out bezier curves (thanks to Mitch Haile at Biscade/Pancetera and Ted Von Bevern for their help) and making them work well-enough in Objective-C, I was able to get the drawing and plotting much smoother. In the old padBoard, every point the app detected was marked as a point, and it drew lines through these points. 3 points detected meant 2 lines drawn. In the new version, between every three points we draw 80. So for 3 points detected, we draw 82 lines. So it's safe to say this new engine is 4100% as smooth as the old one. I'm positive current users will love it.
In the coming days/weeks, I'll be posting about a lot of the internal design choices made with padBoard. This includes things like UI design/thought process, P2P communication structure and user testing.
I'm excited to bring padBoard 1.5 to the masses once it's (hopefully!) accepted, and I'll be sure to share that moment as soon as it happens. Until then, look forward to an awesome version of padBoard!