I've just released the first version of
Béziers for iOS. It's a vector graphics editor specially designed for digitizing lettering projects on the iPhone or iPad. You can take a picture of your work, load it into Béziers, and start drawing curves. When you've finished, you can export it as an SVG file to load into your favourite desktop editor.
Here's a video of a sample session:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts2Crv2uzAU&feature=youtu.beOne thing I'm particularly proud of is that it performs edge detection on the picture as you're tracing and dragging nodes, so the tracing "snaps" to the edges of your lettering. It's really neat; you kind of have to experience it to get it. I've also added curve harmonization, balancing and all that sort of thing.
You can get it from the
App Store. This is my first commercial app release, so please be gentle. I'm happy to work through any queries or problems.
Comments
For anyone who wants to try it, all the commands (add bg image, export, etc.) are in a pop-up menu which is displayed when you do a long press. Creating a new document is via the "files" command.
Simon, if you can figure out a way to do it, I would suggest you use a two-finger tap for undo, three-finger tap for redo, like ProCreate. :-) In fact, ProCreate has lots of great ideas for making an easy to use touch-based graphics app UI.
If nothing else I should make the intro video click-to-play so people have time to see it. (Someone else suggested that and I didn't do it. Listen to your users, dummy!)
Getting a great touch-based UI is hard, and I suspect now that I've released something it's more disruptive for users to make major changes now; better to let them get used to it. (That said, two finger tap and three finger tap are currently unused gestures, so I can easily add them.)
I plan to produce a set of tutorial videos for some of the features, like the file handling. I know software is meant to be intuitive, but I also know in reality it never is, so some explanation would be better than none. The only reason I haven't is that my own iPad is actually too old to run the app! I'll either get a new one with the proceeds or I'll try and borrow one from someone...
I will put this on the list for the next release. John Hudson has already requested a “tap nudge” feature which I’ve added, and I’ve found a bug in the Add Extremes code, so I’m hoping for another release next week.
I would love to test it with a Pencil, but sadly don’t have anything that will support it.