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Adobe's Project Mighty Input Tools Look Pretty Awesome

By Rain Noe - May 9, 2013

in UX

Color me impressed! I figured the next generation of designer-relevant input devices would come from Apple or Wacom, but surprise—it's Adobe. The software giant is venturing into hardware, and their resultant Project Mighty looks pretty damn wicked so far.

The Adobe Mighty Pen is designed for sketching on tablets, and it's got at least two brilliant features integrated with their drawing app: Since the screen can distinguish between the pen's nib and your mitts, you can draw with the pen, then erase with your finger. No more having to click a submenu to change the tool. And when you do need a submenu, you click a button on the pen itself to make it appear on-screen.

The truly awesome device, however, is the pen's Napoleon Ruler. Adobe's VP of Product Experience Michael Gough was trained as an architect, and wanted to bring the efficacy of sketching with a secondary guiding tool--like we all once did with our assortment of plastic triangles, French curves and the like--to the tablet experience. What the Napoleon does is so simple and brilliant, you've just got to see it for yourself:

Presumably they're still working out the kinks, as the release date is TBD.

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Alex

9 years ago

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Terrible, a complete dumbing down of important features and putting them onto a crappy consumer tablet format. I pray this isnt the direction Adobe is going
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Slinger

9 years ago

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@Slippyfish: The person sitting next to me at the studio. And I am not working at Adobe...

You may guess ;)
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Ralph Tullie

9 years ago

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Sounds like they are moving in the right direction. I still love to sketch on paper, but think it would be great to be able to achieve the same amount of freedom and looseness on a tablet.....without any compromises.
Eric, I agree - while watching the video, I kept thinking "move your hand"...or "I wish I could see what he was doing"....!
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Eric

9 years ago

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Ugh, leave it to an architect to add a ruler to the equation....designers don't use them for the most part because we can draw! I do like some of the concepts he talked about, but the whole proprietary renting cloud thing makes me sick. I have to agree with SFPaul.
I would like to see what he is doing but the video work is so horribly bad that I can't see what he is doing! Seriously, someone thought that was a good video where you couldn't see a bunch of the features because they were too lazy top get a second angle or move the camera.
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dcdesign

9 years ago

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Wacom is still better. This and the Jot kinda leave out the levels of pressure sensitivity in their excitement to launch a new problem solver to the Pressure v.s. Touch screen worlds. Plus, you can see that if he moves to fast, the lines have to catch up, that would be frustrating. Hoping that Wacom is moving quickly to give us something, while Apple is starting to reel. AND...."RENT" my programs, ya, that's natural. I'll take an outdated version of a program before I have to make monthly payments just to draw....that's where Pen and Paper still Rule.
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slippyfish

9 years ago

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Who did the ID?
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SFPaul

9 years ago

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So it appears that no part of the hand can touch the tablet when you're using the pen...how unnatural is that?
And since I'm pissed at Adobe now for this rent only cloud concept of theirs. Is this pen going to be sold or only rented to the user?
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Andrew

9 years ago

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What a great use of multi-touch technology! Besides gestural interfaces and replacing digital buttons with tactile ones, are there any other examples of multi-touch devices being used with similar hardware?
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