With Inktober now in full swing, we thought it would be a great time for users to take nearly 50% off Linea’s annual subscription price. If you love to draw, sketch, or even just doodle, Linea makes the perfect companion – and now through the end of October, you get half off when you subscribe.
Linea makes sketching fun and easy, and puts your focus on quickly bringing ideas to life. Inktober’s daily drawing prompts are a great, low-key way to explore the app’s features including ZipShapes, texture layers, realistic brushes, and much more. Linea also comes with scores of helpful video tutorials built right into the app or on YouTube to help you get started in a snap.
Here are just a few examples of what folks have created with their iPads, Apple Pencil, and Linea Sketch:
Linea also creates time-lapse recordings as you draw. These short videos are a great way to pull back the curtain and share your creative process on social media, or directly with friends and family.
October is creeping in like a stealthy spider, and with it comes time to embrace our favorite creative tradition – Inktober. This annual event beckons artists, from novice to seasoned pros, to grab their pens, brushes, or Apple Pencils and conjure up something creative each day of the month. It’s the perfect opportunity to unleash your imagination and face the thrilling challenge of turning daily prompts into hauntingly beautiful sketches. Let’s dive into the spooky fun, one eerie doodle at a time!
For the sixth year running, we’re excited to contribute to the Inktober magic by offering a handy set of templates for Linea Sketch, outlining the prompts for all 31 days. This year’s templates are now available for download, with each page clearly labeled by day and prompt, making it easy to stay organized and inspired. Whether you’re aiming for a cohesive set of sketches or just want to keep your daily creations on track, these templates are the perfect tool to keep your creativity sharp and focused throughout the month!
As they are every year, Linea’s Inktober 2024 templates are completely free and easy to set up. Be sure to check out our short video tutorial on how to get the templates into Linea Sketch for the iPad, and you’ll quickly be on your artistic way.
Don’t forget to tag your posts with #LineaSketch on social media! We love sharing our favorite drawings on Linea’s Instagram throughout October, so it’s the perfect chance to shine. Get your screen protectors ready, charge up those Apple Pencils, and prepare to dive into a month of creativity—October will be haunting us before you know it!
Today’s update for our handy digital sketching app for the iPad brings Apple Pencil Pro support, including new shortcut squeeze actions and helpful haptic feedback.
Choose from a range of sketching shortcuts like toggling Clear Ink on or off, switching to the previous drawing tool, cycling through tool sizes and even undoing the last drawing action. Squeeze actions work great and we find they are much less likely to be triggered accidentally than the older double-tap Pencil actions. Once you try it, you’ll be hooked! Linea defaults to your system-wide settings for the squeeze action, but you can choose a different action (or ignore squeezes) in Linea’s in-app settings.
Today’s 4.3.3 update also enables haptic feedback, giving you a satisfying but subtle bump when performing certain tasks in Linea, such as creating ZipShapes, snapping to rotation angles, scaling selections and more.
Linea Sketch 4.3.3 also fixes several important bugs, so it benefits all Linea users, even if you don’t own the new Apple Pencil Pro. Visit Linea’s version history page for the complete list of What’s New, and then head on over to the App Store and grab the FREE download of Linea Sketch.
Sometimes a design project can hit a roadblock and stall out – a point where for some reason it becomes difficult to leap over a certain potential solution in order to arrive at an even better one.
Brushed Pixel came to us for help with this very situation. They had developed a solid starting point for the design of their digital asset management application, Musebox, but enlisted our expertise in taking it further. The concept – a transparent cube containing a small tree – needed to be realized while at the same time ensuring the graphic treatment would work well within the macOS app icon aesthetic.
We decided to take the floral elements of their existing concept art and focus it specifically into a Bonsai cherry tree. These trees are both very beautiful and graphically distinctive at the same time, so it felt like a good choice.
Brushed Pixel wanted a decisive look for the tree trunk itself, so after building the cube container in a macOS style and palette, we started there.
Some quick geometric shapes were suggested how we would populate the branches of the trunk. This graphic could be reduced to get an idea of how the overall design might appear when seen very small. Although the shapes were fun, they weren’t organic enough to be part of a design solution in this case.
Next, a comp was created with further detail, showing more realistic blossoms in place. These were simply one blossom graphic that was transformed and repeated across the design, with a bit of shading added.
The client was pleased but felt the variations in blossom size might work against the realism. We also needed to make sure everything would still read well at small sizes, so a “volume and lighting” comp was roughly painted. This would be our guide in creating the different groupings of blossoms.
We received a green light for this approach, and next adjusted our vectors to replicate it in organic detail.
Creating every unique blossom in vector form was possible but daunting in terms of time and effort. The decision was made to hand-paint these elements, as well as the trunk itself, which would be much faster and would bring even more of an organic feel to the icon. Shading could easily be painted in on a clipping masked overlay in a non-destructive way.
The finished design combines the painted trunk and blossoms with the vector-created transparent box, with lighting and shading effects to suggest that the tree is growing outside of the boundaries of the container.
The public response to the Musebox icon has been fantastic! We’re very happy to have been able to provide what was needed to take the design the final distance to completion in the way that Brushed Pixel originally envisioned. If your team is looking to overcome design challenges with any aspect of your app’s development we’re here to help.
Summer’s here! Stay cool by keeping things simple with Tot, our elegant and streamlined text editor for notes, to-dos, and so much more. Tot’s single window design and simple formatting controls mean no more hunting for that chunk of important text.
Tot’s already FREE on macOS, but now the iOS version is on sale at 50% OFF from now until July 8. Grab it in the App Store or find out more at tot.rocks.
Today’s update to Linea Sketch for the iPad brings a great new feature that makes customizing the appearance of the canvas easier than ever. Simply open the Layers palette, select background options > Custom Background and use the new eyedropper tool to select any color in your drawing.
The canvas changes in real time to reflect your choice. It’s a perfect way to experiment and find just the right background for your sketch. Linea also keeps a running list of recent colors in case you want to revert to an earlier choice at any time.
Linea Sketch 4.3.2 also fixes several important bugs when drawing with Clear Ink, corrects annoying problems with time-lapse recordings and fixes a bug that broke tool options on the iPhone when full Keyboard Access is turned on. Visit Linea’s version history page for the complete list of what’s new, and then head on over to the App Store and grab the FREE download of Linea Sketch.
We released the first version of iPulse on a new operating system called Mac OS X in 2002. Our unobtrusive and stylish system monitor showcased the features of Apple’s new OS and was a hit.
Now, two decades later, we’re happy to announce that groundbreaking product is coming to iOS and iPadOS. And just as it did with macOS, it’s taking a new approach with its user interface to get the job done.
An app that can monitor your device is a great thing to have when you need it, but can get in the way when you don’t. On iOS we solved this problem by using Picture in Picture technology.
iPulse for iOS/iPadOS literally creates a movie of what’s going on inside your device and updates it every second. You can resize the display to fit well on your screen, or slide it out of the way completely. We were careful to use minimal system resources, such as CPU (3% usage) and memory (only 1 MB in size), while making the video.
iPulse provides answers to a lot of questions that were previously hard to figure out:
Why does playing this game use so much battery?
Why is this download taking so long?
Is anything syncing?
How much more video can I record on an external drive?
And more…
The movie that’s playing also generates sound effects: there are alert tones when CPU, network, or storage are exceeded. These sounds can be turned off in the app settings.
iPulse also provides an alternate view of your storage: the display you’re used to seeing in Settings > General > Storage does not include cached data used by iCloud and other apps. iPulse shows how much actual space is being used. It also provides a view of external storage – very handy if you’re recording video and quickly filling an external drive.
You can learn more about iPulse on the product website. The app is a one-time purchase that will run on both your iPhone and iPad. It’s a tool no developer or power user should be without: download it today!
What an amazing ride this past month has been! We appreciate the support of everyone who backed our Project Tapestry Kickstarter as well as those who helped us spread the word far and wide. We couldn’t have reached our goals without your help and we’re so very excited to have an opportunity to bring Project Tapestry to life.
Thanks to you, the project is not only funded, but we even hit our first two stretch goals, which means we’ll be integrating muffling, muting, filtering, search and more, right from the start. We’ve already begun working on design and development during the Kickstarter campaign, so we’re well on our way to making Tapestry a reality. If you backed the campaign keep an eye on your email over the next few weeks and months regarding rewards and various Tapestry related goodness. You won’t want to miss out!
Be sure to follow us here at the Breakroom and on our Mastodon and Threads social media accounts for updates on Tapestry’s progress. Stay tuned – we’re just getting started and there’s a lot more to come.
Our Kickstarter to bring Project Tapestry to life is in the final stretch. The base project was funded within the first few days, but we’d love to add even more features. To do that we need to hit some stretch goals! We’re asking for your help one last time to spread the word or back the project if you can. We also still have a few pixel portraits available to add on to your pledge – get a hand-drawn custom image made just for you!
If you want to learn even more about Tapestry and get the inside story, be sure to check out these great podcasts:
Double Tap – The importance of accessibility in Project Tapestry and more.
Crossed Wires – What goes into developing an app like Tapestry and what’s next.
While the Kickstarter has been up and running, we’ve been busy laying the ground work for development to begin in earnest as soon as the project is funded. We’ve begun wire framing the app’s structure, planning user interactions, coding new plugins, and exploring how Tapestry will sync your data across devices.
Tapestry’s journey is just beginning and with your help, we’re confident we can reach our stretch goals and do our part to support a more open and accessible web. We’re all excited to get to work, so thanks to everyone who has supported the project this month – you’ve helped make Tapestry a reality.
Even in the early days of the Internet, finding and keeping track of the pages you wanted to read could be difficult. Back then, adventurous individuals created their own personal web pages to keep a public log of the latest things happening in their lives. These web logs (aka blogs) spread like wildfire, and soon there were hundreds for every topic you can imagine.
This led to a problem – there were too many of them, posting too often! Enterprising developers created a way to solve this: “Really Simple Syndication” or RSS. A blog that included support for RSS opened up a whole new possibility: apps could automatically check your blog bookmarks and let you know when one of them updated!
Suddenly it was easy to keep track of your friends, family, budding journalists, plucky pundits, and obscure hobbyists. All you needed was an RSS reader and your computer could do the rest for you. By the mid-2000s, this was a popular way to consume content on the web.
However, around this same time was the rise of what we might call the modern social networking era. Websites such as Facebook appeared that were, in a way, a blog of blogs. They made it easier to post updates and find the updates posted by your friends and family. Then came services like Twitter which, while looking a little different from Facebook, followed the same model: you can keep up with everyone as long as everyone comes here!
Soon there was a mass exodus from personal blogs to these centralized services. Companies, services, and individuals stopped posting on their own websites (if they even had one anymore) and started posting on social sites. Posts started disappearing from the web and got locked behind the doors of the giant companies.
While personal blogging never went away, it was greatly diminished as people began to rely on their Twitter timelines to find interesting news or posts. Following blogs or other online sources directly was rare.
And then Twitter imploded.
While plenty of people still use the service (now unfortunately named X), the company essentially closed its doors to outside access. Apps like Twitterrific were unceremoniously banned. Services and outside blogs that used to automatically post status updates were no longer allowed. Policy changes caused people to leave for other services, go back to their old websites, or just shut their Internet browsers never to return.
Almost overnight the online information landscape shattered and became more fragmented. Millions of people scattered in different directions. Links between friends, family, and random acquaintances were severed. It felt as if the hope for a single, convenient way to check for news, updates, and posts from friends on the web was forever doomed.
But we don’t believe the dream is dead.
RSS still exists and is widely deployed. Many other similar technologies and open protocols have joined the web publishing landscape. We can dust off some of the old ways, update them with modern capabilities, and rebuild what we used to have. We don’t need to go back to checking multiple websites or apps all day long – we have computers to help with that. And now it can all be done in your pocket.
Today, a growing number of people are taking back control of their social media presence by returning to blogging or moving away from the closed and centralized products of mega-corporations. Open platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are popular destinations built on standards like ActivityPub and the AT Protocol. These services operate like small towns that communicate with their neighboring small towns to form a larger shared community that no one completely owns – just like the web itself.
Project Tapestry is our way of embracing the return of fragmentation and the messiness of a more open Internet. We’d like to create an app to help you weave a new fabric of diverse services and protocols together into a unified and chronological timeline, so you can see what you want when you want it. We believe that rather than demanding all of our friends and family move to the same gated neighborhoods, it would be better to visit them where they already are.
But, like any community, it’ll take everyone working together to make it great. Check out our Kickstarter for more details on what we’d like to build and how you can help. Pledge what you can and give us a hand spreading the word far and wide. Thanks!
