Adobe Ideas on Android..sucks

Just got Adobe Ideas (Adobe's vector drawing tool for tabs)from the app market. Drawing with it was amazing.. up until i discovered a few negatives.


note: the image above from the Android Market page is an ipad..

First thing to notice is the lack of brushes, beizier, pen etc.. that are the staple of artists who use adobe vector apps illustrator and flash.. however these you can actually manage without. seriously, i was surprised at how quickly i adapted.

However they also managed to omit a "move" or "transform" tool :down: ! and no layers(you get one image layer and one vector layer). Are you kidding me? Autodesk Sketchbook which is a raster app lets you move/transform layers and the free version even comes with 3 layers.. Idea comes with one vector layer and one "photo" layer. On ios you get the option to "buy" additional layers(you get 9)

anyway heres what i managed to do..
loaded an image from gallery pretty easily


thankfully theres a really nice stroke width slider that lets you do fat and fine lines rather easily


since its all vector, you can have pretty much infinite levels of zoom.. allowing for really detailed work..





Up to this point however i could accept that it was a somewhat worthy purchase. :ko:

Then everything changed... first, you can't export as any format.. not on android anyway.. when i tried to download and open the files on my pc.. i find out i can download via the Adobe Creative Cloud..however i can't edit it because- they failed to mention that only illustrator CS5 can open the format(with a plugin) none of the older versions of illustrator can. why they couldnt just stick to the .ai format i can't understand. By the way the ios version can export to editable pdf.. which lets you edit the vectors in most older versions of illustrator. :irked:

I thought i'd pay a visit to the Adobe ideas pages and blog, to get some android related answers.. and lo and behold.. theyre just brimming with apple love.
have a look :bomb:

so anyway i thought i'd just go get a refund.. then decided to just wait for it to get better.. and in the meantime am now going to get a trialpiratedversion of Illustrator CS5.

Bottom line: i do enjoy drawing vectors on my tab. Won't recommend this to any of the illustrators and artists i know though.

UPDATE: have made a few suggestions on the Adobe forums, please vote for them if you feel like it. -forum link


UPDATE(24th Nov 2012): Have done a follow up post, where i detail the entire process of getting the vector file into Illustrator on your desktop.. and what the vectors look like there. Click here to read that post.

UPDATE (Aug2013)Adobe has withdrawn the Ideas app from the Android Play Store. They will only be developing the IOS versions for now. You can still however google and download the apk file(from alternate sources) and manually install it. For an alternative that is actually a lot better, check out my comparison of Ideas with Infinite Design here.