We’re continually making incremental updates to Ideate as much as we can and we’re always listening to user feedback. The latest release of Ideate (1.1.4) includes a frequently requested feature: the ability to create and save your own custom Templates.
Creating and saving your own custom Templates is really easy and it all starts with a sketch. That is, anything that you can add to your Sketch, including images, drawing, Clips, etc. can be saved as a Sketch by tapping the Share icon in the top toolbar. All your saved Templates appear under the Templates listing under My Templates and they can also be deleted.
Now, if you ever come across a situation where the default Ideate Templates don’t satisfy, you can bring images in from the web, load an image from your Photo Library, draw or load a Sketch in and save it as a Template.
In addition, we’ve created an Ideate Templates Flickr Group for the community to share Templates they create. Just open the Ideate Templates Flickr Group URL in Safari and then copy the image or save it to your Photo Library and then paste or load the image into Ideate.
A new version of Ideate is now available in the App Store. It includes some small incremental updates:
Added Undo support for moving, rotating, and scaling clips.
Made selecting clips easier.
Pressing and holding on a clips will select it for editing.
Improved zooming and panning behavior.
Added Edit button to delete sketches.
Improved stability of saving files.
Fixes issue that could have corrupted a saved sketch.
Improved memory use when changing sketches.
While these are small updates, they are paving the way for some more significant improvements to Ideate, including additional features powered by some great user feedback.
We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback on how people have been using Ideate and one commonly requested feature is the ability to create and save custom templates. While the feature is on our roadmap, I wanted to walk through how you can use images in Ideate in the mean time.
Basically, you can bring in an image from your Photo Library or copy/paste an image from the web, email, etc. Once you load the image into Ideate you can sketch on it just like a Template or Clip and edit it like a Clip too. Here’s a video that walks through these features.
Since releasing Ideate last Thursday, we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback on how people are using the application. Our goal is to highlight different features, current and future, of the application as much as possible.
Here’s a video on one of the current features, called Clips. Clips can be used to add inspiration, reference and additional elements to your sketch to help you communicate your ideas more clearly. They can also help with annotation.
We always welcome feedback and suggestions on current features and where you think this application should go. Give us a shout
We are thrilled to announce that the Ideate iPad application made it into the App Store just in time for the iPad launch. While iPads are still on the way, you can purchase the app now for $3.99.
Ideate is a sketching application meant to help people capture and share their ideas. The idea for the application was born out of EffectiveUI based on sketching practices used to develop and communicate ideas. EffectiveUI already has its own custom sketchpads printed, so taking that idea into the digital world just made sense.
The application is meant to be used for sketching quickly and easily. Features include:
Page Templates – Used as starting points to add context to a sketch. This might be a fashion model, browser chrome, a sports field, etc.
Clips – These are a variety of images used to enhance a sketch. Images from your Photo Library and the web can be brought in as well.
Sharing – Sketches can be easily shared via email, Flickr and more.
Pens – Create and use custom pens to bring your sketch to like.
Eco-friendly – Save a tree and eliminate stacks of paper. There’s no paper here, just an iPad.
Plenty more coming soon.
While in development we talked about the idea for Ideate with other people, like doctors, teachers and architects. After those conversations we couldn’t help but support other use cases besides User Interface Design. We made custom Page Templates and Clips for a variety of uses, like Physicians, Fashion Designers, Landscape Architects, Teachers, Animators and more.
If you decide to purchase Ideate be sure to join the Ideate Flickr Group and show off how you use the application or follow @ideateapp on Twitter to hear about upcoming developments.