So you’ve picked up a shiny new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1
tablet (perhaps after reading our comprehensive review), and are itching
to put the pressure-sensitive S Pen to good use. Or maybe you’re a Galaxy Note user, or are eyeing the Galaxy
Note II, and want to make the most of Samsung’s stylus. Well, I’ve got
good news, and bad news: Samsung’s stylus will generally prove useful
wherever a bit of precision might come in handy, but there aren’t very
many apps that are actually designed with the pen in mind.
Unsurprisingly enough, apps geared towards those of us with a
creative mind shine, and you’ll find plenty of apps for idle sketching
and touching up photos. There are options for getting things done too,
whether you’re taking notes in a meeting or reading documents on the go.
There are a few gems—for work and play—lurking across Google’s Play
Store and Samsung’s own app market; let’s take a look at a few of them.
iAnnotate PDF Of Galaxy
Click to view the full screen.
The cleverly titled iAnnotate PDF does what it says on the tin: It
loads PDFs saved onto your device, and lets you highlight text, scribble
in the margins, and leave text comments. Simplicity is a strong point,
and the app slides through even the heftiest files with ease. Truth be
told I can’t imagine using the app without a stylus; fingers are just
too clunky for actions like highlighting lines of text.
The stylus lends a substantial amount of precision, but getting
around the app can prove to be a bit clunky. Even the simplest apps
recognize pinch and panning functions, but iAnnotate PDF will turn every
gesture or stroke into markings on the page unless you disable all
editing tools. Reading and note-taking became fits of starts and stops,
as I scribbled a few notes, shut the pen tool off, scrolled a few lines
on the page, then re-enabled the pen to scribble some more. That might
seem like a small oversight, but it becomes grating if you’re an
especially prolific note-taker.
The highlighting tool works as expected, coloring any text you
select. It’s a bit clunky—the S Pen offers a bit of extra precision—but
I’d occasionally slip and highlight entire paragraphs with a flick. It’s
easy enough to undo, but a highlighter that was freeform and not based
on text-selection would’ve been a bit more useful.
I’ve admittedly been spoiled by iOS’s phenomenal GoodReader, which
tackles all of the issues I’ve mentioned here with aplomb, despite the
lack of native stylus support on iOS devices. iAnnotate PDF began life
as an iOS app, and its Apple-incarnation is considerably better
equipped, offering connectivity with cloud services like iCloud and
Dropbox. The Android version is currently free, with more updates to
bring it up to par with its iOS sibling to come soon.
Kno Textbooks Of Galaxy
Remember the Kno? The gargantuan, dual-screen device was designed to
be a panacea for the physically-overburdened student, replacing bulky
textbooks with digital e-books. While the device never took off, Kno has
re-emerged in app form withTextbooks for the iPad and Galaxy Note 10.1.
The premise is the same: You’ll be able to rent or purchase textbooks
(in ebook form) or load up PDFs to read and annotate.
There are some clever decisions here that significantly improve the
note-taking experience. Documents can be grouped by classes and terms,
keeping things organized based on your course-load. The app works well
with a finger, but the pen-based edit tools are even better with the S
Pen; they’re freeform, functioning much like their real world
counterparts. Actions like underlining text can feel a bit kludgy to
start but it’s ultimately refreshing, lowering the barrier to entry by
emulating the feel of scribbling in physical margins. This works
extremely well for highlighting and erasing, in contrast to iAnnotate
PDF’s reliance on text selection or deleting entire swaths of notes to
fix a typo. If you’d rather not reach for a stylus, you can select a
chunk of text and highlight it manually.
There are some caveats, however: Notes written with the stylus only
appear when you’re in edit mode; this makes a page easier to read, but
was a bit annoying when I was scanning through PDFs and wondering where
all of my scribbles went. While I wouldn’t call Textbooks sluggish,
there’s a noticeable bit of lag while swiping through pages in PDFs or
on the textbook samples the app provides. And then there’s pricing: the
app is free, but the textbooks are, to my mind, ludicrously expensive.
College textbooks have always been pricey, but when you spend over a
hundred dollars on a chunky textbook, it’s a physical object that’s
yours forever (or until you sell it for a fraction of what it cost you).
The list price of the app’s ebooks are on par with their physical
counterparts, though Kno’s offerings are typically 6-month rentals that
cut the price in half. A $35 eTextbook that expires in 6-months could
prove to be a hard sell.
Photoshop Touch Of Galaxy
We reviewed Adobe’s Photoshop Touch for Android app last year, and
were generally impressed with how well it tackled image editing on a
tablet. The primary sticking point was an altogether unsurprising one:
our fingers just aren’t quite dexterous enough for serious editing work.
To that end Adobe also baked in stylus support, including support for
pressure sensitivity. When coupled with the S Pen—and properly
configured—it made for a more fleshed out editing experience.
Photoshop Touch’s brushes will let you decide if applying pressure to
the stylus will control brush size, opacity, or both. You’ll need to
configure each brush individually, which can be a bit tedious if you’d
like to just jump into editing things. I’m absolutely hopeless at any
sort of artistic endeavor, but the S Pen lends a convincing level of
precision to edits, touchups, and simple sketches. Samsung claims the
tablet offers 1024 levels of sensitivity, and while my hands probably
aren’t steady enough to eke out that much precision, there was an
appreciable difference between strokes as I adjusted the amount of
pressure I placed on the stylus. Hovering the stylus over the “canvas”
gives you an approximation of where your cursor is, which proved useful
for making smaller adjustments. This is no Wacom tablet, but the
experience was snappy enough to make for a satisfying experience.
Photoshop Touch will set you back $10 and isn’t compatible with the
Samsung Galaxy Note or Note II, but there are plenty of other photo
editing options that will work across devices.
Skitch Of Galaxy
Skitch is a venerable image annotation app that made its way to iOS
and Android devices last year. Its utility lies in its simplicity: the
toolset is limited, consisting of a few shapes, some bright pastel
colors, and cropping tools. Fire it up, snap a photo (or load one from
Android’s gallery app), and you’re ready to add Skitch’s iconic arrows, a
few lines of text, or crop the image you’ve selected and save it to
your device’s SD card or internal memory, share it to social networks,
or toss it into your Evernote notebook. Elements you’ve added can be
resized with a pinch or rotated with a twist. Skitch offers rudimentary
drawing tools, designed with your finger in mind: color options are
limited, and while you can adjust the brush’s size there’s no accounting
for pressure sensitivity. There’s also no eraser, though you can undo
the last few strokes you made and delete individual elements.
While this may all sound constricting, Skitch’s no-frills design
results in an app that’s lightning fast, accomplishing exactly what you
need it to without it getting in your way. Skitch boasts handy sharing
options, making it an ideal tool for scrawling quick notes or doodles.
The app works well on both the Note and the Note 10.1, though Skitch’s
barebones functionality means the tablet’s extra real-estate doesn’t add
much. Truth be told I preferred using the phone app, snapping a photo,
making a few quick edits, and tossing it into an email or onto a social
network while shuffling about my apartment or San Francisco. There’s no
functionality that’s specific to the S Pen (a common theme across most
of these apps), but I enjoyed the significantly improved precision that
the stylus offers over using a finger. I did turn off Skitch’s
pencil-smoothing feature, which automatically straightens out lines
you’ve sketched; the extra precision afforded by the S Pen makes it a
bit superfluous. Skitch is completely free to use, though you’ll get a
bit more out of the experience if you sign up for a (free)Evernote
account.
Sketchbook Pro Of Galaxy
Sketchbook Pro brings the desktop app’s powerful sketching prowess to
tablet devices, and it really shines on the Galaxy Note 10.1. The app’s
simple interface belies a complex toolset that can be a little daunting
for the uninitiated—a camp I find myself firmly nestled in. That said,
the concise tutorial shows you everything you need to know. Tap the
small circle that sits on the lower edge of the screen to bring up the
app’s interface and the radial puck menu, which displays all of the
features Sketchbook Pro has to offer. There are… a lot. My favorites are
the ones that make up for my unsteady hands, like the ruler that turns
my scrawls into orderly lines and smooth curves.
Photoshop Touch will be your best bet for proper image editing, but
Sketchbook Pro will allow you to import images saved onto your device or
from the Android gallery, which includes items saved onto a Picasa
account. Sketchbook Pro also offers support for layers, a powerful
feature for budding artists. The app will take advantage of the Galaxy
Note and Note 10.1 stylus’s rudimentary pressure sensitivity, offering
marginal control over the opacity and brush size depending on how much
pressure you apply. I’m still not entirely sold on the S Pen’s supposed
1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, but the effect is appreciable here.
Sketchbook Pro is designed for tablet devices, and will set you back
$5. Galaxy Note users will want to pick up Sketchbook Mobile ($2), which
distills the larger app’s powerful tools and rendering engine into a
size that’s a bit more palm-friendly.
Stylus gaming Of Galaxy
Can’t forget the games! While there aren’t many options that are
expressly designed with a stylus in mind, many simply lend themselves to
the extra precision that a stylus affords. Consider Angry Birds:
pulling back on the slingshot with your finger isn’t an especially
arduous process, but I found the action quite a bit more comfortable
while using the S Pen on the Galaxy Note 10.1. Fruit Ninja ($1.22)
offers similar benefits, with the S Pen greatly enhancing my
fruit-slicing escapades. And, if there was ever a game that seemed ideal
for a stylus, it’s Zynga’s Draw Something ($3). The game pits two
players against each other in a sketching competition, and having a
proper writing utensil beats using your fingers, hands down. The S Pen
isn’t in any way optimized for the game so you won’t be able to take
advantage of pressure sensitivity or the like, but I found my drawings
turned out noticeably better, thanks to the natural feel of the stylus
and tablet or phone in hand. You can find all three of these games on
the Google Play Store, and they all offer free, ad supported versions.
[ Source :- Techhive ]
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