Procreate Dreams
procreate.com
procreate.com
As soon as this was announced I instantly sent it to all my artist and animator friends, I think this is going to be a wildly popular app.
They've done some huge updates over the last 5 years and not even charged for a new version.
Is our best option to pay for a screen replacement? It’ll be hundreds of dollars, but that’s preferable to losing their procreate catalog.
I already lost some art of theirs when they were playing around on my iPad, which I was bummed about, so I’m not eager to repeat that experience.
EDIT: sorry, I should’ve posted this as a top level comment. I didn’t mean to intrude. I was just trying to salvage a year or so of work. Thank you everyone for your wonderful ideas.
Note: iPads only support USB-C displays that operate in "DisplayPort over USBC" mode, not "HDMI over USBC" mode (which requires more active circuitry), so only some USBC monitors will work. If you're worried, I suggest grabbing a DisplayPort-to-USBC dongle and plug it into the iPad that way.
See here for the difference: https://hackaday.com/2023/01/17/all-about-usb-c-high-speed-i...
And thank you HN. You’ve helped salvage an artist’s work. Hopefully procreate will back up their art to iCloud one day.
https://doncorgi.com/blog/procreate-icloud-backup/
I think you can see the last backed-up day (but not list of apps for other devices) somewhere on iCloud.com or in settings on some other iPhone/iPad on their account. Alternatively, you could try restoring to a new/temporary old iPad.
The external monitor + keyboard suggestions in sibling comments could be combined with this advice (or other backup procedures in the article I linked), assuming backup is disabled.
Thank you for pointing that out.
For me, Procreate is a killer app. It's the reason I bought my iPad. IMHO, the $450 or so that it costs to get an iPad + Pencil + Procreate is well worth it.
I don't understand how they can make something as good as Procreate and sell it for $15.
Existing users will buy the new app. But will new users need to buy both, or only this one?
At $15, just about every Apple Pencil owner buys it. The one app basically justifies the existence of the Pencil. If it was a subscription, it'd have vastly fewer users. And Pencil sales would probably be a fair bit lower, too.
And, yes, I'd never buy a subscription because it's just not a daily driver application (for me).
They get [kids] on the brushes and other DLC add-ons.
Because they knew it was that good. They also had first mover advantage. They probably said, "Well, if even 1% of everyone with an iPad buys our app…" and actually knew that would happen. They rock.
TFA: Available November 22
On first view of the website, I read that as November '22, so I thought I was late to the party. After reading your "at release" I see it is Nov 22, (assuming 2023) at this point.
Am I over thinking this could be clearer?
I was sold at "No subscriptions". I'm buying this November 22 and putting a day off in my calendar.
Not to go off on too much of a tangent but thinking about animation on my iPad I was suddenly reminded of one of my favorite “toys” (tools?) from my childhood, The Etcha Sketch Animator:
https://the80sand90s.com/articles/etch-a-sketch-animator?for...
Even though I haven’t had a particular urge to get back into animation again, I think I’m going to have to buy this just to support this business and as a thank-you for 13 years of free updates to Procreate. And to do a little flipbooking for fun.
$2.99 would have been easily swallowable.
[1] https://thedesignest.net/interview-james-cuda-procreate/
I’m guessing any screw tightening will come when Adobe (just a guess) eventually buys it for a lot of money and the company has to raise prices and move to a subscription model to service the debt.
I've had a great experience animating in Callipeg with both cell animation and transform animation.
It is true though that Procreate is the gold standard for drawing apps, and the drawing functionality in Callipeg isn't as polished- So I will be tempted to switch to this new app for animation, if they can match the drawing experience from the core Procreate product.
Even if this app is problematic from a cross-platform or usability standpoint, the fact that people are making real investments in re-thinking our design tools for different contexts is very exciting. I can't wait until we get some better audio, video, drawing, and animation apps built with mobile in mind from the ground-up that AREN'T indie silos of interactive design and file formats. I know people will be itchy to give me some recommendations here, but I'm cynical about it because everything I've seen, so far, is "neat but not for team/studio production" for some reason or another. So it's nice to see something that is absolutely certain about how these things actually get used in the industries, and is willing to strike a new path, while focusing on what is required for industry interoperability.
Once other people start picking up on this idea, we might get some really awesome new ways for people without specific domain knowledge to be as creative in their output as they are in their own heads. That will be pretty awesome, I think!
What do you mean by this?
Basically - even if all those things are locked down, instead of open like they SHOULD* be, it's still a net positive.
*that's my editorializing; all apps SHOULD be web apps (or at least delivered without installation), unless there's some reason you simply can't get the performance you need out of web assembly (often the case, today; hopefully not often true in the future).
I'm considering performance to be more than just UI responsiveness. I include CPU, battery, network, and memory usage.
Jesus god, no. I like having excellent accessibility features that actually work and not seeing my battery get mugged and left for dead.
Like our main compositing tool on the web - Canvas is basically Quartz, which I love for that reason but there's a _huge_ amount of power that you get from native Toolkits that have been developed in the intervening years.
As far as experimental stuff, I'm a very big fan of Makepad's 3D rendering context even for forms. Coming from a games background, I prefer the shader model to most other UI implementations. Especially vector based drawing; that stuff is so much harder to deal with. I'm very happy with what I can achieve in CSS, these days, but it's just a million times easier to do any of it with a some planes and a shader. Give me beziers and pixels over box models and anchors any day.
I know there aren't a lot of public examples of any of that, right now, so it's hard to be inclusive of that kind of thing when considering 'web apps'. Maybe I'm premature in being so loose with the term. But I do think this stuff is closer than a lot of people realize.
I don't hold anyone to any moral obligation; I just speak freely about what I find unsavory. I want applications delivered to me through a url, negotiating with my environment for permissions based on what I allow, and performing for me with native capabilities, including performance, integration, and offline functionality. Return on investment notwithstanding, it's often possible to achieve these goals with modern technology. It's not always, and there are cases where we absolutely should not prioritize these things. Outliers highlighting the example and whatnot.
But, all of that aside, I made a specific point to say that even if my apparently sky-high standards are not satisfied, the product is still great. I don't feel like I was being negative. I'm not sure why that implies a moral issue, to you, but I'm sorry for being unclear!
I also really like really smooth and intuitive interfaces, the iPad in particular is extremely natural (albeit at the things it’s designed to do well.)
Inside I’m kind of nerding out at the combination of my two loves, I have zero artistic talent, but I will buy this immediately. Maybe I can learn to have ~some artistic talent.
From there, it’s just a matter of acting and experience
I used to do 2D animation, and this is what so many people have been hoping Toon Boom would release instead of their half hearted approaches to tablet (not iPad strictly) interfaces in the past.
I think this will be really well received, though given the more niche skillset needed, I doubt it'll be as popular as regular ProCreate
and only $20? That's just a killer value proposition. Competing commercial apps are so much more expensive, and free apps leave a lot to desire for iPad interaction.
I know a ton of artists who bought an iPad Air or Pro just for ProCreate. I can see a lot of my animator friends doing the same now too for this.
This landing page isn't about that.
Not for me, but my eldest picked up procreate recently and was immediately able to create all sorts of amazing things. She’s even been able to create some great animations, but this makes procreate look like a toy in that regard.
Feels a lot like ableton live with the way they’ve been able to reinject the playfulness into creating on a screen. Love it.
Looking forward to give a try.
The only problem is Procreate have set their price way too low. There's no way I'd want to start working on something as grand as Procreate and then sell it for $15.
Infinite Painter and Hipaint(procreate clone) are really the only android alternatives to what procreate is going for.
Samsung has really great products. How many people are buying that instead of an iPad? So many of my Android using friends will have an iPad.
Google let Android on tablets languish for years and the result is they’re such a small part of the marketplace that very few app developers can justify the return on investment.
And then even from those few Android tablets, how many have a good pen outside of Samsung?
It’s a niche of a niche of a niche to target
People are buying android tablets and there are lots of downloads for the apps that do exist on Android.
"Market Share" would be a silly reason not to expand. The market is evidently there. The only valid reasons are not having the capital to expand or having too small a team. Neither of which really apply to Procreate. Even procreate don't give the market share excuse when asked. It's not a valid one.
People are buying android tablets. I'm not arguing that. But what percent of that tablet market has a pen they can target, and has consistent hardware support for everything else like graphics APIs?
Having done mobile dev, even across Samsung devices you have high variance in Vulkan support and bugs for example. Deploying even Unreal Engine or Unity games can be a minefield of compatibility testing.
It's lots of little and big things IMHO that often make it a difficult ROI to swallow.
However, those numbers are not about deployed market share but about market share of shipments. Related numbers, certainly, but not the same.
The most capable drawing software on Android right now is probably Clip Studio Paint, which I think has some sort of limited exclusivity arrangement with Samsung (presuming that they paid for the port), as some android-specific features seemed to have a couple of months of Samsung exclusivity before being opened up to all devices.
No arguing the situation sucks, however.
I mean, at least go for CamelCase ... ProCreate is sort of clear (and said in its own way). Procreate is ... weird.
https://twitter.com/kunchevsky/status/1697439424311853252
Of course, I could also see edge cases where the simple & intuitive get in the way of what the artist actually wants to do. Will be interesting to see how it pans out in practice.
Or is the app using vision models to infer that he is trying to animate wings specifically and just assume the perspective needed and do the coloring on the opposite side for him?
From a technical standpoint the ladder would be very cool, but I could see how it could be troublesome for artists trying to do "real animation".
2) The video is cutting out the drawing of other frames after the first of each layer.
That's just the basic animation flow in Procreate (frame by frame).
"Oh man, procreate AI?" "oh ... wait, this is kinda neat"
I know two professional artists who both hated the concept of AI image generators. But since Photoshop added Generative Fill, I know both have enjoyed using it, and I’ve not heard another complaint since.
I’d bet Procreate add AI capabilities sooner or later. Once you’ve tried it in Photoshop, it’s impossible to look back.
The other example that comes to mind for a very polished and well loved app is Koala (a great audio sampler/sequencer) [0], which sells for a flat $4.99.
Subscriptions have advantages of course, such as providing developers with a more sustained income vs one time purchases which necessarily mean a diminishing hourly rate when you take into account indefinite support.
But still. I'm hopeful.
Organic brushes (natural media like oil and watercolor behavior, not just controls like jitter) are still MIA, for example. And several more things.
And Dreams is more of a diversion. Only a small fraction of users would be interested in animation.
But they of course know that they will get those $19.99 anyway, out of curiosity, even if most Procreate users are going to rarely or never really use Dreams.
Subscriptions can be good!
I only have one gripe: I wish project management in procreate was more robust. Even stacks within stacks would be an improvement. But right now my projects are a scattered mess and there's nothing I can do.
ToonSquid does a really cool thing where their flashy marketing video turns out to be a demo project in the app you can look at and edit. Really good for getting underway quickly.
I was curious myself so I want back and looked at the early submissions and it looks like submission #6 was the first one similar to this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6
That's from October 2006, which is 5 years before you made your account.
The link here is literally just a video advertising the pre-sale of some tablet app that isn't even coming out for a two and a half months. It's not open source, nor even available on open platforms. It has nothing to do with code, or security, or anything even mildly development related. It also isn't "news" in any sense of the word. Not even a press release saying what the app is, just a flashy ad trying to get you to pre-order some app.
Futhermore, it was the #1 link on the site when I made my post, which feels a lot like someone paid to have their advertisement pinned to the top of the site.
There are constantly links to products posted on this site without them being anything more than the marketing site. Heck, there's Show HN which sometimes features similar content, but even more explicitly posts that serve as advertisements.