Most advance content creators may dismiss this as “not that useful or interesting,” but yesterday while struggling with a clothing template I went looking for a sort of “drawing app” that might be useful for making things or editing templates for Second Life.

Actually, I’d already been playing with an iPad app called “Art Studio” that enabled me to create some quite nice looking fabric textures very easily, just in the course of doodling around and playing with some of the settings and filters. I’d bought a simple stylus (not one of the fancy artist’s pressure sensitive ones) and have been enjoying playing with that, too. Art Studio has a lot of goodies; the free version is quite good and even has layers and filters, and the paid version (I think, bought it a while ago) doesn’t have ads and does have the ability to add a lot of extra brushes.

But what I was really thinking about recently was somehow using the iPad as a drawing pad or tablet for my main PC. I quickly found many references to an app called “Air Display,” but the cost (almost $10USD) put me off for a week or more.

Finally, yesterday I decided to just see what it was about, and within a few minutes, wa-la! Not only was I able to slide any open window off of my PC and onto my iPad, I was working in GIMP on a clothing template, with the stylus as the controller.

If you have an iPad already, and have a spare $20 or so (the stylus only set me back $10 as well) you might be amused by what you can do. I was able to draw, write, and work with the GIMP interface.

I suppose I might be able to log on to Second Life – as a curiousity, it would be funny to do that. The keyboard stays active as an input device, and so does the mouse. However, it might be quite useful if you’re in the sort of class inworld where the instructor puts something up on a join.me or Google Docs display while inworld, as the iPad works very well as a seoncd monitor. There’s apparently a mirror mode, too.

In any case, it was fun to play with, and made working with hand-drawn selectins in GIMP more enjoyable than they are with my mouse, which is sometimes rather jerky and stiff for some kinds of operations.

Perhaps somebody with a lot more creative talent might find it interesting to play with; I can definitely say it’s easy to set up (download free drivers on your desktop and install, then install the paid app on the iPad). I’ve made 4 or 5 interesting and unique fabric textures already, and Dhughan was working yesterday on an actual piece of clothing (a rather colorful vest with Art Nouveau-style phoenix figures). He may be branching out into a bit of menswear before too long. It all comes of this playing around with apps and “drawrings” and such; it’s probably just a passing fad but you never know.
Link: Air Display: iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac or Windows PC as an external monitor