Essential IOS apps

Got a shiny iPad for  the start of term? And now you want to justify spending all that student load on the stupid thing! Now you have all the stars on Angry Birds, maybe its time to get somehting of use done on it. Well never fear, I've done alot of the grafting for you and found a few great apps that might make for interesting experimentation with input technologies, and digital machining from lasers, to 3D printers!

Enjoi ;)



This app resembles a scriptographer script 'sketchy structures'. It allows for prety lines to be drawn whislt joining lines are automatically rendered - This gives spiderweb style drawings and the samples people have done looks rather inspired. Made by the same people who brought us sketch chair.



If there was ever an advertisment for mind altering drugs - this would be it! Look no further than Forge of Neon! This thing is super cool and a great way of spending time  - it allows you to change the colours, the patterns, the animations and their speeds...take a screenshot and email yourself a PDF, would make for a super cool engraved image, milled relief or printed tile!




Netfabb Mobile allows you to carry and view .STL files around withyou on iOS devices, it also has a feature to upload to Netfabb Cloud, a service that will analise and fix your 3d model ready for printing. Handy i suppose, but use along side their desktop counterparts.



Adobe Ideas, A neat little sketching tool, free of charge and allows for simple sharing of drawings, no idea how people manage to draw with these things but sample files looks hawt!!I use this app often thanks to its clen user interface, despite me being useless at drawing with it!



I got an email with a DXF attachment, this worked great to see what the client was talking about - not to bad!



For the couple of pounds this app costs it works pretty well, giving anohter function to that door stop you just brought! It makes a neat little second monitor to your primay machine over wifi - which menas you can wander around the house desktop in hand! I use it and the responce is good, it is the only way to get flash running on your iPad device!



iDesign is a mobile vector based drawing app, with those cool little magnifiers when you hold down your finger. This means you are actually able to join two lines together!! Again, the sample images look great so I guess with some patience they to could produce some wonderouse vectors!



Isculpt 3Dlooks pretty freakin awsome! no export yet though, but as its autodesk I imagin development will continue nicely. Will update when they do. Must have app.



Autocad something or other - simple viewer and some editiing toold - dont know caus cad is rubbish!!!


iDough - This was king untill autodesk came and pissed all over it! Shame really - it does still offer exports which is great! and after 3 sessions I had something that resembled a face - so its pretty intuative and again, the samples on the app store looked incrediable so i dont doubt its capabilities. As I said, you can export as an OBJ so 3D printing is definiatly something you can try!


 Harmonius does some pretty neat stuff - drawing with repeat patterns and allows for export as a PDF which means this should be a great toy to play with if you want to engrave some of your outcomes!

Hellow Flower looks good, all be it quite specific as to what it does. If you want to 3D print a flower, then it's the app for you! Either way, its a good way to play with 3D geometry, you can edit several things about the flower - such as amount of petels, their size, spread etc, and once you have done that - you can export them as an OBJ and get some further modelling done in Maya, 3DS Max or Zbrush!
 This is a pants app - wouldnt bother!

Of course, this list isn't the be all and end all of iPAd apps that could be used with digitial machines - as they're being developed alot, and often. If something catches your eye, be sure to ping me with a link!

Untill next time,

Have fun!!