FiftyThree, maker of the fine-art drawing app Paper and its accompanying iPad stylus ‘Pencil’ unveiled an online platform accessible within the app called Mix. This third phase of the company saw it entering the real of cloud collaboration, allowing its users to literally drawn, sketch and re-mix each-other’s creatives works.
Today Mix stops being an invite-only platform and is throwing open its doors to all and sundry. Announcing the move at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, founder Georg Petschnigg said the closed beta had already seen people from 193 countries use the app and collaborative creatively.
Mix allows users to draw whatever they want and then for others to take that drawing an add to it in some way — just go plain nuts with the basic idea. Everything is covered by Creative Commons licensing, to ensure nice behaviour. It providers a series of templates, outlines, and tutorials for users and collaboration tools to openly share projects, allowing the remixing – or should we say re-drawing – to take place. FiftyThree created the platform and templates to remove the main barrier for users to using the app: lack of confidence around being creative.
In addition users of the Paper app — you need to hit update on the App to get the 2.02 version — will see a number of pretty revolutionary changes to how the app responds to the Pencil device (a hollowed-out piece of Walnut wood from Wisconsin) which carries Bluetooth in to create a very fine-art experience.
New features include ‘Surface pressure’ allowing far greater drawing control, shading and fine erasing.
We think this is, frankly, the kind of thing David Hockney, who has moved his incredible art to the iPad in recent time, would like to hear about. Can someone tell him? Thanks.