148Apps Review Summary

Our Rating: ★★★★½ :: Inspirational :: Read Our Full Review >>

iPad art programs continue to grow, and Inspire Pro may be the best yet.

What's New

EXPORT
- Paintings can now be uploaded directly to Facebook and Twitter from within the app.
- Uploads to all social networks are now fully asynchronous so that they can be completed in the background or even all at the same time.
- A new Export menu consolidates all of the options for exporting a painting and conveniently shows the upload progress for each social network.
- Increased reliability of existing Flickr upload functionality.
- Paintings can now be copied onto the iOS clipboard so that they can be pasted into emails or other apps.

PAINTING
- Stab strokes can now be painted by tapping on the canvas. Try them repeatedly with a dry brush for a whole new kind of blending effect.
- The painting engine is now fully optimized for the iPad 2 and its dual-core processor. Brush strokes now render faster and have smoother paths.
- The eye dropper now appears slightly faster when you touch and hold your finger on the screen.

MISCELLANEOUS
- Many performance enhancements throughout the entire user interface.
- Several subtle functional and cosmetic improvements to the user interface.
- Increased reliability, frequency and robustness of automatic background saves so that you will never lose your progress on a painting.
- Several bug fixes.
- Fixed a few compatibility issues with iOS 5.
- Improved memory usage.

App Description

✽ We are very hard at work on FREE update 1.3 to fully support the new iPad's Retina display! ✽

Try Inspire Pro and you will quickly see that it is a painting app like no other! The key feature is the simulation of wet oil paint on canvas, allowing amazing blending effects with five real kinds of brushes. You will be stunned by what you can do with a dry brush!

Inspire Pro is not a Photoshop clone. It does NOT have layers or a large number of brushes. It does, however, have the BEST color blending capability on the App Store. Whether you're a beginner, expert, or somewhere in between, you will enjoy the simplicity and power of Inspire Pro.

★ REVIEWS ★

"Inspire Pro has easily the best color blending system of any painting app I have used. With the Dry Brush toggle button to apply and blend colors together, the workflow is incredibly fast and reminds me of working with oil paints."
- Kyle Lambert (Macworld.com)

"For those who have been waiting for the digital means to replace their canvas - your app is here and you should buy it. Inspire Pro is a powerfully simple platform that will enable artists and doodlers everywhere to create beautiful works."
- Samuel L. Lytle (AppAdvice.com)

"There is no shortage of art apps on Apple’s App Store, but the number of truly good ones is a short list indeed. Add Inspire Pro to the top of any and all of those lists, as it easily bests some of its top competitors."
- Chris Kirby (148Apps.com)

"While the app is easy enough to use for beginners, professional artists will be able to harness Inspire Pro to its fullest and bring their masterpieces to life."
- Gwen Phua (Appmodo.com)

"I have found Inspire Pro to be the most responsive and the most realistic of the apps I have used. My favorite part of the app is blending colors using the dry brush. My wife actually paints on canvas and she also found Inspire Pro’s dry brush to be very realistic."
- Randy Herring (iPhoneLife.com)

✔ FEATURES ✔

Brushes
- Five realistic paint brushes to choose from: a flat brush, round brush, fan brush, palette knife and clumped brush.
- Each brush comes in many different sizes and can be rotated a full 360 degrees.
- Brushes can be loaded with different amounts of paint, including no paint at all for a dry brush.
- Varying amounts of pressure can be used with a dry brush to achieve many different kinds of paint blending effects.
- All brushes can be used as an eraser, controlled by the pressure.
- The bristles of each brush act independently of each other and are completely randomized in every way, producing natural brush strokes that never look exactly the same.

Painting
- Two different canvas sizes to choose from: (768 x 1024) and (1024 x 1024).
- All device orientations are supported, all the time. Switch from portrait to landscape painting with ease.
- 1000 levels of undo and redo are available.
- A non-realistic paint mode adds versatility to the brushes, allowing you to draw and sketch as well as paint.
- Choose any paint color you can dream of right away with the natural color picker.
- You can save your favorite colors while painting with drag and drop.
- The eye dropper tool can be used to select paint colors that are already on the canvas and can be invoked using a tap and hold gesture.
- The canvas can be moved around and zoomed in and out up to 3200%.

Saving, Importing and Exporting
- Paintings are automatically saved in your gallery and easily exported to your Photos.
- Images can be imported from your Photos and positioned, rotated and scaled onto a new canvas.
- Paintings can be sent via email from within the app, attached as uncompressed PNG image files.
- Paintings can be uploaded directly to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
- Paintings can be exported at resolutions of up to 6 times the original in both PNG and JPEG formats using the free Inspire Exporter app available for both Windows and Mac OS.

Visit KiwiPixel.com for more screenshots, videos and paintings in the gallery.

App Screen Shots

(click to enlarge)

App Changes

February 25, 2012 Price Decrease: $7.99 -> $0.99
January 20, 2012 Price Decrease: $7.99 -> $0.99
October 09, 2010 Initial Release

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