Could Apple be working on their own answer to Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator: a sophisticated program for professionals doing photo manipulation and digital illustrating? If a new patent is anything to go by, yes, and it won’t just be a major innovation on the Mac… it will work on the iPad as well.
The patent, published today by the U.S. Patent Office, is complicated, but this seems to be the jist: Apple is patenting a way in which someone using an illustrator of digital image editing program can adjust the settings of the current tool they are using — such as a brush’s size or opacity — by using gestures at or near that tool, which would then visually change the tool to represent the changes.
You would also be able to change tools with gestures. And these gestures would work using a mouse, a trackpad or a touchscreen. There’s a lot more to this patent, so you should read more about it here.
Apple patents don’t always — or even usually — end up in real world products, but they are useful in giving us an idea of the products and directions Apple is thinking about. Certianly, the idea of an Apple-made Photoshop or Illustrator-like app is exciting, especially if it launches on both the Mac and the iPad.
Source: Patently Apple