[Photoshop doesn't require 4GB of RAM. The stated system minimum is 1GB. --J.]

For the record, the people saying the ipad isn’t good for mobile art just don’t have the right use case. Sure, it probably can’t handle the finished art most of us are making, but it is especially important to me as a sketchpad. I’ve been drawing a rough draft of a graphic novel on it. Most of this has happened in the park on lunch, and it’s better looking and easier than doing it on paper, and I don’t have to scan it just to make a readable pdf. The almost the entire workflow, including scripting has happened with the ipad in mobile situations where I’ve never had the ability to work digitally before. Yes, go ahead and tell me I can do all this on a laptop. I dont have one and wouldn’t carry around a $2k+ device for this type of work. The iPad is ideal for concept and sketching and will only get better.

I think the idea was more uses as a tool space extension.
I think it could be great to use with a Wacom tablet if you could put the commands that you would often reach to your keyboard for in one easy to touch area. If you could configure it how you want, placing which commands you most use and place them where you want them. Not sure how helpful it would be in actual use but it would be nice to find out. Also for rotating the work area while drawing it would be great.

Since OSX doesn’t even have a proper multitouch api yet,
extending some context-specific UI to an accessory tablet is a good place to start.

But whatever UI emerges on an iPad, It really needs to devote full screens to very discrete contexts/tasks. Photoshop has a lot of tools, and a lot of ways to use them. And this thread demonstrates that everyone seems to have different workflows and prioritize different tools.

My fear is that adobe will take a stab at some commonsense multitouch widgets with potentially poor usability and limited utility; It won’t quite fit what I’m looking for, and that will be that.

I’m more interested in the Configurator + Actionscript model, where we have tools to create our own controllers and custom workflows. Give people the power to experiment and figure out what a next-generation multitouch-enabled Photoshop might look (and feel) like.

Wacom is not enough. They are great, but also complacent. The Cintiq is overpriced. Their drivers are buggy. The airbrush has a poor build quality. You have to pay extra for the pen that enables control of rotation.

You cannot use a Wacom tablet without relying extensively on the keyboard. Photoshop simply has too many functions for a few programmable buttons.

Pressure is a great way to modulate a stroke, but it should not be the only way. I have carpal tunnel syndrome and cannot afford to press the Wacom stylus hard enough to control the input the way I want.

Why can’t I draw with one hand, and simultaneously modulate a property of the stroke with another controller (a multitouch gesture or hardware knob)?
I’ve seen Adobe experimenting with this in some Labs video.

As far as I know, the only way to drive the Photoshop brush engine (thankfully updated in CS5) is through the Wacom driver.
Can we open this up to multitouch gestures and other hardware controllers?

People are already doing neat stuff using iPad as a controller for audio software using the OSC messaging standard.

PS. I Feel like I spend half of my time in photoshop tweaking tiny slider bars back-and-forth, back-and-forth. This is ripe territory to offload a modal UI to a larger, more tweak-and-compare friendly screen.

To me this *sounds* like a fantastic idea. I see it as literally taking the place of my keyboard during Photoshop work. Whilst Keypad goes some of the way by providing shortcuts, the key to to making it work properly is context.

During general use I see myself using the right hand side as a trackpad to control the cursor on the screen and the left hand side being shortcuts to tools, adjustment layers, actions, scripts etc.

When I select a tool – the brush for example – I expect the iPad to change to show a slider for brush size and another for hardness. When I select the text tool a keyboard – ready for text entry – should appear. With an adjustment layer selected it could show quick links to saved presets, a slider for opacity etc, etc…

It would be like an an infinitely configurable keyboard / control surface whose context is based on what you are doing at the time.

Needless to say it would have to be user configurable – my needs are unlikely to be the same as the next person – although a facility for sharing templates would be great.

As I said this *sounds* great but the proof of the pudding is in the eating (as they say)

I do use an app on my iPad that allows me to remote control my dslr when the camera is tethered to my laptop.

I would love to see Adobe produce a similar app that would allow iPad control via wireless or tethered directly to the camera; that presets, filters, keywords, and all of the import functions could be applied upon the incoming images.

If the current app could access a NAS library of images to edit, that would be much more interesting!

[Configurator also does HTML, and it could be modified further. --J.]

May have better luck with the Dell Streak…

And seriously…I’m surprised that Adobe keeps writing it’s software for the Apple platform…

[We're not going to let some of Apple's decisions keep us from going where customers need us. --J.]

So far though, Configurator does 90% of the job for me (even though the larger palettes take up more precious screen space – there’s nothing like 1-click access)