Inspire

This update contains several bug fixes and small improvements as we continually work toward refining the app to maintain its high quality.

This update brings to you a brand new app icon and logo design as well as several bug fixes and small improvements as we continually work toward refining the app to maintain its high quality.

iPhone, iOS, WatchOS
• Full support for the new iPhone SE, iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iOS 13.5, WatchOS 6.2

Localization
• Inspire is now localized for 12 different languages: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, and Russian

Bug fixes and minor improvements

Several bug fixes and UI improvements to make sure your holiday painting, drawing, and sketching goes as smooth as ice and as fun as snow.

Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12
• Hey Siri, painting time!
• Add a shortcut to Siri to automatically open Inspire, create a new canvas, and start painting right away

iPhone XS Max
• If you have a shiny new iPhone XS Max, you're going to love it even more with this Inspire update
• The UI fills the beautiful new 6.5” screen
• Paint colors look vibrant and luscious on the new OLED display
• Brush strokes flow on the canvas in stunning detail with the new Super Retina HD resolution
• Paint, draw and sketch faster than ever before with our updated painting engine Sorcery, fully optimized for the new A12 Bionic chip
• As always, the entire app works in both portrait and landscape orientations, with all of the UI adapting seamlessly to the new iPhone XS Max screen

Apple Watch Series 4
• Fully tested and optimized for WatchOS 5
• Support for the 4 new complication sizes and shapes in the new Infograph watch face: corner, bezel, circular, and rectangular

Based on your feedback, which we greatly appreciate, we have decided to remove all in-app purchases from Inspire and make those 7 brush sets free, included in the original price of the app. Paint Splatter, Spray Paint, Charcoal, Pastels & Conté, Complex Shapes, Shape Outlines, and Patterns are now all available with this new update.

For those of you that already purchased any of the extra brush sets, we would like to extend a huge thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your generous support. We are a very small team from Ottawa, Canada with no fancy Silicon Valley venture capital and so your support has allowed us to keep working on the app and doing what we love. Rest assured you have contributed to keeping an indie developer alive — one that is dedicated to bringing you awesome, free updates to Inspire for as long as we can.

Speaking of updates, we are hard at work on our biggest one ever. Inspire 5.0 will have many amazing new features, including layers. Stay tuned to our social networks @snowCanoe to find out when we will be starting our public beta if you’re interested in helping us test the new update.

Thanks again for your support and we hope you enjoy all of the extra brush sets!

Several bug fixes.

Several bug fixes.

Several bug fixes.

A few bug fixes with iPhone X support

iPhone X Support
• If you have a shiny new iPhone X, you're going to love it even more with this Inspire update
• The UI now fills the beautiful new screen
• Paint colors look vibrant and luscious on the new OLED display
• Brush strokes flow on the canvas in stunning detail with the new Super Retina HD resolution
• Paint, draw and sketch faster than ever before with our updated painting engine Sorcery™, fully optimized for the new A11 Bionic chip
• The gallery now shows the status bar in portrait orientation on iPhone X, in case you lost track of time while painting
• As always, the entire app works in both portrait and landscape orientations, with all of the UI adapting seamlessly to the new iPhone X screen

Along with hopefully the last of iOS 11 bug fixes, we updated the Social menu with a new button that links to our Instagram account. Follow us on Insta @snowCanoe to get the latest news on updates that we're working on and check out some of the newest artwork created with Inspire. Tag your own art with #InspireApp to get our attention, we'd love to see what you're working on and what inspires you!

Support for iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.

Support for iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.

More iOS 11 support with a few bug fixes.

More iOS 11 support with a few bug fixes.

Support for iOS 11.

Bug fixes and UI refinements.

Improved Import and Export with iCloud Drive
• We’ve finally let go of our own custom export menu (don’t worry, it got a great severance package) and replaced it with the iOS one that you’re used to in other apps
• The new iOS export menu now gives you access to iCloud Drive, AirDrop and any other 3rd party services via their own apps
• You can also import files and images in the New Canvas menu from iCloud Drive and other 3rd party services now

Bluetooth Keyboard Support
• Added support for over 20 context-sensitive keyboard shortcuts to make performing commonly used actions in the app quicker and easier

What do rocky sand, Italian leather and stretched canvas all have in common?

If you guessed a puzzling exhibit at a modern art gallery, you might be right…

If you guessed a new Inspire brush set called Textures, you’re absolutely right! Congratulations, you win a prize: a new Inspire brush set called Textures.

New Brush Set “Textures” (Free)
• 10 new amazing brushes that can apply beautiful, photo-realistic textures to your canvas
• New Brick, Belgian Block, Broken Stone, Rocky Sand, Weathered Bark, Stretched Canvas, Coarse Burlap, Italian Leather, Wool Carpet, Long Grass

New Brush Set “Pastels & Conté” (Available in the Inspire Shop)
• 10 new incredibly realistic brushes that allow you to draw and sketch with a variety of different kinds of pastels and conté
• Soft Pastel Stick, Soft Angled Pastel Stick, Soft Flat Pastel Stick, Hard Pastel Stick, Hard Angled Pastel Stick, Hard Flat Pastel Stick, Oil Pastel, Pastel Pencil, Conté Crayon, Conté Pencil

Miscellaneous
• iOS 10.2 compatibility — if you haven’t updated yet, your friends have better emojis than you
• Bug fixes

iPhone 7 and iOS 10
• Fully tested and optimized for the new iPhone 7, 7 Plus and iOS 10
• Improved 3D Touch support so that changes in pressure affect brush stroke size and opacity smoother and faster than ever before
• Haptics now provide tactile feedback throughout various aspects of the UI to let you feel widgets like switches and sliders, actions like dropping a color onto a palette and notifications of success like saving a painting to your Photos
• Improved overall brush stroke rendering performance by up to 1.3x on new devices

Apple Watch Series 2 and watchOS 3
• Fully tested and optimized for the new Apple Watch Series 2 and watchOS 3
• Greatly improved performance while performing actions, selecting colors from a palette and generally keeping in sync with the iPhone app
• Updates now refresh in the background when the app is in the new Dock and at other opportune times
• Complications are now updated more frequently and reliably while painting
• The new extra-large complication is now supported

Messages Integration
• You can now create a painting or drawing with Inspire right within the Messages app
• Start from a blank canvas or choose an image from your Photos to paint on top of
• The painting UI has been streamlined for Messages to fit the smaller space and makes creating a quick sketch faster and easier than ever before

Adjusting Brush Size and Opacity
• The hotspot to reset the zoom level at the top of the screen has been replaced with 2 new hotspots that can be used to quickly change the brush size or opacity / dry brush pressure
• You can now touch and slide to the left or right, starting on one of these new hotspots, to invoke the Quick Change mode, instead of having to use a 3-finger pan gesture like before
• These new hotspots give you one touch access to changing the brush size or opacity of the current brush, without having any sliders always taking up space on the screen and covering your artwork while you paint
• Don’t worry, you can still reset the zoom level using a quick pinch gesture (more below)

Quick Pinch Zoom
• You can now use quick pinch gestures to reset the zoom level or zoom to the previous level
• Pinching your fingers together quickly and then releasing them off the screen, as if you're zooming out, will reset the zoom level of the canvas back to the default — this has the same effect as tapping on the old hotspot at the top of the screen
• Spreading your fingers apart quickly and then releasing them off the screen, as if you're zooming in, will automatically zoom the canvas back to the previous level, centered at the starting location of your pinch — this is the same as what the “Double Tap Zoom” option used to do, it has now been removed since it could not be used at the same time as the “Paint with Taps” option anyway, which is far more useful

Miscellaneous
• Improved the performance of brushes in the Oil Paint set by 20%
• Hotspots have a new look with some improved icon designs and more translucent backgrounds behind fully opaque outlines and icons
• Twitter doesn’t count characters for uploading an image anymore, so you now have 23 more characters to use when writing a tweet for uploading your artwork
• Several bug fixes throughout the app improving reliability and general goodness :)

Inspire and iOS 10 are best friends now.

Inspire and iOS 10 are best friends now.

Inspire and iOS 10 are best friends now.

We found some bugs in the app — it turns out they were looking for Pokémon... When we told them there weren’t any here, they quickly fled to the nearest park.

Apple Watch
● You can now use your Apple Watch as an inspiring companion while you paint with Inspire on your iPhone
● Perform actions such as changing the brush mode, undo/redo and going back to the gallery from Apple Watch
● Choose a new paint color from your favorite palette — it’s automatically synced and always accessible from Apple Watch
● See all of the properties of the current painting from Apple Watch without having to go back to the gallery
● Clear the canvas or fill it with the latest paint color using Force Touch from any menu
● Check out the glance to quickly see how long you’ve spent on the current painting and how many strokes you’ve used so far
● Customize your Apple Watch face with every kind of complication to quickly see the number of strokes and time spent on the current painting

3D Touch
● You can now specify a pressure curve with a new UI in the Options menu that modulates the value of applied pressure with 3D Touch into a different value that gets communicated to the painting engine for rendering brush strokes
● Improved the painting engine’s reaction time so that brush strokes adapt more quickly and smoothly to changes of 3D Touch pressure
● Support for third-party pressure sensitive styli has been removed for iPhone 6s

Color Menu
● The black and white buttons at the top-left of the Color menu have been replaced with two new mode buttons that allow you to change the UI to help you choose the exact color that you’re looking for — if you liked having the black and white buttons in the menu for convenience, you can always add these colors to the Favorite palette
● The first new mode adds a color square to the menu that allows you to choose the saturation and brightness of a new paint color more precisely
● The second new mode adds RGB sliders to the existing HSB sliders and displays the values of all parameters to help you choose an exact color to work with

Canvas Size Menu
● There is a new button in the Canvas Size menu that allows you to conveniently swap the width and height of a new canvas quickly and easily, without having to rotate your device or bring up the keyboard
● You can now see the maximum dimension in pixels and total size in MP allowed for your device, when creating a new canvas, in the Dimensions description of the Canvas Size menu’s context sensitive info

Miscellaneous
● Fully tested and optimized for the new iPhone SE
● Many small cosmetic refinements to the UI
● Several bug fixes

We found several bugs, but instead of squashing them we gathered them all up inside of a small container and let them free outside. They won’t be bugging you anymore.

iPhone 6s and 3D Touch Support
● Our Sorcery™ painting engine is now fully optimized for the new A9 processor and GPU of iPhone 6s for unprecedented performance on a mobile device
● You can create a canvas of up to 6K by 4K or any custom size up to 24MP and Sorcery™ crushes it with iPhone 6s
● Quick Actions with 3D Touch allow you to create one of 3 preset canvas sizes directly from the Home screen and start painting right away
● 3D Touch support for amazingly fluid pressure sensitive painting and drawing without the need for a 3rd party stylus — you can configure touch pressure from the Gestures category in the Options

Larger Canvas Sizes
● The max size of a canvas has been increased based on the device
● iPhone 6s: 2048 x 1536 >> 6144 x 4096 (24MP)
● iPhone 6s Plus: 2048 x 1536 >> 6144 x 4096 (24MP)
● iPhone 6: 2048 x 1536 >> 4096 x 3072 (12MP)
● iPhone 6 Plus: 2048 x 1536 >> 4096 x 3072 (12MP)
● iPhone 5s: 2048 x 1536 >> 3072 x 3072 (9MP)
● iPhone 5c: 2048 x 1536 >> 2048 x 2048 (4MP)
● iPhone 5: 2048 x 1536 >> 2048 x 2048 (4MP)
● iPod touch 6: 2048 x 1536 >> 4096 x 3072 (12MP)
● iPod touch 5: 2048 x 1536 >> 2048 x 2048 (4MP)

Custom Canvas Sizes
● There is a new “Canvas Size” menu that allows you to choose any canvas size from 1 x 1 up to the max allowed on your device
● Shape presets and a resolution slider make selecting common sizes easier

Improved Rendering and Performance
● Brush textures now have higher quality anti-aliasing when applied to the canvas during a stroke
● The canvas is now anti-aliased/filtered so the paint on it looks smoother when zoomed out, but you can still see individual pixels for accuracy when zoomed in
● Up to 160% performance increase for texture brush rendering
● Up to 30% performance increase for oil paint bristle brush rendering
● Reduced memory (RAM) usage by 40%
● Improved canvas loading time by 45%

UI Improvements
● Improved the app icon and app logo
● Changed the Artwork menu button icon
● There is now an option in the Hotspots category to have the top-left brush mode hotspot cycle through wet, dry and the eraser, instead of just toggling between wet and dry
● The brush rotation and surface rotation sliders now go from -180 to 180 instead of 0 to 360
● The random rotation switches are now sliders so you can specify the amount of random rotation of each texture through a brush stroke
● Changed the icon for the button to go back to the gallery in the painting menu to the word “Gallery” to make it easier to find for new users
● Changed the company intro animation for the new snowCanoe logo
● Added a “Welcome” page to the Guide
● You can now rotate an existing painting in the gallery by 90 degrees instead of just 180 from the Properties menu and any existing Canvas Playback video will be rotated accordingly to match
● Paintings now always appear in the same orientation while painting as they do in the gallery
● Improved the performance of the Color picker menu so that the controls respond and update more quickly to your touch
● Oil paint brushes have improved, stylized previews

Painting Improvements
● Oil paint brushes can now have an infinite amount of paint — paint will not blend with existing colors on the canvas with an infinite paint amount
● Oil paint brushes now have twice the maximum size they did before
● The taper length of a brush stroke now depends on the current size of the brush, instead of being independent of it, which was basically a bug

Miscellaneous
● Added a button in the Properties menu to permanently delete and disable Canvas Playback video for an existing painting to save space
● Updated to the latest Adonit, Wacom and Ten One Design pressure sensitive stylus SDK’s
● Removed support for the HEX3 Jaja stylus
● Many bug fixes