We read all our email, and really appreciate all the great feedback you guys send us. Though we may not respond to every suggestion or request, we do consider all of them for future improvements. One common request has been to add paper templates to Air Sketch. Graph paper would be very useful for math and science classes, and ruled lines would be useful for writing. This is a great suggestion, and we hope to add this to future versions of the product. In the meantime, we’ve created a few simple PDF files with these templates. Simply load them up in Air Sketch and draw over them.

To use, right-click and save the PDF files below, transfer them to your iPad using any file manager (such as Dropbox or box.net) and “open in…” Air Sketch.

We’ve also provided the PowerPoint files that you can use to easily modify and create your own custom templates.

 

Graph paper:

PDF file

PPTX file

PPT file (legacy PowerPoint)

 

Ruled paper:

PDF file

PPTX file

 

Blank paper:

PDF file

PPTX file

 

Feel free to use these in your classes and share with your colleagues. Let us know if you find these useful, and if there are other templates you would like to see. If you would like to contribute your own templates to the community, email them to us and we’ll post them on the website for others to use.

Enjoy!

In case you’ve somehow missed it, Photo Stream in iOS5 is quite a game changer. Once you’ve upgraded all your devices, whenever you take a photo on one, it auto-magically syncs to all the others. Let’s say you are projecting a presentation with Air Sketch and want to quickly add a photo of something in the room. You can take a photo with your iPhone, tap on the insert photo button,  open the Photo Stream album, and your photo will appear after a few seconds. Instant new feature that would have been pretty hard to do before. No wires, no new hardware needed, no mess. Apple really did a great job with Photo Stream, and we’ve found that it does indeed work as advertised.

Note that it does take a few seconds to a minute for the photos to sync, depending on your network connection. If you are doing this in a live presentation, it would be a good idea to take the photo first, finish your current slide, then try to add it.

Works with iPhoto too:

Bonus tip: It seems that the latest version of iPhoto ‘11 also automatically synchs newly imported photos to Photo Stream. We found that if you drag a photo from the Finder and add it to iPhoto, it will appear in Photo Stream shortly. However, it seems that the Photo Stream is sorted by the File date, not the added date, so older files may appear at the beginning of the Photo Stream album, not the end as you would expect.

Air Sketch’s open PDF feature works with all Apps that support the “open in…” function including the built-in Email App as well as third party Apps such as Dropbox, Box.net, Goodreader, Readdle Docs, and many others. Here’s a short walkthrough on how to use Air Sketch with Dropbox:

Dropbox is a cloud-based file storage / backup service. They currently offer a free 2GB account, and subscription plans starting from $9.99 a month for 50GB. You can sign up for an account on dropbox.com. With an account, you can upload files either directly on the website, or using a free sync client for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

With their free iPad app, you can view your uploaded files directly on your iPad. To open a PDF file in Air Sketch, just select it, then tap the “open in…” (aka “send to”) icon on the top right and select Air Sketch:

 

Note that the “open in…” dropdown is scrollable if you have more than 4 Apps that support PDF files.

Tip: You can also store your files locally on your iPad in the Dropbox app by simply marking it as a favorite (with the star icon). This way, you can still access your files later if you don’t have Internet access.

We’ve found Dropbox’s service to be very easy to use and reliable, and it works great with Air Sketch. If you are looking for a simple way to keep your files in sync across multiple devices, Dropbox is definitely worth a try.

Update: This issue has been addressed in v2.1, released on Oct. 21st.

An issue has been discovered where the undo-drawing function doesn’t always work when annotation PDF documents on non-FireFox browsers such as Safari or Chrome. We have already shipped a fix which should be available as a free update once it passes Apple’s final review, hopefully in 7-12 days time. We have noticed that the review times have been quite unpredictable lately.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused. :( In the meantime, we recommend using the latest version of FireFox (3.6.10) if possible.

Easier page flipping

On a slightly brighter note, this update (2.1) will also include a small refinement: You will be able to flip PDF pages by tapping on the left and right side gray margins when the page is zoomed all the way out. This should make it easier to navigate slides during a presentation.

We have gotten lots of great feedback from our enthusiastic users over the past few months (thank you and do keep it up!). It’s clear that many people see the potential of the iPad as a powerful presentation tool. The iPad is the perfect size as a personal wireless whiteboard, and it’s even light enough to carry around in front of an audience.

We’ve taken all your feedback into account and are launching a major new version of Air Sketch today.

Air Sketch 2.0 takes presentations to the next level: You can now open multi-page PDF documents in Air Sketch to wirelessly annotate and project them. This works wonderfully with exported PDFs from all major presentation packages, such as PowerPoint and Keynote. Just email the PDFs to yourself, view them in the Mail app, and open them in Air Sketch. You can advance or flip through the pages in the PDF and draw over them, all of this being wirelessly projected as before.

Tip: Tap the page number on the new PDF controls to quickly jump to any page.

You can also send PDF documents to Air Sketch from any App that supports the “open in…” feature, including 3rd party document managers such as Dropbox or Goodreader. Note that Air Sketch works with one PDF file at a time, and doesn’t store or manage PDF files directly.

 

 

Email Annotated PDFs

When you are done with your presentation, you can even email the complete PDF file with all your annotations right from Air Sketch using the Email as PDF option on the Send-To control. This makes it easy to share your notes with your audience right after a presentation.

One thing to be aware of is that there appears to be a limit to the size of email attachments on the iPad. We’ve found that documents under around 10MB (or PDF files up to around 75 pages) tend to be sent ok, but sending larger ones may fail. This appears to be an OS limitation and happens in other Apps as well, which we hope will be addressed in a future upgrade.

 

Full Page Zoom

We’ve added a few more refinements to Air Sketch, including the ability to zoom out to see the whole page: Just pinch with 2 fingers from the default full-screen zoom level.

 

Switching in and out of PDF Mode

If you are in the middle of presenting a PDF and need to sketch on a blank page, just erase the annotations and background (if there are annotations, you need to tap the erase button twice). You can then return to where you were by tapping on the PDF button:

This works the same if you need to load a snapshot, or a background image from the Photo Library.

 

Other Improvements

Air Sketch 2.0 comes with additional performance improvements, including smoother background image transitions. The short blank page “flash” between background image changes has been greatly reduced. Scrolling large lists of snapshots is now also much smoother.

 

Free Update for Existing Users

We have decided to release Air Sketch 2.0 as a free update to everyone who has already purchased Air Sketch v1. This is our little way of saying Thank You to all our early adopters. We are very grateful for your continued support! The update should be available in the App Store within 24 hours.

 

Please Rate this New Version!

If you like these new features, please consider taking a minute to rate this new version in the App Store. Ratings are per version, and your 5-star ratings go a long way towards helping support future free updates. We are committed to building great apps and earning your 5-star reviews.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, please contact us via the support form and we’ll respond as quickly as possible. Also, do keep your feedback and suggestions coming. We do try to answer all our emails in person, and take all of it into account for future releases.

We are extremely thrilled that MSNBC has chosen to use Air Sketch for use On Air. Here’s a segment of the Daily Rundown where Chuck Todd uses the iPad and Air Sketch to walk through the changes in Electoral Votes across states (hey, I didn’t even know these could change!). The segment starts at around the 18:55 mark of the 9/30 broadcast:

Here’s an earlier show which shows more page flipping (but no sketching) The segment starts at the 16:42 mark of Last Friday’s broadcast:

Thank you NBC for choosing Air Sketch!

Updated 10/1: Added a link to the new segment.

We’ve made a couple of changes to make transitions between background images smoother without an intermediate blank screen on the remote display.

Now tap erase once to erase the drawing layer, and tap again to erase the background image. Also, when setting a new background image, the previous remote sketch is erased only after editing the new one is complete.

Thanks for using Air Sketch!

Thank you for all your feedback and great reviews in the App Store! We really appreciate all your support!

We are introducing two brand new features in this update: Zoom/Pan and Send To.

You can now fluidly zoom and pan around your sketches using 2 fingers. The remote image stays the same (full) size. Tip: Write smaller and smoother text while zoomed in. You can also make some fairly detailed drawings or edits using the pencil tool and zooming. Also, the eraser shrinks when zoomed in, allowing finer control.

 

Tap on the new Send To icon to email your sketches as PDF and JPEG images, or save them to the Photo Library. Tip: JPEG images are typically much smaller than PDFs and are recommended for email to others, but PDFs contain the full-quality image.

This release also includes numerous smaller bug fixes, including smoother erasing.

We hope you enjoy these new additions.

 

BonjourFoxy is an excellent Add-In for FireFox that displays available Bonjour servers, such as Air Sketch, in a sidebar just like Safari. This let’s you connect your browser to Air Sketch without having to type in the IP address.

To use BonjourFoxy, just install the add-in, then select View (menu) –> Sidebar –> BonjourFoxy. When Air Sketch is started on the local network, a link will appear under the Websites folder:

To make it even easier, you can also add a BonjourFoxy button to your toolbar. Right click on the toolbar –> Customize. Select the BonjourFoxy icon and drag it to your toolbar. You can now click on it to open the sidebar:

BonjourFoxy is available on OSX, Windows, and other platforms. Note that you may need to install Apple’s Bonjour libraries if you haven’t already (see the BonjourFoxy website for details).

[Updated 9/4/12: Looks like BonjourFoxy is now deprecated. Check out the DNSSD add-in instead.]

An extra bonus is that you can bookmark the address that BonjourFoxy or Bonjour in Safari links to. This uses your iPad’s machine name (e.g. http://my-ipad.local.:8080), which should remain static as long as you don’t rename your iPad in iTunes. We recommend you give your iPad a unique name (like “Sam Spade’s iPad”) to avoid potential conflicts on the network. In contrast, the IP address may change from day-to-day or on different networks.

Bonjour is a relatively unknown, but awesome piece of technology that makes networking just a little easier. If you know of a Bonjour add-in for other browsers, please do let us know about it.

Several users have asked if its possible to use Air Sketch when a WiFi hotspot isn’t available. It turns out the answer is YES! Air Sketch works just as well when connected directly to a computer running an Ad-Hoc network.

An Ad-hoc network is basically a private WiFi hotspot that runs off your notebook or desktop computer. All modern operating systems allow you to create one very easily in a couple minutes. This can be very useful when you are in a WiFi-less environment, or don’t want to risk connectivity issues on an unfamiliar network.

Here’s how to use Air Sketch on an ad-hoc network with Mac OSX Snow Leopard:

 

1. Start on the Mac. Click on the Airport (WiFi) icon in the menu bar and select "Create Network...". Give it a name, and (highly recommended) a password.

2. Go to network settings on your iPad, and join that new network. Wait for the WiFi icon to appear in the status bar. We found that it can take up a minute for the ad-hoc WiFi connection to be established.

3. Now launch Air Sketch. The IP address will be different, but everything else should work the same.

 

That’s it! On the first connection it may be necessary to manually refresh the browser a couple of times if the network hasn’t been fully established yet.

The steps for other operating systems should be very similar. Here are the steps for setting up an ad-hoc network on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Note that you can’t set up an ad-hoc network from the iPad itself.

 

But wait, there’s more!

Once you have your ad-hoc network set up, additional devices can connect to it and to Air Sketch as well, just like any other WiFi hotspot. You can even connect your iPhone, another iPad, or iPod Touch to the network and project Air Sketch to those. Before you go too crazy on this, remember to limit the number of Air Sketch clients (we recommend less than 4) to avoid performance issues.

We hope you find this tip useful. If you try it out, do let us know how it works out for you. Feel free to leave a comment or shoot us an email.