What will be the benefits/differences for Artstudio Pro once it's ported to the new graphics engine?
1. We wrote ArtKit engine from scratch, in pure Swift, while Artstudio Pro is written in obj-c. Here is the list of advantages:
- it is in pure Swift and supports both OpenGL and Metal, so it will be possible to make Artstudio for Windows / Android, but don't expect that soon
- faster - because Swift is faster than objc)
- faster and more memory efficient - we had a lot of experience from Artstudio so we made many thing in a different, more efficient way
- we separated stroke processing from other things so we have better control on stroke stabilization / smoothing / dynamics etc, we may add more options in brush editor
- we implemented texture compressing so the memory usage will be lower and it will improve performance in large documents (a lot of layer, big dimension) because it will first compress layer data on low memory, then save it to disk if there is still no free memory
- besides we learnt a lot of things when working on a new engine and on Notestudio which is vector based app
2. We switched to SwiftUI in Notestudio and wrote separate framework for the UI - ArtUI. It will improve UI a lot
- we made draggable panel mechanism (used in Notestudio), we are going to use it in Artstudio too
- SwiftUI has better support of localizations, light/dark mode, controls refreshing, small animation here and there etc
Things in iOS are changing very fast. To make Artstudio alive we had to make really big steps every few year. First Artstudio was released in 2010, then rewritten almost from scratch in about 2015, then rewritten almost from scratch again in 2019 and released as Artstudio Pro, it seems it's time for the next big step...