What is Adobe Nav?
Adobe Nav is an iPad app which directly communicates with Photoshop over a WiFi connection. With Adobe Nav, you can use the touch screen of your iPad to select tools and documents in Photoshop while it is running on your computer.
Version Reviewed: Adobe Nav 1.0.1 (pre-release)
Cost and Compatibility: $1.99. Requires iPad running iOS 4.3 or later. Photoshop connection requires Photoshop CS 5.1 or higher.
Adobe Nav Pros:
- Makes commonly-used Photoshop tools more accessible.
- Full-resolution Photoshop documents are cached on the iPad if the network connection is broken, allowing users to share work with others off-site.
Adobe Nav Cons:
In the document picker of Adobe Nav, you can browse and select from open Photoshop documents. Touching a thumbnail brings the document to the front in Photoshop, and double-tapping the thumbnail will show detailed document information.
© Sue Chastain- Multiple "tool sets" can not be saved or swapped out.
- iPad will need a power connection to prevent battery drain, and automatic screen lock should be disabled.
Adobe Nav Description:
- Select up to 16 Photoshop tools to display on the iPad toolbar.
- Use iPad as a remote tool switcher for Photoshop. Selecting tools on the iPad makes them the active tool in Photoshop.
- Add, delete and move tool buttons within the 4x4 icon grid.
- Toggle Photoshop's screen modes from the iPad touch screen.
- Review as many as 200 open Photoshop documents as a thumbnail grid on the iPad.
- Flick through larger document views in a filmstrip or full-screen view.
- Zoom in to see full resolution detail on the iPad.
- Switch the active document in Photoshop by selecting from Adobe Nav on the iPad.
- View image information for open documents by double-tapping the preview.
- Disconnecting from your local network keeps images in cache on the iPad.
- Rotates for landscape or portrait orientation.
Working with Adobe Nav
Adobe Nav's toolbar can be customized with any of the tools available in Photoshop. The tools can be put into any position in the 4x4 tool grid by drag and drop.
© Sue ChastainTwo buttons at the bottom of the screen allow you to switch between toolbar mode and document picker mode. In the toolbar mode, an edit button allows you to customize your toolbar from any of the tools in Photoshop's toolbox. So you can take your frequently-used tools, including those which are normally nested, and make them more accessible from the iPad screen. The toolbar is displayed as a 4x4 grid and the tools can be ordered however you wish. It would be nice if you could save multiple tool collections as sets and quickly switch between them for different types of work, but this is not available.
Alongside the toolbar, you also have a display of the active colors in Photoshop, a button to switch screen modes, and a button to zoom the active document to actual pixels. The colors box does not allow you to pick colors on the iPad, but it does let you reset the default colors and swap foreground and background colors. The Actual Pixels button is nice to have, but would be more useful if it was a toggle to switch between actual pixels and fit-to-screen. The Screen Mode button toggles between standard view, full screen with menus, and full screen (image only).
In addition to the custom toolbar, Adobe Nav can also function as a browser and viewer for any documents open in Photoshop. Tapping the grid icon at the bottom of the screen switches you to document picker mode, which initially displays thumbnails of all the documents you have open in Photoshop. By spreading two fingers over the thumbnail, you can zoom to a larger filmstrip view and flick through the open documents.
In either of these views, you can double-tap the thumbnail to see image information including size, resolution, color mode, and created and modified dates. Zooming in further gives you a full-screen view of the document on your iPad, and you can continue zooming in up to full resolution. From the document picker, you can also click New to create a new 1024x768 pixel document in Photoshop.
Adobe Nav is really quite nifty, and even offers some practical functionality, but when desks are already crowded with a keyboard, mouse, and graphics tablet, I'm not sure if people are going to want to bother with squeezing an iPad in there too. However, the ability to have your Photoshop work-in-progress cached on the iPad where you can take it around and use it as a presentation tool--that alone might make it worthwhile for many Photoshop users. At just two bucks, Nav is priced reasonably for what it is, though I would like to see it further developed with more customization options, and perhaps the ability to link to Photoshop actions and scripts.
