Adobe is going all in on the iPad.
Mark Gurman and Nico Grant of Bloomberg published an article today detailing what they have learned from multiple sources about Illustrators’s plans for the iPad:
The San Jose, California-based company will preview Illustrator for iPad at its Max conference in November before launching it in 2020, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the decision. Illustrator, which designers rely on for digital drawing and creating graphics, would follow in the footsteps of Photoshop, which is scheduled to be available on the iPad later this year. Illustrator is one of Adobe’s most popular apps in its Creative Cloud software suite and would mirror many of the features from the desktop version when running on the iPad.
Adobe declined to confirm or deny the news, saying only: “We have nothing new to share at this time.”
Illustrator is a vector-based illustration software that became the industry’s golden standard after the demise of Macromedia Freehand — which ended its development in 2003 and was bought by Adobe in 2005.
Along with Photoshop, the release of Illustrator will turn the iPad Pro into a serious laptop alternative to for artists. Adobe’s Lightroom, an image organization and manipulation package, is already available, as is Premiere Rush, its video editing tool, and Fresco, the sketching and painting app. As mentioned previously mentioned, Photoshop is also being prepped for release by the end of the year.
