Expanding stroke

[babmo]

I really, really wanted to love AD, bought it the day it hit the app store. But here we habe a behavior that‘s been there since the very beginning. For a serious vector app, this is unacceptable. What good is the 650 billion magnification if the outlines are wonky as hell? Case in point, here is how a few vector apps handle expanding stroke. In each of them I made a straight vertical line, gave it a thickness of 50pt and round endings. (The proportions differ because I didn‘t care for the line length and zoom level to be equal)

 

Autodesk Graphic, an old app, came out with iOS6 I think? Only gets updates to be compatible with new OS, no new features. But the bread and butter of every vector artist, it does as expected:

 

 

 

Vectornator a FREE app, quite recent and changes the UI every now and then. For a free app it‘s really solid and has some nice features. It does lack some, like aligning nodes (not that AD can do that). Graphic can do that by the way. Back to our test, expand stroke gives us this:

 

 

Again, clean precise point placement, ready to be modified with ease.

I am sure there are many more apps that handle stroke expansion the same way, some of them share the vector engine that was open source at some point or whatever.

 

And here is AD.

 

What

the

fu

The most expensive and the most extensive app on my iPad gives me THIS? Make no mistake, AD on Mac gives me the same output (1.7 beta as well). It’s the equivalent of not only coming late to work, but also wearing pants around your neck, shoes as gloves and diver fins on your feet. This makes absolutely no sense, the nodes placement, why is it asymmetrical? Why are there so many? Why do I have to clean up nodes after such a mundane task, I never even think about it in other desktop and iPad apps, it‘s a feature that just "works". 

AD 1.7 has addressed many of my critical points and it‘s great, but this is simply defunct, there’s no way around it. What good is an app for, if I have to change to another just to get the expected result. Please please please do something about it sooner than later.

[Lee D]

This is already logged with the developers to look in to improving.