I had this whole thing written (which I’ve preserved at the end in a postscript) about why my current hardware solution was not one but two devices: a LincPlus LincStudio S1 pen computer and my trusty MacBook Pro (my main writing machine). Instead, I was handed what may be a better software solution that lets me switch one of the devices!
On Saturday, February 8, 2025, the universe gave me a gift! Not me specifically, but I’ll take it. 🙂
Let me back up.
One of the reasons I picked up the S1 was due to the vexed problems that I wanted to do hand-drawn-style animation, which was going to require a graphics tablet, display tablet, or pen computer (see below more discussion). Currently the big players in these spaces include Wacom (the venerable but pricier leader), more recent (more affordable) challengers like Huion and XP-Pen and others; for pen computers, you can also look at Android tablets or an iPad. I’m mostly discussing Wacom examples because that’s what I have the most familiarity with, but please know that there are a lot of options and look at reviews if you’re in the market for one of these!
- a graphics tablet, i.e. the non-display thing you plug into your computer to draw on with a stylus while looking at the computer monitor, e.g. a Wacom Intuos. I had an ancient one for over a decade, built like a tank, only had to give it up because the built-in cable wore out. These are terrific, much more affordable than the other options (see below), and often more ergonomic because you can have the drawing surface where your hands are vs. wherever you set your display height. They also tend to be lighter. My daughter, an accomplished digital artist, still has the one I got her almost a decade ago and she loves it. A common difficulty—certainly it was mine—is that there is a learning curve for having the drawing surface and the artwork/display be separate. I never managed to adapt.
- a display tablet, i.e. the display thing you plug into your computer so you can draw directly on the display with a stylus. These are rather pricier, although prices have come down. I tried a couple of these and ran into the difficulty that some of them, especially the less expensive or older models, have a non-intuitive multi-cable setup and possibly also a separate power brick. Some of the more recent offerings, like Wacom’s Movink 13, have a single cable but even that can be fraught due to power or other requirements. But these do solve the problem of the separate drawing surface vs. artwork/display learning curve. For what it’s worth, I still have my Movink 13 and I love it. It doesn’t have as much sensitivity or resolution as a professional-level display tablet, but it’s smaller and lighter (so much lighter), and some of my health issues mean that I have to cut to aggressively cut the weight of things I use and carry. If you don’t want/need to be aggressive about using light-as-possible devices, of course, your options open up! The professional offering in this area is something like the Wacom Cintiq series. I don’t need that level of device, but a friend of mine has one so I have seen her Cintiq. It’s GINORMOUS (…I joke that it’s bigger than I am) and requires a special desk arm mount to safely hold it for repositioning and so on. But she’s a professional artist and designer, so absolutely that makes sense for her. 🙂
- I’m coming to the last option, which is a pen computer, and now we’re at an all-in-one device that you don’t have to plug into something else to provide the computer part but you can draw with a stylus directly on the device’s display. Examples include the Wacom MobileStudio Pro, which received mixed reviews and hasn’t been updated in a while; tablets running Android or straight-up iPads; tablet/laptop hybrids like the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 (I’ve never used any of these); or more uncommon devices like the LincPlus LincStudio S1, which is what I originally went for and still own. This is a vexed solution in that the devices are pretty pricey, and if one part of it fails, you’re stuck replacing the whole device. Getting one primarily for digital animation or art is pretty niche!
You may ask why I’d go for a pen computer, and why that specific one. A few reasons:
- Guess who has an adult diagnosis of ADHD! Surprisingly small logistical steps will derail me hugely. I discovered that I’d stall for literal weeks because the step of figuring out where I’d stashed my Movink and plugging it in would derail me that much. For various reasons, my primary writing device is a MacBook Pro, and for ADHD and/or work reasons, I end up moving the laptop a lot throughout the week, so simply leaving the Movink plugged in wasn’t feasible. I know this is ridiculous! But I came to the conclusion that for animation, the cost of an all-in-one device (pen computer) would in fact be offset by my…actually getting some !@#$ work done more regularly.
- My original preference was an iPad! They’re sufficiently light, the battery life is sufficiently good (since I can’t work long sessions anyway), I like the drawing experience with a Pencil fine although some people dislike the “slick” glass surface. The biggest issue here was software. I dislike file management on iPadOS and, at the time I was originally considering the hardware problem, there wasn’t a sofware solution I found entirely satisfactory. Clip Studio Paint EX has a subscription model and its iPadOS interface is a PITA; RoughAnimator is a terrific app and I often recommend it to people who want to get their toes wet, but it’s straight-up designed for pencil tests as part of a larger workflow—for example, there aren’t any custom brushes, it’s basically lines and fills. Procreate Dreams doesn’t include a bunch of basic functionality I consider necessary although I’m definitely keeping an eye on it to see how it evolves. I’ve done short, simple straight-ahead animation in regular Procreate and I’ve seen people (even people who are not Aaron Blaise! :grin:) create amazing work in Procreate Dreams, so genuinely, no shade if it’s what works for you. 🙂
- You might ask why I went for a niche S1 instead of one of the more common Android tablets. The answer, again, is software. I’m not super familiar with Android and prefer the iPad in that I already have a bunch of hardware in the Apple ecosystem. But Android doesn’t appear to have some wildly better animation software option either. There isn’t a macOS-based tablet, so now we’re at Windows pen computers/tablets that can run the software options I care about. In my case, I’ve been using TVPaint 12 Pro. I dislike Windows 11 but I can tolerate it; I do have a Windows 11 desktop as my main music production rig!
I should add that at this point, unless something changes, the MacBook Pro is a non-negotiable part of my setup for writing and other purposes. I’m currently budgeting for a new one down the line but with maxed-out RAM so that I use it for writing and music production.
Why macOS and not a Windows or other OS laptop, you ask?
- I do want a laptop because it enables me to take my setup with me, including when I’m traveling for extended periods of time!
- Some of my writing apps, such as Scrivener and Vellum, are smoother on the Mac or only exist for Mac.
- I’ve used both Windows and Mac machines for a while, but the Mac is more comfortable for me at this point in time. (To be honest, my favorite Windows was probably, like Windows ’95 and I dislike Windows 11.) I’ve owned Macs since the PowerBook 1400cs 20+ years ago, so a lot of my work setup is based on a familiar-to-me OS. That’s not nothing!
- I have other Apple ecosystem devices (iPhone, iPad).
- Why not Linux/other? A non-trivial amount of my software doesn’t exist for Linux/etc. In particular, the audio software I need for my M.A. doesn’t exist. Sorry. :] It does exist for Windows or macOS.
The difficulty is that the particular music I compose and produce (and am in a media composition M.A. for!) is sampled orchestration + hybrid orchestration. This is one of the music types with the highest hardware requirements, since orchestral VSTs eat SSD space like whoa and they gobble RAM like whoa. (I don’t actually want to disclose the size of my VST hoard or what’s in it, even though almost all of it was bought on sale, because it’s embarrassing even for someone in a media composition M.A.) I can get around file storage with fast external SSDs, but while workarounds exist for lower RAM, they’re pretty miserable. For this kind of work, 64 GB RAM is a working minimum and 128 GB (or higher, if you can swing it?!) is preferable. (No, please do not argue with me about this unless you are a working professional in this domain.) There are types of music production you can do smoothly on 16 GB RAM! But sampled orchestration is not one of them. Unfortunately, Apple’s current design philosophy where you can’t upgrade RAM afterward as a regular user even in desktops means that I’m stuck shelling out for RAM up front. My current MacBook Pro is overkill for writing and will even run digital painting or animation software fine on 16 GB RAM. But it can’t handle sampled orchestration due to the RAM issue.
Why do I want to consolidate to a single (much) pricier device for both writing and music despite the expense and single point of failure? (Yes, I back up on paranoia mode!) Again, being able to transport my work setup in case of extended travel (work or vacation) or even, like, going to a local café. Having my writing workflow and my composition workflow on the same machine would reduce a huge amount of technical friction shuffling files back and forth.
Okay, so what about this gift from the universe?
A few days ago (February 6, 2025), ToonSquid (animation app) released version 2.0 after closed beta. It will run on iPadOS and adds a staggering number of features. The reason I’d decided not to go with ToonSquid a few years back was the lack of easy cycles. It has that now! They’ve also added a ton of useful things (perspective/warp animation and non-destructive effects with keyframes) as well as things that are useful to others although I don’t currently have a need for them. I suspect for many people, the addition of inverse kinematics and bones rigging will be huge; I do hand-drawn “tradigital” frames, which is why I went with TVPaint for desktop (look, I find it weirdly chillaxing?!) so I don’t currently care about this, but others do! The brush engine will import Photoshop .abr brushes! The library/import system is thoughtfully designed to mitigate iPadOS filesystem limitations!
This is $15 USD for a one-time purchase, not a subscription. I am currently road-testing this to see if it will work, but…hell. At $15 USD for something that will run on the iPad I already have, of course I’m trying this! The iPad’s advantage for me specifically is that it’s basically an instant-on-from-sleep device, it has a reasonably good on-screen keyboard, there’s a Magic Keyboard available for faking laptop mode (I don’t own one but am considering budgeting for one), I have a Pencil, and it’s really light. Again: I have health issues that mean I have to be aggressive about cutting the weight of my devices.
If ToonSquid delivers on all of these features and works reasonably smoothly, at $15 USD, this or similarly capable apps will be no-brainers for many hobbyists.
Also! My digital art is done in Procreate and that’s also on the iPad, so having both available on the same device will make life easier (e.g. for environments or quick doodles). (I like Rebelle a lot, but it’s desktop-only.)
If ToonSquid + iPad don’t work out, I can go back to my LincStudio S1! I’m keeping the device since a likely workflow is doing the bulk of the animation in ToonSquid + iPad, then taking a PNG sequence into TVPaint 12 Pro then DaVinci Resolve on the S1 for postproduction. It’s also a lovely device in its own right.
By the way, I have a story about my current iPad, as well as further notes on the Unity + Naninovel + WWISE front, but I think I’ll save that for later as this post is getting long! This also buys me time to cough up (a) a couple placeholder backgrounds, (b) give Cheris a better revised sprite :3, and (c) spend more time on paper prototyping the game mechanics.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL
P.S. earlier version of this post
Other accomplishments include:
- installing Rebelle 7 Pro onto my animation device, a LincPlus LincStudio S1. I love this device although I’m wondering if it’s discontinued; regardless, I’ll use it while it lasts.
- setting up a hotkey on the LincStudio S1 for the on-screen keyboard for keyboard entry without having to hook up the keyboard folio thingy. 😀
I’ve been trying and failing at an all-in-one solution, but I may be able to get my “travel studio” down to two devices:
- LincPlus LincStudio S1 pen computer for 2D art and animation
- MacBook Pro for everything else (Unity, WWISE, music, etc.)
Having a digital painting solution on the S1 that’s not Procreate will allow me to drop the iPad Air from my setup, not because I don’t love it (I love it!) but because I have health stuff that means that I need to lighten my backpack as much as possible. (Not very, unfortunately. Among other things, the iPad is the lightest device, but iPadOS won’t comfortably run a bunch of software I need, so…) I’ve played with Rebelle in the past and really enjoy it.
You may ask why I don’t go all in on the S1 alone for Unity, WWISE, etc. There are two big reasons:
First: the MacBook Pro is my primary writing machine. This includes apps like Scrivener and Vellum that are either “better” on macOS or straight-up don’t exist for Windows. I also dislike Windows 11 (I’ve gotten along better with previous Windows iterations) and prefer macOS overall, which is not to say that it’s perfect either, but for the software I need for this, it’s either Windows or macOS. That said, if it were just a matter of writing, I could suck it up and switch the necessary tasks to the S1 using Windows.
Second, the deciding factor: I’m eventually looking to switch to a new MacBook Pro for my primary music composition/production machine. My current MBP is overkill for writing but inadequate, unfortunately, for the specific kind of music I do, which is sampled orchestration and hybrid orchestral music. :3 The difficulty is that this specific type of music has high SSD and high RAM requirements. One can get away with external SSD storage, but not so much RAM. For reference, 64 GB RAM is pretty much a working minimum in this realm. (Please don’t argue with me about my hardware requirements unless you do this kind of media composition, thanks.)