Adobe Project Mighty cloud pen and Napoleon digital ruler to ship in H1 2014

Adobe, who is best know for producing software such the ever-popular Photoshop, seems quite serious in its first ever hardware venture. The company is now announcing that it expects have its Project Mighty pen and Project Napoleon ruler manufactured and released by the first half of next year.

Adobe first unveiled these unique and strange contraptions in May as part of the company's adventure in to the realm of natural interfaces and cloud computing. It says that it is now prepared to shift from proof-of-concept to an actual product that will empower what it calls the new creatives, a new generation of artists defined by the new tools at their disposal.

Project Mighty is a stylus that connects to devices such as an iPad via Bluetooth LE. It is different from most capacitive styli for the iPad in that Project Mighty is pressure sensitive, a feature much desired by digital artists. Furthermore, it is built with Adobe's Creative Cloud in mind. This gives the pen access to various tools and settings synced across various Adobe software, such as colors from Kuler or brushes from Photoshop. It also features a clipboard that allows grabbing and dropping content from one supported device to another.

Project Napoleon is probably more intriguing and weirder, being, for all intents and purpose, a glorified digital ruler. Aside from drawing straight lines like any other ruler, Napoleon, named as such for being a "short ruler" (get it?), lets users draw other shapes as well, like arcs. What it does is to fix, smoothen, or straighten the user's drawing based on the drawing mode it's set to. If you're curious about all these features, watch the video below to see them in action.

Adobe is partnering with popular stylus maker Adonit for actually manufacturing the digital devices in time for the first half of 2014. The company is also revealing two new apps that will take advantage of Napoleon's features. Project Parallel is a drafting app for the iPad designed specifically around Napoleon, while Project Contour lets users take photos of shapes using an iPhone and transfer it to an iPad for architectural line sketching.

As implied in all the features, the devices and software ecosystem all revolve around Adobe's Creative Cloud platform. And from the sound of it, these will all be available on iOS only, though Adobe might decide to bring them to Android later on as it did with some of its apps in the past.

SOURCE: Adobe