You can scrub through the stacking order to move a layer until it looks right without opening up the Layers panel - which takes up a chunk of screen real estate.When it comes to creative apps, it can feel as if Adobe has cornered the entire market. On the other hand, the iPad app provides a live preview of what the results of each operation would be, which is a huge timesaver if you're not good at quickly conceptualizing what they'd look like (guilty!).

Combine shapes (aka Pathfinder in the desktop app) only has the four main operations - Combine all, Minus front, Intersect and Exclude overlap, as well as Divide all - but not others like Trim, Merge and Minus back. Still, some of the features have fewer capabilities. For instance, the node editing tools are all subsumed by the contextual toolbar below the item you're editing, although you can access them other ways as well.

Illustrator on iPad may seem like it has fewer tools than the desktop application, but the iPad app consolidates a lot. The control sliders let you adjust the number of repeats, the gap and angle between the mirrored objects and to remove repeated objects from the radial repeat to create a gap in the circle.

(You still need to understand how paths work, but the rest seems easy to pick up.) It also supports livestreaming directly to Behance so you can share your magic with the world. There are some new and useful time savers, and a well-designed interface that seems less intimidating than the desktop version. It debuts with a fully baked type engine and vector drawing tools, support for keyboard shortcuts (if you've got one connected) and the ability to correctly import Photoshop layers, just to name a random few. It starts with a leg up over its predecessors, taking advantage of development done for its sibling Photoshop. It's priced like Adobe's other mobile apps, at $10 (£10, AU$16.49) per month. Now it's ready to roll, and while it has some holes in its feature set and can't match the desktop version's power, it's probably one of Adobe's most 'finished' version 1.0 mobile apps. On the iPad and a few months since its huge (for Adobe, at least) beta test cycle.

Adobe illustrator app