New In Apple Creator Studio: AI Shapes

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.  Let's take a look at the new feature in Apple Creator Studio to create shapes using AI. 

Apple just updated Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to version 15.3. This is the new Apple Creator Studio versions of the apps, the ones that you can use with or without the Apple Creator Studio subscription. If you have the subscription you've got extra features, including Content Hub. A new part of the Content Hub is the ability to create shapes from a description. So, it's going to use AI to make the standard shapes that you want. 

Now we already have tons of shapes that you can use with or without a subscription. If you go to the Content Library here and you go to Shapes you'll see these and you'll probably recognize them. They've been around for years. There are tons of great shapes here. They're monocolor shapes that you can edit. You can change the color.You can insert text into. You can do different fills and all this. But the one problem with them is that you have a limited number of shapes that you could use. But now you can create your own.

So you see here at the top there is a Generate Shape button. In fact if I'm on the first screen here you could see it says Generate Image or Generate Shape. So you're only going to see this, of course, if you've got the Apple Creator Studio subscription. When you go to it, it lets you describe a shape and it will draw it for you. Not as a regular image or something you would normally see in an AI Image Creation Tool. But actually as one of those shapes just as if you were to draw with the pen in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote and create the shape yourself. Let's give it a try. 

What should I use as my first example? I wonder. Let's see. Let's try this. There's no shape for this and I would love for there to be one. Now you're going to get a permission dialogue here that you have to interact with on and you'll see that it is actually going to use Google to generate these. It's interesting that Apple is using ChatGPT for some things. Claw for some things, and Google for other things. So let's go and give her permission and see what kind of shapes it generates. 

So here we go. Exactly as I would want. There's a great shape but there's actually four variations. So, I can go to the different variations here to see which one I want more. I actually like this one the best. So I'm going to click Insert. I could also have it regenerate or I could Edit the description here. Let's just insert this one to see what we get and I'll Close this window. There's my shape! It is just a regular shape like if I would create a circle, square, or one of the many other ones that have been around for years. I can change its style, change the Fill Color. I can just change the Fill Color to what ever I want. I can add a Border around it as I like and do all the different things you can normally do with a shape. Including Control Clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking on it and it making it editable. You can see her the dots and how I could drag them around or delete them and change how this shape looks. 

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So another one that I remember I needed at some point and didn't really have this is a treasure chest. So I'll have it generate that and there's a closed one. Different shape. This is a pretty good one. I like this one too. Let's alter it though and say Open With Coins. So there you go. That's a pretty good one there. I like that first one the best. So I can Insert this one here. Since it is a shape, I can go and Edit it. If I decide, like maybe I don't want one of those coins in there, I can make it editable and I can select those dots there and delete them like that. Or I could have gotten rid of the lock or some of these dots here. Things like that. I can edit as I like.

Another thing you can do with shapes when they're complex and they have like holes and objects inside them is you can Control Click to bring up the Context Menu and break them apart. It will take pieces out. So pieces that aren't connected to other pieces. Now a lot of times you just do this for coloring in multiple area. So, for instance, if I wanted to make the entire chest kind of gray, but maybe make this are darker, like that, to be kind of a shadow and then let's make it this area kind of a gold, like that. You can do it by breaking the shape apart. You can do a lot with this. Here I can take these panels here and I will go and make them some sort of other color or even, you know, go in here and let's choose something that is more of a brown to be like wood, like that. 

I know some of you are going to wonder whether or not if you Save this could you open it in version of Pages that's not part of Apple Creator Studio. You can. Looks like once you've generated the shape you can now collaborate with somebody else. As a matter of fact you can do it with the older version of Pages showing it's nothing special to do with the shapes themselves. 

So, I'm going to Save the document out here and I'm going to Open With, the old version of Pages, which certainly doesn't even know about Apple Creator Studio. You could see the shape opens up just fine here. It's even editable and everything. 

Now this also works in Numbers and Keynote. All of those have an updated version 15.3 which you need for this. So as you can imagine in Keynote there's a ton of stuff that you can do. Shapes are even more useful there. So, for instance, I'm going to generate a shape here. So let's take a look at some of the variations here. So we've got some cool stuff. I like this one. We'll insert this one here. We can take it here. Let's make it a little bit bigger. Let's give it a color. I'm even going to flip it, like that. Let's create some more. Let's take a look at some of these. Let's try asking for more here because I didn't like any of those. They weren't what I had in mind. I think this one is close to what I want. I'm going to Insert this one here and I'm going to enlarge it. I'm actually going to go to Arrange here and turn Off Constrain Proportions. So I can stretch it like this and then place it down here.  Ah, this is kind of what I want. Let's send this to the back and there we go. Let's add one more. So we have some variations here. It just moves it around a little bit. But I think this will work. Let's insert this one here and expand it. I'm going to add a regular circle behind it. So let's get this to match in size, like that. Perfect. I'm going to Arrange and send that to the back and make that a blue. Then I'm going to select that part of the shape there. I'm going to make that something more like a brown, like that. I'll group these two together. I'll select both of them and do Arrange Group. Put that there. I'll even go ahead and rotate this a little bit like that. 

So you can see how it easily creates some nice shape-based art for my Keynote presentation.