I've been keeping some graphics programs on my iPhone, and it's time to trim the fat.
What I wanted with a graphics program was an "eletronic napkin." Back when I was teaching college classes, I also used to joke that I loved to draw, it was just that I wasn't very good at it. Drawing someone a picture sometimes goes a long way to explaining it to them, and I also find when I'm really stuck, getting that concept on to paper is a great way to sort out thoughts. And the iPhone would seem to be a great platform for doing just that.
I'm not looking to create art - fine or otherwise - here. I just want an app that will give me plenty of space to work, and allow me to have some fairly decent fine-grained control of lines and shapes. Color fills would be nice - though not necessary. And text capabilities (for labelling) would be great. I'm not asking for Visio here, but the basic ability to draw a bunch of boxes and cylinders, some arrowed lines connecting them, and the ability to label all the doodads. An undo capability - to correct those stray marks you make - and an eraser to just get rid of something that just doesn't work - is a must. Being able to export it somehow - email it, save it to the Camera Roll, push it up to a network - is a key feature, as is the ability to retrieve the drawing and keep working at it.
But so far, I haven't found a program that I like.
I had grabbed two graphics programs - Sketches and NetSketch - and I wasn't using either of them.
Sketches is a rather neat little app. Your pictures and drawings are presented as pictures tacked to a corkboard. Touch one of them, and it loads onto the screen. You have a rather rudimentary zoom in the upper right hand corner - zoom in, or zoom out. Across the bottom, there are a number of tools.
The first - a back arrow - allows you to undo your last several actions. Unfortunately, I see no way to redo what you did, if you decide you rather liked it the way it was - or if you mistakenly hit the Undo button (like I just did).
You then have the main drawing tool - Ink. You have the ability to select the opacity of the line - or, alternatively, to make the pencil into an eraser, the line thickness, and lastly the color (24 of them). The selector is pretty straightforward, but make sure you select your color last; that selection shuts down the dialogue and returns you, ink in hand, to the picture you are about to work on. It works the way you would expect it to. Make your choices, then drag your finger across the picture; a trail of the thickness, opacity, and color is left behind. The eraser is a little tricky. It erases the foreground only. It uses the line thickness, but doesn't give you any way of knowing what exactly you're erasing, so you spend a lot of time going over and over an area trying to remove the last little trace of that line.
Next up is the Shapes tool. You are presented with a grid of nine categories, two of which are your traditional drawing tools - geometric and text - and the remaining seven are more properly thought of as stamps. Geometric presents you with choices for line, arrow line, box, oval, and filled box and filled oval. These utilize the settings that you have selected in Ink - color, opacity, and thickness - to create these various shapes. You place them by using multitouch - two fingers define the diametrically opposed points of the shape. Spread or pinch to change the size and shape of the object. It's a good idea, and works a lot better on geometric shapes, but still feels awkward at times.
Text uses the same basic concept. You are presented with a dialogue that invites you to enter the text you want to place, and gives you a choice of three fonts: Helvetica (sans serif), "Times New" (serif), and the iPhone's default "Marker Felt." Once you type in the text and hit Go, you can position and size the text with the two finger approach. Again, it takes the opacity and color from the Ink settings.
The other stamps work much the same way - six predefined graphics for each of the other seven categories that you can place and size using the two finger multi-touch. The graphics look fine, and they're really made to enliven the photographs you take. Add text balloons, for instance, or put a party hat on your girlfriend. But in some cases they can be really frustrating. Just try shrinking down a game controller to get it between your cat's paws; your fingers are swiftly blotting out the picture as you pinch it to make it small enough, and you can't see where you have it, and the attitude (pitch and yawl) of the thing. And worse, once you take your fingers up - it's there to stay.
You have six types of backgrounds to choose from: snap a picture to serve as the background, pull a picture form your albums, fill with a solid color, specify a web-page, specify a map, or choose from a library of six backgrounds (sketch, leather, graph paper, yellow note, white note, or blue print). For the web, you get to specify a webpage to capture, but frustratingly you can only map your present location. The library images - rather than be helpful - are more gimmicky than anything else.
Lastly, there's a "forward" option which lets you export the image to the camera roll, email the drawing, push it up to Twitter(!), or push it to your desktop using a built-in web server (which is pretty cool).
The real purpose for Sketches, therefore, is fun. For example, the color pallette is, for lack of a better term, party themed. Its 24 colors are not exactly pastels, but light and bright. Gimmicks (the cork board, the backgrounds, the stamps) abound. The app is really designed to let you snap a picture of your cat, put a Santa hat on him, a text balloon saying "Ho fucking Ho," and then upload it to Twitter and email it to your friends as a holiday eCard. It does that well, but it's not really what I want in my drawing program; really difficult to draw database cylinders and application boxes.
NetSketch has one absolutely killer feature, and it's the reason I held on to it for so long. You can zoom in and out of a drawing without limit using pinch and spread, creating an infinite piece of paper. Scrolling around is easy, as well, utilizing two fingers. How and why do you want to use this? Well, imagine you want some really small text. You zoom in until the area is big enough for you to use your finger to "draw" the letters of the text, and then zoom out to make the letters small, and - for example - draw a box around your now really small text. It's really smooth, and works really well, and I wish other drawing apps would utilize this zoom approach.
Unfortunately, NetSketch is rather primitive in the rest of its toolset. It basically seeks to freehand draw everything, and it has what I guess is a pencil and paintbrush in a cup but looks more like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In the FSM, you can configure three paintbrushes - in three tabs - with different thicknesses and colors. The color picker is expansive - allowing you to pick a color from a spectrum. Click OK and then draw away.
Next, you get an eye-dropper tool to pick the exact same color that's already in your picture (in case you chose a different color with the FSM). Next to that is a screen re-centering tool, which fits your entire image on the screen - sort of resetting the view for really big canvasses. The multi-stage undo is a little different, and well conceived: rather than undoing a brush stroke, you undo sections of the stoke. Draw a box in one smooth stroke, and you step through undoing the box in four distinct pieces. Sounds like a bit of a pain, but allows you to not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Lastly, NetSketch has an export feature which allows you to Replay(!) the drawing, send to your camera roll, email, or upload to NetSketch.
NetSketch's big selling point is that allows you to share your drawing over the internet, including only a select number of people you specify. Looking at the community drawings, it's fairly impressive what others have come up with. And that is sort of what NetSketch is about. It has some nice free-hand drawing tools, which - when combined with the infinite zoom - really allows you to get creative. And then it has tools for you to share your creativity with others. You can even share your drawing over your network so others can pick it up, duplicate it, see how you went about drawing it, and generally have at it.
But again - it's not what I'm looking for. To its credit, I used NetSketch to do the one useful drawing thing that I've done with my iPhone: sketch out a new Mobtown website. I had an idea, wanted to sketch it out in full color, and made a go of it with NetSketch. It worked, more or less, especially zooming in to enter the navigation labels. But it all looks really sort of ... melty and off-kilter. Again - it's all free hand drawing. There is no text, there is no way to generate a cylinder or a box or a fill. There are no backgrounds, there are no stamps. And while I don't need all those things, remember - I like to draw, but I'm not good at it. I really need the computer's help to draw a reasonable looking box, not something that looks like a stuffed Glad trash bag. And that's sort of when I stopped using it.
And that brings me to my latest attempt: iDoodle2. Once you get past the janky light blue coloring, this app has quite a few nice features that make it surprisingly nice. First, there's a User's Guide. Rudimentary, but very worthwhile. Next, the interface works quite well. Across the bottom of the app are four tools and a Menu button. The tools show you what the current settings are. The menu gives you access to a few very nice things: new, save, edit the background, replay (!), the gallery, preferences, and the user's guide.
While each one is a separate button, Tools, Line, and Fill work together as tabs. Under tools, you can choose the freehand pen (and control thickness and sharpness), a line (choose thickness), a blob, text (you choose size of font), rectangle, oval, erase (choose thickness, sharpness, and opacity!), and eyedropper (choose to select line or fill color). The line tab allows you to choose the opacity of the line with a palette of 16 colors - or you mix your own colors with an RGB slider. Same with fill. Your selections are automatically reflected in the icons at the bottom and the other tools, so you can see what a blob with fuzzy, mostly clear black borders and a grey fill will look like. Astonishingly, it appears that you can even select a color gradient for fills! Use the color preview near the top, and select either end to specify the colors in a gradient, or the middle to select a solid color.
What's it like to create a new drawing? At start up, the menu pops up; select New Doodle and you are taken to the Edit background screen. Editing the background allows you to select a fill color (including a gradient fill), snap a picture with the camera, or select from your photo albums. Once your background is set up, tap on Tools (or Line or Fill) and configure your drawing tool. For example, select Blob, with a green line color (for the outline of the blob), and a light green fill color (using the Advanced color sliders). Click done and start dragging your finger on the screen in a roughly circular, blobby shape. No need to connect the beginning and the end; when you pick up your finger, the blob completes, and fills itself in with the color you chose. The other tools work similarly. Choose the Oval, for example, tap on the screen and drag the oval out. Text is vaguely the same. Choose text, type in your text, select the text size via the slider, and then slightly tap and drag to place your text on the screen.
The zooming capabilities are a little disappointing: double tap and you zoom in. But here's a nice feature. The zoom icon works as a toggle; zoom in and then tap the zoom icon and now you can drag the zoom window around the entire image. The icon reflects what piece of the entire image the zoom window is looking at. To edit, tap the zoom icon again and go at it. Double tap to zoom back out.
A couple of other points about the drawing experience. Look out for the opacity settings! By default, all objects are at about 50% opacity. This is fine for most things, but when you start laying objects on top of each other, the results may not be what you expected. I found them rather interesting - an almost watercolor quality. Want to "deepen" the color? Just keep drawing over the same area. When you get the hang of it, it looks rather cool and you can get some interesting layering effects, but the first time you do it, you're left wondering what you did.
The undo/redo feature uses a rather creative approach. To undo (or even multi-undo) what you just did, you need to tip the iPhone to the left and return it to its upright mode. It's taken me quite a lot of practice and I still don't get it right half the time. It feels like you really need to whip the iPhone in order to get it to work, and a good chunk of the time, I end up redoing instead of undoing. (Redoing is accomplished by tipping the iPhone to the right.) In fact, sometimes I give up and whip it to the right to get it to undo. Interesting etch-a-sketch-like approach, but one that could be smoother.
Your export choices are limited: click Save Doodle and you can either save it to the gallery (to keep working on it), or "publish" the drawing to your camera roll. No, you can't share it over the web or email directly from the program or even post to Twitter. That's a small problem in my way of thinking; I've got Twitterfon, so I can post the pic to Twitter. I can email to anyone, including myself, from the Camera Roll. And besides, the drawings are in a proprietary format, so I'm not sure what good sending them to my desktop directly from the app is going to get me.
And, in fact, as I type this I see there is an update for iDoodle2 which promises better text support (including fonts and shadows), a smart pen offset (so your penpoint isn't totally obscured by your finger), multitouch zoom and pan (can't wait to see if that brings it closer to NetSketch's use of zoom), and Undo button, and a couple of other features, such as a Child Mode, saved tool settings, and rotation of background images. Stay tuned for an Update!