I was talking to one of the lecturers in the School of Art about digital drawing apps, and remembered that five long years ago I looked at 30 different drawing apps for iphone and ipad:
http://www.strangebiros.co.uk/2015/06/30-drawing-apps-in-30-days-day-1-paper.html
Today as I start working from home I thought it might be useful to revisit the apps, see if they have survived, improved or if there are even better options.
Back then I had an ipad air and probably a foam tipped stylus.. to be honest I can't remember.
Today I've got a nice ipad pro and an apple pencil.
After the investigations into ipad apps last time I switched to using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro as my main drawing application, as I found it was very well matched to my drawing style. Maybe I'll find another app to replace it?
So Back in June of 2015 I started my 30 apps with 'paper' by '53'.
It's now Called 'Paper' by 'We Transfer', the app looks familiar even though I've not used it in 5 years. I offers a collection of sketchbooks which you can flick through and add pages. There's a free version, and an £8.99 pro version that unlocks special features, no idea what they are though... The comments seem mostly positive except for the moaning about it being a subscription service.
It's actively maintained though, and the last update was 3 weeks ago. The app works well with my ipad and pencil, and the brushes and pens have a pleasant arty feel.
The palette is intuitive and the pen tracks accurately. There's no glitching, and the non standard zoom feature which used to be a magnifying glass according to my last review has been replaced with pinch and zoom. Apparently the old version used to have some weird finger twist to undo too, but that's all been changed and is now a very obvious undo arrow.
It's nice, I like the ability to add images to the covers of the virtual notebooks, and I can see it becoming a well used virtual journal style app if you like that sort of thing... definitely worth taking for a test drive.
