Paper is a fun and very useful sketch app on the iPad. Rather than rethinking how electronic pen/paper should work, the developers duplicated the joys and pains of the limited physical world we all still live in.
Since no one needs to do more than type notes or draw very detailed art on our iPhones, there has been no match for the iPad Paper available for the iPhone. Till, Draw Book came along. The app is truly, ‘in progress’ but it is a lot of fun to use it the way it is right now. Draw Book lets you zip out those quick little creative sketches when you need to say it in pictures. While the app has plenty of power to do detailed images, it’s best suited for doing what you would normally on a small pad of paper.
When a work paper is on the screen, there is a small ‘+’ at the bottom of the screen, centered. Tapping that will bring up a toolbar for quick access to undo/redo, color picker and writing/drawing tools. Select a tool to select, tap the screen to close the bar to work on a clean screen.
Selecting any of the writing tools will give you access to adjust how the tool ‘writes’ on the screen. The thin/thick stroke of a pen sure helps make any sketch better than just a thin solid line.
Selecting the ‘open book’ icon on the upper left corner takes you out of the work screen to a view of the notebook your working inside of. As well, all the pages in the notebook are flowing out to the right. Sweep through the pages to select on for viewing or future editing. The ‘Guide Book’ in Draw Book says you can sweep through the pages in a notebook using two fingers, the feature never works for me, I always go up to the notebook level to jump to another page.
Draw book allows for notebooks to be created for the many different creative sketches. The buttons along the bottom allow for a new notebook to be created, a notebook to be opened as well to delete. The art that is on the cover is the first page of the notebook, the title is editable by tapping it. Sweep left/right through the notebooks to open the one you need to view/edit.
For a quick reference, the below are screen shots of the ‘Help’ pages showing an overview of the features.
Selecting any of the writing devices, you can adjust the tip type, then variations of written line and even the transparency of the lines.
When viewing the tools across the bottom of the work area of Draw Book, there is an upper bar too. With it, you can return to the list of workbooks, clear the page, save the page to your iPhone photo library (960×640), load a background or import a photo (draw on a picture!), and share your creations on Facebook.