Serious program finally – iDesign Review

I tried about ten mostly paid apps for editable (path-based) drawing and this was the only serious app, being way more sophisticated and cleanly laid out than the others, despite its lack of regular updates. There's a steep learning curve as you discover how the big detailed settings/commands window that floats over your imagery works. Seemingly missing from the online manual from the web site was the simple ability to select two adjacent control points by just clicking the curve section between them. The option to include “offset handles” let's me manually align edits on a tiny iPhone without my finger blocking the center of action! Just WOW. The interface now strikes me as being ingenious. I haven't figured out a kludge for the missing rectangular/polar array command. To access the seemingly missing Cut command, evidently needed to change the layer of an existing object, I am first making a copy and then using the delete command before pasting into a different active layer. Request: in between the existing nudge arrows also fit rotate buttons that I can double click to adjust the degree increment. Tip: you can both rotate and move and scale within a single selection by tapping back out of the rotate mode with a tap on one of the four rescale circles so you can once again drag the object around. I design jewelry these days, on paper, but dynamically editable shapes are what this program now also offers me on the fly and when I am crashing in bed, nearly asleep when the last thing I want to do is turn on a light and search for my notebook. Serious bug: odd dynamic rescaling of existing forms kicks in whenever I turn on Continuous Insert mode in order to very rapidly sketch a bunch of line segments. UPDATE: Now fixed in update! Missing feature: locking aspect ratio doesn't work for images so I can't do page layout!
Review by MrPebius on iDesign.