Surprisingly pleasant – ‎iArtbook Review

This might have been the best free drawing app that I’ve tried so far, so I just had to make a detailed review.⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ Some of the things I loved:⁣⁣⁣ - It can do basic frame by frame ANIMATIONS. No need to purchase a separate app if you don’t need transition effects.⁣⁣⁣ - It’s free, and the ads so far have been very non intrusive, took a while for me to even see the first one and I think it’s because I clicked on the pro button to see what the price was. It just had me watch one ad to have the pro features for a day. Mad respect for the dev.⁣⁣⁣ - Has layer masks and alpha lock.⁣ - The UI is sleek, just the right amount of minimalist not to clutter anything, and the most important controls are easily accessible on the hand that’s not holding the pen. Changing brush size, opacity, undoing and redoing are very easy even without gestures (but undo/redo gestures still work). I found the interface more comfortable than procreate.⁣⁣⁣ - You can drag the color toolbar, brush settings, layers and etc outside of the menu to have them floating and always available.⁣⁣⁣ - There is a left-handed option⁣⁣⁣ - You can set a floating reference image that you can resize and drag around the app.⁣⁣⁣ - It has a quick gesture menu bar, but it’s a bit clunky (read further for the downsides)⁣⁣⁣ - A good amount of nice brushes, with lots of settings to customize. Possibly one of the Pencil brushes that felt more natural between apps for me after some quick tweaking. Procreate was giving me a headache with the unnatural default tilt and pressure options.⁣⁣⁣ - You can easily insert a photo, file, or paste from the clipboard from the layers menu. It lets you resize and distort that image as needed.⁣⁣⁣ - Layers have many blend mode options, and there are simple HSL/color/sharpen/blur/edge effects you can throw in as well.⁣⁣⁣ - It has a recording option (toggable)⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ Now to the bad:⁣⁣⁣ - Shape tool is a disaster most of the time. Recognizing triangles as circles or lone lines or shapes very different than what you drew. Some times things are salvageable by pushing the align button but don’t count on it…⁣⁣⁣ - A button we could hold for making straight lines with the regular brushes while drawing would be a godsend.⁣⁣⁣ - Holding finger while using the pen to erase without having to change tools would be great.⁣⁣⁣ - No ruler tool for making parallels or partial arcs.⁣ No perspective rulers or grids.⁣⁣ - No Liquify tool⁣⁣⁣ - Thumb gesture bar is…ugh. Rather than being a little circle that you can use anywhere like on procreate, it’s stuck in one portion of the screen, taking all that vertical space. So what would happen is that I kept activating shortcuts when I was just trying to undo or move the screen. I ended up having to deactivate it.⁣⁣⁣ - If the gesture wheel were fixed, it would be nice if the shortcuts on it were customizable. Having the color picker, undo and redo there seemed a bit redundant when the regular gestures already work fine. It could be very handy for other types of operations like canvas flipping, transform, fit to screen, adding new layers, etc.⁣⁣⁣ - Double tap gestures need a customizable delay option, they’re a bit TOO quick and I’d end up not being able to select the colors I needed, and spent more time fighting to get it to work as intended. ⁣⁣⁣ - It’d be nice to be able to customize which tools we have on the toolbar, or be able to add more tools to the it when on vertical mode in iPad.⁣⁣⁣ - Would be neat to be able to double tap the frame navigator to add a new frame (or have a way to access the add frame menu from the other side at least)⁣⁣⁣ - Some tools/menus aren’t super intuitive, so having a tooltip button / in-app miniguide was something I kinda missed having.⁣⁣⁣ - Default stabilizer settings for most brushes are way too high, so it’s a little tiresome to have to reconfigure so many brushes. (But it’s very fine tuned so you can definitely get something good going if you have the patience — though once again, having more text documentation available for the brush settings within the app would have been nice).
Review by Nayelianne on ‎iArtbook.