I’ve written before that you can’t receive the national BBC radio stations on your iPhone, because it doesn’t play Flash. The workaround is to use the fantastic BBCStreams service, which transcodes the radio signal into a format that the free FStream app can play. I’ve used this service for a while, and it works pretty well, even over the mobile network.

And they’ve been busy: BBCStreams has just announced that you can now listen to all 45 BBC local radio stations, plus BBC Radio Russia and BBC Radio Arabic. They also have plans for an iPhone app that will allow you to listen to the Beeb’s radio ouput, including when you’re overseas. But they need your support.

There have been rumours recently that Apple is planning an app that will enable the FM reception capability of the chip within the iPhone 3GS and 3rd generation iPod Touch, much like the FM radio on the latest iPod Nano. While this is good news, it doesn’t do anything for owners of earlier versions of the iPod Touch and iPhone. So the news that I will be able to listen to more BBC radio is very welcome.

Here’s what the BBCStreams app will offer:

• A dedicated app for playing all BBC radio stations (including regional stations), internationally
• Play other independent UK radio stations, again internationally
• Eliminate the need for inputting long stream URLs in FStream

The iPhone application will be free, and will not have any built-in advertising. The anticipated release date is 1st December 2009.

What’s the catch?

There’s always a catch, isn’t there? The problem is that streaming all this radio and developing the app costs money, and they need £370 to keep things going. So, if you’d like to see the service continue, and the app be built, then you’ll have to cough up. BBCStreams have also said that:

“Everybody who donates will be mentioned in the credits of the application if they would like, with a link to their company or web address if they would like that too!”

If you don’t have an iPhone, this doesn’t leave you out – BBCStreams broadcast in Windows Media (.asx) format, so you can receive it on newer Nokia N series phones, or any phone that can install Coreplayer Mobile.

So if you’re interested, the donate link is here:

http://ivirtua.chipin.com/keeping-bbcstreamscom-online-for-another-year.

They need to hit their target by October 27th, when their hosting bill is due.

This service is especially useful given that the BBC are removing their Real Media streams, which will reduce the ability of people to access their stations. Yes, of course, the Beeb should be doing streaming all this themselves in more accessible formats, but until they do, this is a service worth supporting.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with BBCStreams.com in any way.

This isn’t so much an app review as an excursion into the hinterland of the unfinished iPhone user interface. There are always tweaks – and sometimes wholesale changes – to be made to an operating system’s interface. But on mobile devices these changes face higher scrutiny, as there are usually more constraints on the end-user being able to install workarounds to better suit their preferences. This is especially true on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

So this is a look at an app that provides a different way of navigating your iPhone, borrowing from Exposé and Spaces on the Mac’s OS X. But, because it radically changes the method of switching between pages of apps, you won’t find it in the App Store. This one is jailbreak only.

I’ve been following recent articles about the iPhone user interface, from the founder of the Apple Human Interface Group – Bruce Tognazzini – and a response from Lukas Mathis (via Daring Fireball). Both of the these articles focus on how best to develop the iPhone user interface, as its complexity and use-cases increase. Mainly, it’s about navigation, and managing potentially hundreds of applications on a small handheld device. It’s a problem that Steve Litchfield has written about before on All About iPhone.

Apple only allows eleven home screens, which equals 160 apps in total. There are currently three ways of navigating to these apps:

1. Swipe across the screen
2. Touch to the left or right of the small dots above the Dock
3. Use Spotlight to type the name of the app

(With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple actually allows you to install more apps than you can fit on the eleven home screens, but these are only accessible through Spotlight – if you can remember what the app is called.)

Although I argued before that on-device search is a necessity, I’ve found that I don’t actually use it much from the Spotlight interface; I tend to use it more within applications that support search, such as Contacts. So, I usually swipe to get to my apps. But if I’m looking to launch a little-used utility that I’ve hidden away on screen 11, then I’m looking at possibly 10 swipes to get there, provided I can remember what screen it’s on. Surely there’s a better way?

Enter Orbit

On Macs, you can use Exposé and Spaces, which give you a visual overview of open apps and virtual desktops, respectively. Orbit (from developer Steven Troughton-Smith) gives you something very similar. By tapping the icon, it shows a small preview of each of the home screens. Tapping on a screen preview will take you to that home screen.

And that’s it. It’s a simple idea, and well executed. There is the occasional tiny lag in drawing the preview, but we’re talking a split-second delay rather than anything grating.

Orbit does takes some getting used to, because it’s a new way of interacting with your iPhone. For all the finger-swiping to get to that last screen, I’m very used to it now, and it’s pretty quick.

Is it worth using?

I do wonder if this is a solution that many people will need? I only have 5 or 6 home screens populated at any one time, even with all the review copies of apps that come my way. I choose to manage the complexity of my iPhone by keeping complexity *off* the device. But for power users with their phones chock full of apps, I can see that this could be very useful, especially if you combine it with one of Steven’s other apps, Stacks (think folders but with a visual preview).

The only downside is that the app has to take up a precious space in the Dock to be usable. I suppose you could put it on the home screen – then it would only be an extra push of the home button (plus the tap to launch the app) away. But it feels to me that this shouldn’t be launched like an app – it should be built into the system and invoked in a different way, perhaps a gesture on the screen, or a pull-down on the status bar. I see from comments on Twitter that the developer is considering adding the abililty to modify the home button to launch Orbit.

I’m not sure if Orbit will stay on my iPhone. I only have 5 or 6 home screens, so swiping is pretty quick, and Orbit feels like overkill. But I can see it absolutely appealing to power users. And as our mobiles become increasingly difficult to manage, we need innovative ideas such as this in order to keep up.

(A big thank you to Steven for the pre-release copy of the app).

Orbit
Version reviewed: V1.0
Category: N/A
Developer: Steven Troughton-Smith
Current Price: US$1.99
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
Cydia Store link

I’ve been happily watching BBC iPlayer on my iPhone for a while now. It’s a shame the other UK channels haven’t followed suit in opening up their offerings to iPhone users, but it’s understandable given the problems that the Beeb have had with their shows being unofficially downloaded.

But what about live TV? Catchup TV is all well and good, but sometimes you just want to watch live. Unless you’ve streamed it yourself using Slingplayer, Orb or EyeTV, then you’ve been out of luck. That is, until a couple of days ago when TVCatchup opened up a beta of their new service.

TVCatchup.com streams over 30 UK Freeview channels live. Sounds too good to be true? Surely this can’t be legal? Well, it seems it is, at least according to their FAQ.

So with that out of the way, is it any good? Nope. It’s superb!

I’ve been trying it out tonight (having been alerted by James Burland), and it has worked exceptionally over Wifi. It also worked pretty well over 3G (just occasional drop-outs), and I’ve had a report that it works over EDGE too. And the quality? Eminently watchable. Here’s a screengrab of me watching The Daily Show on More4, simultaneously on both my iPhone and my TV:

As you can see, there is a difference in the picture, because there’s about a one to two minute delay in the TVCatchup feed. But unless you’re watching side-by-side, then this is irrelevant.

What do I need to watch live TV?

Live streaming is only supported in iPhone/iPod OS 3.0 onwards. So upgrade if you haven’t done so already (Geek note: Because the service uses playlists with the .m3u8 extension, you can tell that it’s using HTTP Live Streaming, hence iPhone 3.0+).

Then, open up this URL in the iPhone’s web browser: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com, and pick a channel.

That’s it! The TV channel will then load in Quicktime on your iPhone or iPod. You can pause live TV, and also skip forward to jump to the live stream. It works in portrait and landscape mode.

What else?

There are currently only 11 channels available with the iPhone beta, but more are on the way. The company has also submitted an app to Apple, and are awaiting approval.

Also, you may wonder about the name – TVCatchup – since they are offering a live service. It was originally intended to offer recording functionality, but that was postponed while the legal position is being worked out. But apparently it’s still on the cards. If that was included in the iPhone app, it would be, quite frankly, amazing.

Aside from the current limited number of channels (but it’s a beta, so fair enough), the only other downside it that it’s restricted to UK users. But if you’re smart, just use a VPN service that gives you a UK IP address, which will get around the geographic block. You can even use that VPN on your iPhone.

So I only have one question – do you think their servers are going to be able to handle the demand?!

Extra:

I just had to include this. I’m watching The Matrix Reloaded live on my iPhone. Surely that’s worth double geek points

This will be the fifth Painting app I’ve taken a detailed look at. I didn’t set out to write a series of reviews on one particular genre of app but after looking at PhotoForge, it happened that I became aware of one interesting app after another. I had expected to come to the end of the road with the last of what I considered the big four, ‘Inspire’, especially as I loved its realistic painting simulation and thought I’d be ending the series on a high note. But wouldn’t you know it, just as I was dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on the review, Autodesk released SketchBook Mobile.

This caught my eye for a couple of reasons. To begin with, it’s the first iPhone app I’ve tried that’s been produced by a grown up company. No offence to the developers of the previous apps but they are small (often one man) teams. Autodesk, on the other hand, is a big corporation. Not just that but it makes its money producing professional grade software. AutoCAD is one of theirs, the first choice of architects and engineers all over the world. 3DS Max is software used by hundreds of games developers and special effects houses. Although they dip their toes in retail with a few consumer packages, pro’ level software costing thousands is very much their business. I was curious to see how they’d apply their experience to the iPhone OS.

Secondly, the screenshots suggested a slickly designed interface – something I always look for. Third, a couple of the listed features sounded particularly interesting. Not only did it boast “a variety of customizable brushes, including pencil, paint, texture and airbrush” but “all the tools simulate pressure sensitivity, giving each variable width and transparency that takes mobile sketching to a new level.”

C’mon, how could I not take a look?

In the interests of full disclosure I should start off by mentioning that I worked for Autodesk several years ago but I no longer have any affiliation with them and nothing to gain by giving them a favourable (or unfavourable) review if it isn’t deserved. With that said, let’s get on with it…

SketchBook Mobile is a cut down version of the desktop ‘SketchBook Pro’. I have to admit I’m unfamiliar with this software (never even heard of it before now) but a look at its description on the Autodesk website suggests it’s somewhat like Corel Painter but tailored more for Artists and Designers to use for electronic sketching as opposed to full blown Painting. With this in mind, it makes particular sense to produce a version that Artists can carry around with them for those times when inspiration strikes.

Interestingly, Autodesk say of the mobile version, “It uses the same engine as Autodesk® SketchBook® Pro painting and drawing software delivering much of the same power and functionality as the desktop application.” This suggests the guts behind the software has been worked on for years meaning it’s tried, tested, (relatively) bug free, and proven. This should give it advantages over the typical small developer working on their own painting apps from scratch, with very limited resources, little testing and the design vision of only one or two people. This last factor can equally be a good or bad thing of course, depending on the individuals involved.

EULA if you want to
When I first started the app, I was surprised to be presented with a EULA (End User License Agreement) to either accept or reject. Actually it was just a link to the Apple EULA. After, ahem, reading that I tapped ‘I agree’ and was given the option to take a Quick Tour. This turns out to be a series of screens explaining the basic controls and by the end, you’ll be ready to dive straight in.

As with similar apps, Your work is held in a Gallery screen where you can select an existing picture to work on, create a new blank one, import a photo, export your painting (to the camera roll or by emailing it) or, finally, delete the selected picture. Creating a new drawing automatically moves you into the painting screen.

Painting Screen
SketchBook (assume I mean ‘Mobile’ rather than ‘Pro’ from now on) features a number of different controls from those of its rivals. First, the four corners are reserved for some commonly used functions, with a double tap activating them. Starting at the top left and working clockwise, they are: clear layer, fit to view, redo and undo (which is limited to 10 steps). These controls work really well and having them activated with a double tap in the corner means they are never used by accident. I hope other developers shamelessly steal this idea to improve their interfaces. I’d suggest Autodesk rotate these functions as the Artist rotates the screen to allow him to continue tapping in the same relative corner as he works on the picture in different orientations.

There’s also the now traditional (for most painting apps) tap and hold gesture to activate the colour picker. SketchBook’s twist on this is that the picker’s offset from your finger allowing you to see exactly where the colour is being picked up. This makes perfect sense but hadn’t occurred to me before seeing it in action.

There’s a little symbol in the bottom centre of the screen that you tap to bring up the Tools menu (which Autodesk seem to call the Marking Menu for some reason). I found this somewhat reminiscent of the system used in Inspire. I did find the implementation in that app to be consistently annoying – the menu would pop up at inopportune times and just generally get in the way. The painting menu in SketchBook is an altogether slicker and more comprehensive affair. It took a little time to get used to tapping the symbol to bring up the tools as the area you tap is away from where the menu appears. I’m not saying that’s wrong (it does mean the menu doesn’t pop up unnecessary) but I did find it a little clunky and never felt fully comfortable with it even though it did become easier over time.

Marking (Tools) Menu
This is arranged in a ring around the central width control. To change the brush/eraser size you tap in the middle of the control and drag left to decrease or right to increase the brush width. This works nicely but as you drag, the width is only shown as a number which is difficult to relate to. It would be much more intuitive if there was a visual indication with a circular outline appearing on screen, changing as you adjust the width.

The eight tools are arranged, compass like, around the central control. In the ‘north’ position is the pencil tool, then moving clockwise, you get the airbrush, paintbrush, eraser, brushes screen, layer editor, colour selection and symmetry.

Eraser
Given that this app features layers, it’s necessary to have an eraser tool. You’ve the option of a hard or soft edged eraser, chosen in the Brush screen. The problem is that SketchBook doesn’t remember your selection. The default is hard edged and that’s what you’ll get each time you choose the eraser from the tools menu. To get the alternative, you have to select it in the brush screen. Surely it would be better to be able to park whichever version you preferred in the Tool menu so it was more easily available?

As I was using it, I found myself wanting the eraser to have an indication on screen of its size so I’d know where the edges were. I think this would largely be solved with a circle being drawn on screen showing the eraser’s edges. This wouldn’t help much when it was small (i.e. smaller than your finger) but the problem tended to occur when it was larger and I didn’t want to accidentally erase parts of my drawing.

Brushes Screen
Many users of painting apps like to have a good selection of different brushes to choose from and SketchBook delivers. At the top of the screen is a preview of the brush stroke. Directly below this is a row of icons called the ‘Marking Menu Brushes’ along with a Fill bucket. Under that row is a grid of 20 different tools.

This screen puzzled me for a while. My initial assumption when I saw it was that you choose the type of brush you want to appear on the Marking Menu from the main selection, perhaps by dragging it onto the top row. Nope. The brushes that appear on the marking menu stay the same. If you choose a different tool here and hit ‘Back’ it’s the one you’ll be painting with. Enable the marking menu and choose one of the three available and it’ll change back to that. If you want to select another after that you have to go back into the brush screen to do it.

There’s nothing really wrong with this arrangement except I can’t help feeling my initial assumption was preferable. Wouldn’t it be better to select which brush you want to paint with, the pencil you draw with and which airbrush to have as your default? But things aren’t that simple and it turns out the ‘Edit’ button allows you to make some minor changes to the default brushes.

Fill
Before I get to editing brushes, I should take a small diversion to mention that the Fill tool is selected from the brush menu. As it’s not something you need to use that often, being tucked away in here seems fair enough.

For anyone most familiar with fill tools from other iPhone painting apps, you’ll probably be surprised at how this one works. Rather than just fill the whole layer as in other apps, this one acts like a flood fill bucket from a desktop app, filling the area outward from where it’s dropped, until it meets a boundary. This means separate areas can be filled with different colours. It does have its limitations though. It only acts on the current layer (i.e. doesn’t stop if it comes across a line on a different layer. It also only fills flat colours rather than having a choice of filling as a gradient as you might expect in a desktop application. Even so, it’s a pleasant surprise to have this added functionality on a basic tool.

Edit Brushes
On the Brushes screen is a tempting button on the top right called ‘Editor’. Diving into this opens up the possibilities you have with the brushes even further. If the 20 or more brushes weren’t enough for you, this screen allows the chance to tweak them. Before I go into it too much, let me take another slight but necessary diversion.

Simulated Pressure Sensitivity
When I read one of the features of SketchBook Mobile was that it simulated pressure sensitivity, I became very interested. During my time with Brushes, there were a few moments when I thought something very clever was going on under the hood as it felt as if the app somehow took the pressure of my finger into account. That was clearly impossible but it did lead to the notion that if Apple allowed developers access to the finger’s contact patch information in the SDK, a passable pseudo pressure effect might be possible. Reading about SketchBook’s simulated pressure caused me to wonder. Had Autodesk somehow gotten access to the contact patch data allowing them to produce this amazing new feature?

In a word, no. Try as I might, pressing my finger onto the screen had little effect on the stroke no matter how hard or soft I pressed. After my initial disappointment I took some time to figure out exactly what this simulated pressure thing of Autodesks is. Select, say, the pencil, make a stroke and you won’t get the uniform line you might expect from other apps. The mark will start thin and grow into the normal sized line, tapering off again at the end. Make a series of swift strokes and they’ll have a different character to slow, deliberate ones. So, what’s going on?

I was frustrated by the apps lack of help or documentation on this, of all areas in the app, as it’s clearly the one that requires it the most. In the absence of any official explanation, I had to experiment myself to try and work it out. Here’s what I found.

Edit Brushes again
In the Edit screen, you’re able to adjust whether the marks are Soft, Solid or Hard. This simply refers to the edge of the stroke dictating how soft or sharp it will be.

Complication starts to creep in with tools to adjust the Radius, Opacity and Spacing of strokes. It seems that these settings are applied to your stroke depending entirely (as far as I could tell) on the speed you make it. Make a quick stroke and not only is the taper of the mark elongated but it’s thickness will be the minimum Radius set and much of its ‘density’ will depend on the minimum opacity. Likewise, make a slow, deliberate stroke and it’s thicker and darker depending on the maximum settings for radius and opacity but with a very short taper.

Once I’d worked this out, it did strike me as a pretty simplistic setup with which to emulate naturalistic strokes. However, it has to be said that, when I put all the technicalities out of my head and simply drew normally, the strokes started to look quite realistic. It started to look (and feel) much more like sketching than with any other app. So, while I still have to wait for better pseudo pressure sensitivity to appear on the iPhone, this is a passable facsimile for the time being.

Any changes you make to a brush in the edit screen stays with it until you adjust it again or reset it back to the factory defaults (found under the ‘?’ button on the painting screen). So, in this way you can change the default ‘marking’ tools somewhat. It’s clearly limited primarily to the thickness and opacity leaving you unable to change the shape of the mark made but I found it surprisingly useful to be able to tweak various brushes.

Layers Editor
A new painting will start with only one layer but opening this screen allows you to add up to five more if you’re running on an iPhone 3GS but only two more on other devices (apparently this limitation also applies to even the most recent iPod Touches). On this screen you can add a new layer, load in a photo as a new layer and rearrange them in the familiar iPhone manner by dragging the three line icon up and down. You can also merge the current layer with the one below and turn each layer’s visibility on and off.

Considering this is the third and most recent painting app I’ve seen that incorporates layers and especially since it comes from a big software company, it’s surprising that this implementation of layers is easily the most crude. It doesn’t hold a candle to the style used in Brushes let alone the slick 3D interface of Layers. Don’t get me wrong, it works but where the rest of the app shows a hefty dollop of design both in functionality and visual appeal, the layers editor seems rudimentary in comparison. It leaves the definite impression of being something of an afterthought.

Colour Screen
This is an interesting take on colour selection. When you launch this screen you’re shown a grid of swatches (i.e. pre-selected colours). Tapping on one selects it and returns you to the painting screen. If you want a wider choice, hit the ‘Wheel’ button and you’re given a colour wheel to play with. This is a little different to the wheels you’ll find in most painting apps. It features an outer ring showing all the hues with a diamond inside for the saturation (left/right) and brightness (up/down). Below it are RGB (Red, Green, Blue) sliders to allow precise colour selection should you need it. This seems a little unnecessary on an iPhone but given that it’s there, it strikes me that sliders aren’t the best way to input precise numbers.

Pressing ‘Back’ from here takes you to the painting screen with the ‘Swatches’ button returning you to the colour grid. Here, you can keep your brand new colour for future use by dragging it from the bar at the top of the screen into any of the swatches in the grid. This is something I’ve wanted since I tried my first iPhone Painting app and, although I’d welcome more slots to use, it works well.

Symmetry
This is a unique tool among serious iPhone painting apps in my experience. Turning this on means all your strokes will be mirrored around the vertical centre of your canvas. Paint a line of the right hand side of the screen and it will be replicated in reverse on the left.

Although it seemed a little odd to begin with, this could prove more useful than you might expect. Drawing a stylised or cartoon face is made easier but I can’t see much use for it with a serious portrait as you’re unlikely to draw a subject straight on and people don’t have perfectly symmetrical faces.

During the whole of my time with SketchBook, I was convinced it didn’t do symmetry in the other direction (i.e. horizontally). Then, watching the promo video (at the end of this review), showed it being done. The trick is to turn your device to landscape orientation before turning on symmetry. Easy when you know how.

Drawing and Painting
Rummaging through a new box of tools is fine but it’s only when you use them that you find out how good they are at getting the job done. So, following my usual habit, I chose to draw a picture of a famous figure electing, on this occasion, Ricky Gervais (I thought it particularly worth mentioning who it was meant to be as I didn’t have time to get the best likeness in the world). The painting tools available in SketchBook are broadly similar to the other painting apps I’ve reviewed (those without a blend tool at least) so, rather than create a painting as I have for previous apps of this type, I thought I’d play to its strengths and concentrate on a pencil drawing this time. In the real world, my favoured medium is pencil on paper – it’s where I produce my best work and I slowly found myself favouring that style while experimenting with SketchBook.

During the later stages, I found one particular brush to be extremely useful. It features a series of thin, parallel lines similar to the sort of mark I’d normally make to shade a drawing. When you overlay a series of strokes such as this at differing angles, you produce cross hatching. The same marks could be produced ‘manually’ but it would be a slow, laborious process. Having a pre-made brush that replicates this is a great idea and makes it easily my favourite non standard brush to be found in any painting app I’ve tried. I should say the list isn’t long as I rarely find a use for the secondary brushes provided.

Once I forgot the technicalities of the software I found that sketching really comes naturally in SketchBook. I would concentrate on one area of the drawing, zooming in to add some detail, then when I looked at the picture as a whole, I’d be surprised at how much it looked like a real pencil drawing.

As with a number of Painting apps, Sketchbook doesn’t cater for ‘landscape’ orientation (let alone upside down). This never ceases to baffle me and I can only hope it’s fixed in a future update.

Zooming
As you’d expect, this is easily achieved via a pinch but SketchBook gives you the most generous range I’ve yet seen – from 20% right in to 2500% which I found very useful for working on small details.

Performance
SketchBook’s the most laggy painting app I’ve tried. On the one hand, given that I have a 1st generation iPod Touch, you might expect it to be slow but on the other, running on my old hardware means it’s limited to 3 layers (rather than the 6 of a 3GS) and the resolution is clamped to 600×400 (as opposed to 1024×682 on the latest hardware). So, given I’m already paying the price for using a slow device with cut down features, shouldn’t I expect it to run well? The question comes down to ‘is it still usable?’ and I’d have to say a definite yes but I did have to modify my behaviour by often waiting to check the results of my strokes before continuing.

Help
Although you’re given a quick tour to get you started and a slightly more extensive help screen inside, there were a couple of areas I needed detailed help on and wasn’t available. I searched for a manual online to no avail. As I mentioned earlier, help is most noticeably absent (and needed) on how the Brush screen works, the effects of editing them and an overview of the simulated pressure sensitivity.

I’d suggest someone with no previous experience of the desktop application be put in charge of writing the Help. While little is needed for most of the application, the lack of any explanation in several key areas leaves users to fend for themselves which is pretty unforgivable.

Exporting
You can email a PNG file directly from SketchBook or save a copy into your camera roll. With my drawing, I found the former was much the best option as saving to JPG (with its compression) resulted in much of the subtle shading in my portrait being lost. This won’t apply to all work of course but it does hi light the possible problems you might come across with pencil work.

It would be nice if there were more export (and import) options in SketchBook. Given that it uses layers, the ideal would be for it to export (and import) PSD files. This Photoshop format would allow all layer and transparency information to be kept in a lossless file. Ideally, all painting apps would adopt this convention, allowing users to move their work between them to take advantage of their strengths. I can see myself sketching in SketchBook then moving into Inspire to paint. It would require somewhere for all apps to import files from (email attachments, perhaps) but it would be a welcome addition.

Verdict
You can certainly tell this is the direct descendent of a bigger desktop application. In most areas the pedigree of its thoroughly designed and tested code gives it a polish that’s often lacking in similar apps. But in one or two areas it’s surprisingly hum drum – its implementation of layers being the obvious example.

I initially approached SketchBook as another Painting app. Viewed in that way it suffers. It doesn’t have the range of tools PhotoForge has or the paint simulation of Inspire. But, it has the best box of pencils of the lot and viewed in that way, it’s impressive. I’d suggest Autodesk expand on this by introducing effects for different grades of pencil (and charcoal?) and differing textures of paper. Specialise in that area and SketchBook will really cut out its own niche in the Painting app genre – actually, it would create its own Drawing genre.

I will head back to Inspire and its fabulous blending abilities when I feel the need for colour. SketchBook, I’ll save for times when I just want to sketch. It’s the best pencil simulator currently to be had on the iPhone and until Apple allows developers access to the finger contact patch info’, or Corel release a version of Painter for the iPhone, it’s likely to remain so.

Here’s a video of SketchBook Mobile in action

Version 1.1 update
I don’t usually cover updates to apps I’ve already reviewed (who’d have time to eat or sleep if they did that?) but I thought I’d make an exception with the recent V1.1 update to SketchBook Mobile as there’re a couple of aspects to it of interest.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have experienced the little thrill that occurs whenever you connect to your network and a red badge pops up over the ‘App Store’ icon telling you an update or two is available. It’s a bit like a mini Christmas with bug fixes equating to clothes from your Granny (necessary but boring) and new features being the Buzz Lightyear (the big, flashy electronic gizmo that you’ve been looking forward to for months). Oooh, I love updates.

When you dive in to the App Store, up comes a screen listing the changes. Here’s what it said for the SketchBook update (I always grab these so I can check them in detail later).

Does anything strike you about this (apart from the missing icon – I’ve been getting that sometimes lately)? Not exactly packed with useful detail or explanation, is it? Take that first line for example:

“Patented gesture-based marking menus”

What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean? It might as well say “Squiggle flak trumpet sink” for all the sense it makes without explanation. In fairness, most of the rest of the items are less baffling. I get that I can now email a picture in the PSD format, delete a layer or change its opacity and little in the way of help is needed for them.

But some things require more detail. How do I Stipple (and, indeed, many users won’t even know what the term means) and how does the double tap to exit the Brush or Layers screen work? I have to say it’s seems to be in keeping with the original lack of relevant documentation that I mentioned in the main review. Whoever’s responsible for this has forgotten the user who’s unfamiliar with the desktop app and the new features. It’s like he (or she) has been using them for months and forgotten that they’ll be brand new to the users when the update appears.

The tutorial in the app doesn’t mention the new features but I did eventually find reference to the ‘Patented gesture-based marking menus’ in the ‘Help’ screen under a section titled ‘Sketching’. It turns out this refers to a way to quickly access certain tools. You have to press the little circle (marking menu) icon with one finger and use another to tap-drag in the direction of the tool you want from the ‘marking menu’. So, to activate the eraser for example, you’d drag in a South-East direction.

I’m not sure if I’d use this much – after a short time with it, I found it a little awkward but it’s quite possible this will change with practice and there’s always the option to turn it off. I’m puzzled that it’s described as ‘Patented’ as there’s a very similar method employed in the Inspire app which was released earlier but then I’m no expert in patent law.

I was pleased to see a feature I mentioned in the review appear (I’ve no illusions it was down to my mentioning it though). I wanted there to be visual indication of the brush size as you change it and that has now appeared in the update. One slight problem however. It’s placed at the centre of the screen – under your finger in other words, making it tricky to see small brushes. The problem is easily overcome by moving your finger down the screen and dragging it left/right from there but I’d have preferred the indicator to be placed where the numbers appear.

It’s worth mentioning how the double tap feature works as it wasn’t obvious. When you’re in the Brush or Layer screens, you can double tap on any brush (or layer) to quickly select it and get you back to the painting screen. It probably sounds obvious now but without explanation, it’s not clear where you’re meant to double tap on the screen for this to work.

The only other feature that might need a little explanation is the ability to import photos that are in landscape orientation. It’s pretty obvious except it’ll be helpful to know there’s a setting that allows you to decide which direction to turn them on import. This can be found via the ‘Prefs’ screen under then ‘?’ button.

So, a decent update with some interesting new features but please, Autodesk, add a bit of detail and explanatory text for the next update. Your much smaller competitors are putting you to shame in this area.

While I’m here there something that’s been bugging me since I wrote the original review. It strikes me as odd that the sketch Autodesk use to represent the app e.g. in the title screen (i.e. the red robot character) seems to have actually been created in the desktop application. I’ve no doubt that a similar sketch could be produced in SketchBook Mobile so why not create and use that instead? I’d have thought that using the current image is, technically, false advertising as it wasn’t produced using the mobile software which its presence implies. Still, not a big deal, I guess.

Here’s a video showing the update in action:

SketchBook Mobile
Version reviewed: V1.0 (Main review) & V1.1
Category: Entertainment
Developer: Autodesk Inc.
Current Price: £1.79
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
UK App Store Link

I began a quest of sorts a few months back when I reviewed PhotoForge. This was the first serious painting app I’d used for the iPhone and while being very impressed, it whet my appetite to see how the other major Painting apps compared.

So, next came Layers with its unique (at the time) implementation of layers. The main thing that bugged me was the lack of a blend/smudge tool (which PhotoForge had included). Most recently, I looked at the original serious painting app, Brushes. It now included its own version of layers and had a very nice, if difficult to describe, ‘feel’. But, annoyingly, it also lacked a blend tool.

So, imagine my interest when I came across ‘Inspire’ whose key feature was, according to the developer, KiwiPixel’s description on the App Store, that it “simulates wet paint on a canvas, allowing amazing blending effects.” This I had to try.

First, I should probably explain why a simple blend tool has taken on such importance. It’s entirely based on my experience with the painting apps. PhotoForge happened to have what it calls (accurately as it turns out) a ‘Smudge’ tool. While this is crude compared to Inspire’s more sophisticated blending, it was good enough to help smooth the transition between two colours or tones. However, when I used Layers and Brushes I realised how much extra work it was without a tool of this sort. With all the needless extra taps and brush strokes required, it meant a typical painting would take appreciably longer to complete.

Who’d have thought it would be so significant? Not me but the fact was that, without one, smoothing the join between two colours forced me to work the way the software wanted rather than it working the way I wanted – a pet hate of mine. Inspire promises to not only end this frustration but potentially go much further. First, though, I had to familiarise myself with it’s various screens and options.

Main Menu
After firing up the app, you get a short intro sequence showing the Inspire and KiwiPixel logos. As quick as it is, it would be nice to click through it but, unfortunately, this isn’t possible as the app uses the time to pre-load large amounts of data and crunch some big numbers in order for it to perform as well as it does on the limited iPhone hardware. Following that, up pops the Main Menu. Here you have entries for Gallery, Options, Info and Tips & Tricks.

Tips & Tricks
This section lists ten areas of help covering such items as how to flick through the settings, duplicating paintings and where to submit feature ideas. This is a very useful section and one I wish more developers would include within their app. In fairness, not all apps need much help but in one such as this with a quirky interface and unfamiliar options, the help is necessary and welcome.

Info
This screen simply shows the version number as well as a link to the developer’s website. It also encourages you to email your best paintings off to the developer so they can be included in their online gallery. The email address is shown but isn’t ‘live’. However, that’s not a problem as the process is automated elsewhere in the app.

Options
Here you get a handful of general options including one to select an offset allowing you to paint in an area just above and to the left or right of your finger. Although I’ve been curious to use an offset before, after trying this, I tended not to use it. I found it just felt more natural to paint where my finger touched the screen. Good to have the option available though.

The next few options allow you to display location with an onscreen cursor, bring up the Painting Menu by tapping the corners of the screen and have ‘flickable settings’. This last one allows you to swipe left and right while in the painting options screens rather than have to back out to the menu and go back in via the Painting Menu – you’ll want to set this to ‘On’, trust me.

Also on this screen, you’ll come across another type of help that’s scattered throughout the options screens. This is in the form of ‘i’ (for information) buttons which, when pressed, provide specific help on the control they’re associated with. I found this invaluable and, again, I’d recommend other developers follow suit.

Gallery & Browsing
This is where all your work’s stored. From here you can get back to the main menu, create a new canvas or tap on an existing painting to ‘Browse’ it. In the Browse view, as well as buttons along the top to take you back to the Gallery and start Painting, there’s a toolbar along the bottom. This includes icons to save the image to photos, email the painting, move back and forward to view your other work, duplicate painting and, finally, delete the current image.

They’re not big problems by any means but it seems slightly odd that you can’t simply swipe left and right to move to the next painting along. Also, as I found with Brushes, I can’t see a reason not to be able to zoom into a painting in Browse mode but Inspire also doesn’t offer this.

Painting mode
Hitting the ‘Paint’ button moves you from Browse to Painting mode. When I looked at Brushes, I mentioned that there was little visual difference between its view and painting modes leading to useless strokes being placed in viewing mode. Here the difference is more obvious as browse has conventional toolbars, whereas they fade away when you move into painting mode.

Painting Menu
Where other painting apps have toolbars along the top and bottom of the screen, KiwiPixel has come up with something a little different for Inspire. When you’re in Painting mode, tapping on the centre of the screen brings up the Painting Menu. This is a cluster of tools arranged in a square shape. Starting from the top left and working clockwise, you get Fill, Colour Picker, Colour Selection, Redo, Brush Usage, Brush Selection, Return to Browse Mode and Undo.

Tapping on any of these tools either performs the action or takes you to its screen, depending on the icon. One of the application’s Hints and Tips suggests a way to speed up use of the Painting Menu. When it’s activated the icons appear in the centre of the screen and spread outward, forming the ‘box’. However, once you start to become familiar with the locations of the tools, it’s possible to tap on where they’ll be before they get there. The developer calls this a “quick painting menu selection”. For example to quickly undo a stroke, you’d tap the centre of the screen then immediately tap a centimetre or so to the left to press undo and finally tap back in the centre to dismiss the Painting Menu. With practice, this should become one quick, fluid movement.

I must say that during the several days I was using the app, I didn’t get up to speed enough to be able to take advantage of this quick selection method. I was stuck in the slow lane, peering at the screen to find the icon then prodding away carefully. I’m sure this quick method will work for many (maybe even me, if I keep at it) but if my experience is anything to judge by, not everyone will find it easy and quick to use, at least in the short term.

As it’s called up with a single tap on the screen, it’s possible that the occasional painting stroke will activate the menu when it isn’t wanted. If you find that happening too often for your liking, there’s the option (in the Main Menu options screen) to only activate it with a tap in the corners of the screen rather than the centre. The idea is that you’ll rarely be painting in a corner so are unlikely to bring it up by accident. The downside is that the ‘quick painting menu selection’ then becomes impossible.

Once I got into my stride with the painting, I did find that the painting menu would appear when it wasn’t wanted. This seemed to happen a lot so I tried setting it to only appear with a tap in the corner. This certainly stops the menu appearing unnecessarily but I found it frustrating as it became awkward to tap in the corner then move my finger to the middle of the screen to tap the tool I wanted then the centre of the screen to dismiss it. So, in the end I turned the option off and settled for living with the painting menu popping up when it wasn’t wanted. I hope the developer either tweaks the workings of the painting menu or offers a more conventional arrangement in the future.

At the moment the Painting Menu only really works in Portrait mode. It appears in Landscape but unrotated thus making it cumbersome (and impossible to use the quick painting menu selection). This is planned to be fixed in a future update. I hope the developer also allows for upside down use (both for Portrait and landscape modes) as I for one, like to use this orientation regularly to get a fresh perspective on the painting.

Well, that’s the Painting Menu, but what of the actual tools?

Fill
Inspire keeps track of the fill colour so when you open the screen, the last fill colour is already chosen. Selecting another is done as you’d expect: tap somewhere within the wheel and adjust the brightness and opacity sliders. In the top right of the colour window is a grid icon. Pressing this takes you into the Grid Palette which can be found both here and in the Colour Selection screen.

Unlike all the other painting apps I’ve tried, Inspire keeps swatches of colours so you can easily reuse them but I have to admit to finding this initially baffling. I’d assumed it was a case of my manually adding the colours I wanted to the palette but try as I might, no end of double tapping, swiping, sliding or magical incantation would add the colours.

The developer was able to set me straight. It actually works in a much simpler way. When you pick a new colour and press ‘Done’, it’s added to the palette of 80 swatches. If it’s the same as an existing colour, it’s not added. Simple. The developer went on to explain the positioning of the colours.

“They are sorted in order starting from the most recently selected colours. So if you go into the colour picker, select a green colour, for example, then press Done, next time you go into the colour picker you should see the green colour at the beginning of the previously used colours grid in the top-left square. If a colour that is already in the grid is selected, it gets removed from its current spot and moved to the top – you should never see duplicate colours in the grid.”

I was curious to know if there was a different set of 80 colours for each painting but quickly discovered the same palette grid applies to all paintings. I’m in two minds as to whether I’d prefer a different palette for each painting or not. I’m currently erring on the side of not as I didn’t really make use of it during my painting. I found I changed colour so often (tweaking its opacity counts as a different colour), that colours tended to slide off the end of the palette grid very quickly. I’d prefer the option to reserve, say, the bottom third of the grid for my own choice of colours. I’d find it very useful to be able to drag a colour from the changeable palette into my permanent one. The developer is considering this suggestion for a possible update in the future.

Colour Picker
This acts much as you’d expect from other painting apps with the exception of how you bring it up. It’s one of the tools in the Painting Menu and can only be enabled from there. I have to admit I really missed the ability to bring it up with a simple tap and hold gesture as most other painting apps now feature. So much so, that if I had one wish to change the app, it would be to add this ability. In a single stroke a healthy chunk of the frustration I had using the Painting Menu would disappear. I don’t think it would interfere with the current tools at all and would just add that functionality for those of us who prefer it – come KiwiPixel, pretty please?

Colour Selection
This is identical to the fill colour screen with the exception that you are shown the ‘old’ and ‘new’ colours whereas in the fill colour screen, it just displays the current colour.

When I first saw the colour screen, there was something about it that bothered me a little. Something that made it seem a bit old fashioned somehow. It soon struck me what it was. Transparency is indicated by a chequer pattern. But, unlike other Painting apps that use the Photoshop style chequer, the pattern chosen for Inspire reminds me of the type used by drawing applications of old such as Deluxe Paint and Animator Pro.

These worked back when your palette of colours was a heady 256 (and sometimes less). So, the result was that there’s a slight visual incongruity between a colour wheel that clearly shows thousands of colours and what looks like a limited palette of 256. This isn’t a big problem of course (it’s not even a small problem) but I have to admit it did continually nag at me throughout my time with Inspire. Admittedly it’s probably only me that will be bothered at all by this.

Brush Usage
Having an app that allows you to play with realistic blending, requires more sophisticated options than normal so it’s no surprise that Inspire includes some specialist controls.

The Brush Usage screen is where you’ll find such controls as ‘Paint Load Amount’, ‘Pressure’ and ‘Automatic Reload’. Not the sort of thing most users will be familiar with. It’s here that the little help screens come into their own, explaining the functions of all the weird and wonderful buttons and sliders.

So, for example, you learn that ‘Paint Load Amount’ alters the length of a stroke before it runs out of paint. Reduce this slider and your stroke will be shorter. Lengthen it and it’ll go on that much longer. I tended to keep this at the maximum length and, indeed, wished there was an option for an infinite amount of paint but the developer isn’t keen on this as it goes against the principle that Inspire simulates real paint which is difficult to argue with.

The opposite of this is having a paint load of zero – a ‘Dry Brush’ in other words. What use is a brush with no paint? Plenty. In real life, if you move a dry brush through an existing stroke what would you expect to happen? The Brush would drag some of the paint it runs through with it, spreading it out as it goes. And this is exactly what happens in Inspire. I’ll come back to this when I talk about what it’s like to paint with.

If you have the Palette Knife selected as your brush, there’s the option to set ‘Alternate Mode’ on. This allows you to scratch away at your painting as you could do in real life. Why would you want to? Mostly to get pure white hi-lights. This is as close as you’ll get to an eraser in Inspire and it might be useful to be able to alter the size but it’s a nice addition as it stands.

Brush Selection
If you set the Main Menu ‘Flickable Settings’ option to ‘On’, you can swipe back and forth from the Brush Usage Screen. To its right is Colour Selection and to the left is the Brush Selection screen. Unlike the previous screen the controls on this one will seem reassuringly familiar. The first one selects between four brushes: Flat, Round, Fan and Palette Knife. The second is a slider to adjust the brush size.

I couldn’t help feeling both the Brush Usage and Brush Selection screens would benefit greatly from a redesign. For example, if you’ve chosen a round brush, there’s no need for a rotation control. Also, the alternate mode option only applies when the palette knife is selected.

When you have, say, the chisel brush selected and set a rotation of 45 degrees, the indicator changes to reflect this. However, the almost identical looking size indicator on the Brush Select screen remains upright. This seems odd and it strikes me that combining the rotation and size controls would not only avoid the confusion but also save space too.

From a graphical design point of view the Brush Usage screen suffers from a bit of odd alignment of some of the elements. You may think this is being picky but a slick graphic design (or even just a tidy up) would add to the clarity and usability of the software.

Actually, I’ve got a feeling that with some thought and a re-design, both these screens could probably be combined into one.

Zooming and Panning
In a satisfyingly familiar way, you can zoom in and out by using a pinch. Panning is a somewhat less predictable affair as it has to be done as part of a zoom. To quote the help text on panning, “touch two fingers on the screen then use one of them to move around.” Brushes uses a very similar idea but pulls it off perfectly. The version you encounter in Inspire, feels more like the clunky prototype.

It starts to become particularly irksome if you want to pan more than one screens worth as you have to repeat the two finger zoom and pan again. Otherwise, you’ll do a pan then, without thinking, try to pan further with another one finger drag which results in an unwanted brush stroke. In the end though, I found the simplest thing was to pan using a two finger gesture. I hope this gets cleaned up in the future as it has a way to go before it becomes the seamless experience it should be.

Painting
As ever, the heart of a Painting app is, naturally, the Painting. An app could have the slickest interface in the world but if the painting’s crap, what’s the point? Likewise, its interface might be full of awkward design and poorly implemented controls but paint like a dream. Which side does Inspire come down on?

I found it took me some time to really get my head around the Painting in Inspire. Not because it’s hard to do but more because it’s such a different experience to the other Painting apps I’ve used until now. Where they replicated the experience of applying colour to a surface in a very rudimentary way, Inspire simulates paint more realistically than I might have imagined possible on the iPhone. A few simple examples soon made me realise this was something different.

Make a brushstroke and it gradually peters out of paint, thinning as it goes. Wow.

Turn on the dry brush option, zig zag it through your first stroke and watch the paint being spread backwards and forwards. Double wow.

Choose the palette knife, turn on alternate mode and scratch away some paint, leaving the gleaming white canvas shining through. Triple wow with sugar on top.

Let’s get this out of the way now – I luurrve painting with this thing.

It really feels like you can ‘work’ the paint in Inspire. In other apps, you plop the paint on and it’s instantly ‘set’. Any other marks you make on top of it have no effect but in Inspire making a stroke involves not just the current colour but any and all colours that it comes in contact with. In this way, the painting feels organic and workable, allowing the Artist to approach it much more like a real painting.

Mix yellow with red and you get orange, just as you would in the real world. Attempt the same thing in the only other Painting app I’ve tried with something similar (the smudge tool in PhotoForge) and you get a dirty smudge. There are limits to the colour mixing abilities of Inspire but these are down to the RGB colour model used and applies to similar desktop apps. Even so, after using other iPhone Painting apps, the blending and colour mixing possible in Inspire are a revelation.

So, after the initial fireworks of mixing colours and pushing paint around, what’s it like to create a real picture using it? Interesting, surprising, experimental and fun.

I opted to paint a picture of UK comedian Jo Brand as she has an interesting face that I thought would particularly suit blending. I was right but found the work went through several stages starting off pretty badly. This was a combination of a couple of things, not least the fact that I began with the intention of producing a caricature but changed my mind halfway through and aimed for a more ‘straight’ portrait. The change in the proportions were tricky to fix and I found myself wishing Inspire would allow me to scale the picture’s height, which, of course it doesn’t. I also thought it would have helped me fix things if layers had been available but they’re not and I can live without them.

The other main problem I had with the portrait was down to me learning Inspire as I went. What was possible and how to use the tools takes a little time to learn and I think less experienced users are likely to find things somewhat confusing. But time spent experimenting is rewarded with some great effects and surprising techniques.

For example, it dawned on me there’d be a value in underpainting with Inspire. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, underpainting is a technique used (especially in Oils) where an underlying colour is applied and thinner washes of a different colour are laid on over the top. The result is a combination of the second colour with the underpainting partially showing through. This is often used in portraiture where the underlying tissue affects the appearance where the skin is thin – around the eyes, for example.

Although I guess I could apply colour in thin (i.e. fairly transparent) strokes to try and replicate the traditional use of underpainting, I discovered a different technique worked better here. I found the fully opaque flesh tone brush strokes mixed in a little with the underlying canvas colour (blue in this case) creating a nice effect. I was learning as I went on the portrait so didn’t have the chance to fully explore the technique but this unexpected finding shows how flexible Inspire’s painting simulation might be.

This blending also results in paintings with a unique look compared to other painting apps. There’s a temptation to overdo it and smooth everything out until it looks artificial (and I think I may have gone a touch too far with the portrait) but as with all tools, it’s up to the user to apply his skill and experience to work out the best way to use it. After I finished with the portrait I had a second go with a quick sketch of an apple. I think this is a definite improvement and shows Inspire is flexible enough to allow for experimentation and improvement.

Where other apps offer several brushes to choose from, in practice, I’ve found them to be pretty similar. However, the difference between the 4 (well, 4.5 if you include the palette knife’s alternate mode) brushes in Inspire does result in noticeably different effects. Although I tended to stick with the round brush most of the time, there were definite occasions when the use of the other brushes was called for. I don’t recall this happening as much with the previous painting apps I’ve used.

Given the sophistication of what Inspire’s doing, it runs very well. There were times when a series of quick strokes did lag a tiny bit but not to the degree where it bothered me (and you can probably tell how fussy I am). I should also note I was running on a 1st generation iPod Touch which, by current standards seems positively steam powered, making its performance doubly impressive.

Trouble in paradise
As advanced as its painting is, I was continually frustrated by other aspects of Inspire, not least the painting menu. I’m all for new ideas and innovation but when there are proven, reliable methods for something as fundamental as presenting the tools to the user, my vote goes to the tried and tested. Ok, so maybe it will suit me better with more practice but for the moment it’s a bit of a pain to use. I really hope this is at least tweaked to be less of an obstacle to painting. This is especially true of the colour picker and, as mentioned before, my one wish for the next update would be to include the ‘tap and hold’ gesture (as seen in Brushes and Layers) to bring up the colour picker.

My second wish would be for brush presets. Given all the options available, it can be relatively time consuming switching from one brush setup to another. I think it’s screaming out for the ability to create user defined presets, giving quick access to favourite sets of brushes. If this can be implemented in an elegant way that allows quick switching between setups, it’ll be a major boost to workflow. Happily, the developer has indicated that this feature will be considered.

Exporting
Inevitably, at some point you’ll want to transfer your painting to your PC. With Inspire you can save it to the camera roll and email from there. Also, it’s possible to email directly from the ‘Browse’ view. By default, the ‘To’ field is filled in with the developers contact address to send your picture for inclusion in their online gallery but you can, of course, change that for your own email address to send it to yourself.

The blending in Inspire makes you feel like you’re working at a higher resolution than normal but the developer assures me it’s the same old native iPhone res’ of 320×480. In the present version of Inspire there’s no way to get a copy of your painting at a higher resolution. However, the developer is working on that feature for the next version. This will use a free to download ‘Inspire Exporter’ application that will be available for both Windows and Mac. This will allow output resolutions from 1 to 6 times the original resolution, producing images up to 1920×2880.

The developer also tells me that future updates will include the ability to open an image from your Photos to use as a starting point (instead of a blank canvas), different canvas sizes and more types of paint brushes.

Natural Media
I berated the developers of both Layers and Brushes for using the term ‘Natural Media’ to describe their apps as I don’t think they can justifiably be described in that way. It shows admirable restraint on the part of KiwiPixel that they don’t make the same mistake even when their application arguably merits the term. Still, given it’s a registered trademark of Corel, I still think it’s wise not to use it.

Verdict
Inspire certainly has its share of rough edges and sharp corners to fix such as bringing up the colour picker, zoom/pan and making the paint menu less aggravating. There are also a couple of features I’d like to see added. Brush presets would speed up work flow and user selected permanent colours in the grid palette would be more useful than the current arrangement.

Despite these gripes, I found using Inspire to be the most satisfying painting experience I’ve yet had on the iPhone. It’s the nearest thing to ‘real’ painting I’ve found on the platform. Using a dry brush to work the paint really feels like I’m involved in an organic, creative process.

As much as I hate to say it for fear of putting anyone off trying it for themselves, It’s not really the painting app I’d recommend to the casual user. They’d likely be a bit baffled by a dry brush and what to do with the palette knife. There’s no doubt that to get the best from Inspire requires experimentation and practice.

To make it easier for novice users, I’d suggest the developer redesign the brush options, perhaps keeping a tweaked version of the current setup as the ‘Pro’ version while offering everyone else a selection of presets familiar from the real world to play with.

Currently, I think ‘real’ Artists (people who already have some experience pushing actual paint around with a real brush) are likely to be the ones best equipped to appreciate its capabilities and get the most from Inspire. This, I think, is the true indication of Inspire’s quality – it’s like the other painting apps are kids crayons and this is a proper set of Artists oils. You can almost smell the linseed oil.

Inspire
Version reviewed: V1.2
Category: Entertainment
Company: KiwiPixel
Current Price: £2.99
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
UK App Store Link

It’s rare for an iPhone app to make a splash out in the ‘real’ world but Brushes has. Famous for being used to paint the cover to The New Yorker magazine and a favourite of no less an Artist than David Hockney, it’s one of those rare apps to cross, at least somewhat, into the main stream.

Having recently reached it’s first anniversary on the App Store and with strong competition appearing all the time, Brushes was starting to look in danger of falling behind. Now, though, version 2.0 has been released. Has it done enough to retain the iPhone Painting crown?

To bring you up to speed, I’ve previously looked at PhotoForge and Layers. While I was extremely impressed with the implementation of layers (the feature) in Layers (the app), my preference for painting remained PhotoForge. Despite a couple of workflow bottlenecks, the inclusion of a smudge tool makes up for them, allowing me to quickly and easily blend colours together. This cuts down the work and time required for a painting by an appreciable amount.

Anyone looking into the Painting app genre, can’t help but hear about Brushes. It does now carry a bit of baggage around from its growing fame but I wasn’t aware how much effect this had on me until I ran it for the first time.

First impressions
Although this is a review of V2.0, I installed Brushes before the update came out so my first sight of it was V1.1. About three minutes after installation, I found myself checking the developer’s website and reading through the user’s guide (PDF link). Why? Because I couldn’t believe that was it. There were only a couple of screens and a handful of features. I was expecting much more.

This isn’t a fault of the app of course. It’s my own, based on the mental picture I’ve built up through reading about it and hearing the comments left by many of its fervent users. Also, assessing an app on its tool or screen count is a bad way to judge. After all, a pencil is one of the simplest tools in the world but a talented Artist can conjure up a masterpiece filled with breathtaking detail and subtlety with one. The tools an Artist uses are probably the least important factor in how good the end result will be. Still, the better they are, the easier it makes the process. Despite knowing all that, I found myself initially disappointed with what Brushes offered. I had to start again.

So, having made my preconceptions stand in the corner with its back to the room, I returned to Brushes with a fresh eye and a determination to look at it with an open mind.

First impressions… again.
When you first start Brushes, you’re presented with the Gallery view where you’ll discover a few sample paintings. These show a nice range of styles and show what’s possible with the app although the developer may want to add one or two new ones that demonstrate the use of layers. From here you can load an existing photo (to act as a starting point for the painting), export your paintings using a built in web server (more on that later) or press the ‘+’ button to create a blank canvas.

Tapping a picture opens it up in viewing mode where you can see it full screen, move back and forth through the paintings in your gallery or press play to start a slideshow. There’s also an icon to delete the current picture and an option button allowing you to duplicate the painting or save a copy into the camera roll.

I’d be happy to bet that every new user of Brushes has done exactly what I did (several times) and tap away uselessly at the screen here, trying to paint. What you need to do is press the Edit button to actually get painting. I’d suggest making the difference between the view and edit modes visually more obvious, perhaps by displaying the toolbars in a different colour or adding a border around the pictures. I don’t see why you shouldn’t also be able to zoom in and out while in view mode but that’s not a big deal.

Painting Mode
Pressing ‘+’ in the Gallery or ‘Edit’ while in viewing mode, gets you painting. Assuming you started a new one, here you’ll see a plain white canvas with a navigation bar along the top providing a Gallery button and a (rather pointless) ‘Done’ button that merely returns you back to viewing mode. The lower toolbar consists of icons for layers, brush/eraser, undo, redo, eyedropper (colour picker) and colour. I’ll take these functions one at a time in reverse order.

Colour screen
This is dominated by the colour wheel where you simply tap within it to make your selection. Above that are four swatches, the end two providing quick access to black and white. The middle two show your previous and new colours. These display the colours against black and white backgrounds to give an idea how the transparency affects it.

Below the wheel are sliders for brightness and opacity. When you’re happy with your colour choice, pressing ‘Done’ takes you back or ‘Cancel’ returns to the painting screen without changing the colour.

Colour picker
The other way to select colour is by using the ‘eyedropper’ tool (which I prefer to call the colour picker). As with other painting apps, this can be summoned into existence either by tapping the icon or pressing and holding on the painting. When I originally reviewed Layers, I was frustrated about how long you had to hold for the picker to appear (although that’s now been fixed in a recent update) but Brushes works just fine, not requiring too long a hold before it appears.

Undo/Redo
Undo and redo work as you’d expect. The documentation suggests the undo stack isn’t limitless but I didn’t ever find myself running out of undo steps while painting. It should be noted that unlike PhotoForge, the undo stack isn’t kept between sessions so once you’ve gone back into the Gallery screen or quit Brushes, you’ll no longer have the option to undo any strokes made in a previous session. This isn’t unreasonable but with a similar app allowing you to undo from a previous session, it would make a nice addition.

Brushes and Eraser
Next stop along the toolbar is the Brush icon which takes you into the Brushes screen. This has two modes, toggled by pressing either the Brush or Eraser buttons at the top, left of the window.

Brush mode allows you to select your brush type and adjust the stroke’s opacity. You can also change its size either by using the slider or fine tuning it with a tap on the ‘-’ or ‘+’ buttons at either end. The precise size of the brush is shown at the top in pixels. You can increase the size up to 64 pixels wide but the largest I tended to use was only around half of that – anything above that didn’t really allow me to work to the level of detail I wanted. Still, good to know the larger size is there if I need it.

How you change the brush type isn’t immediately obvious but the three dots above the example stroke provide the clue. As with the various pages of the home screen on the iPhone, changing from one to another merely requires a swipe left or right.

For a painting app, and especially one called ‘Brushes’, I was surprised to discover there were only three to choose from: smooth, fine bristly and rough bristly. This doesn’t particularly bother me as I tend to quickly settle on my favourite brush in an app and stick with it (rough bristly in this case). However, judging by the comments I’ve read on various forums, having a wide selection of brushes seems to be an important feature for a great many people. This has always puzzled me as it’s what you do with the strokes that has the greatest effect on the end result rather than the type of brush used. The character of the brush largely disappears after a few strokes. Even so, it does seem a bit mean having such a small selection to choose from.

Pressing the eraser icon changes the screen over to the second mode. Unlike the Layers app, the controls for the eraser are beautifully integrated into the same screen as those for the Brushes. Barely a thing changes between the two modes as the controls for one serves the other. Although the example stroke remains much the same, it now displays the strength of the eraser by showing the familiar Photoshop style chequer pattern (indicating transparency). The more powerful the eraser, the more transparent the stroke becomes – brilliantly intuitive.

When you leave this screen while in Eraser mode, the toolbar icon changes to match this showing which mode you are in. It switches back when you return to brush mode.

Layers
This is the second Painting app I’ve looked at with this feature. The first one was ‘Layers’ where I was so impressed by the implementation that I couldn’t imagine it being done any other way. Brushes does it another way. Having a good idea of how long software development takes, I have no doubt that layers have been worked on for Brushes for quite some time and its appearance now is certainly not a direct result of the arrival of the Layers app as many might think. This gives us an interesting opportunity to see how two separate developers tackle the same problem and come up with different designs.

At the top of the screen, the toolbar allows you to import a photo as a new layer and provides a ‘Done’ button to return you to the painting screen (a double tap on a layer does the same). The lower toolbar gives the options to fill a layer with a colour, merge the active layer down with the one below, undo, redo, delete current layer and create a new one.

Where the Layers app presented layers in a 3D display with an animated transition from the painting screen, Brushes cuts abruptly from the painting screen to layers and uses a ‘hand of cards’ metaphor to display and manipulate the layers. This does result in them being shown relatively small on screen but leaves room to include a preview of how all the layers look together.

Manipulating the layers is easy. Moving is a case of dragging from one position to another and deleting is achieved by simply selecting a layer and tapping the ‘trash’ icon. Adding a new layer and merging two is pretty self explanatory from the icons.

Brushes has a couple of features that Layers currently lacks. First, is the ability to easily adjust the opacity of each layer via a slider. Second, touch and hold on a layer and the now familiar ‘Copy’ option pops up. Move to another painting and (assuming you don’t already have the maximum number of layers), touch and hold again and the Copy & Paste options appear, allowing you to paste layers from one painting to another. Not something I had a use for during my time with the app but a handy feature to have nonetheless.

You can have a maximum of four layers which is one less than you get in ‘Layers’ but, as with that app, I don’t think the limited number is much of a restriction. If the Beatles can record Sgt. Pepper using a four track, you shouldn’t have too much trouble creating your sketch with four layers. This is particularly true with Brushes as it allows you to copy and paste layers between paintings so you could theoretically have any number of them on the go and then merge them down to a final four in the finished picture. In practice I can’t imagine doing this myself but it’s another nice option to have in reserve should you need it.

When you use the fill tool, a version of the colour selection screen appears, allowing you to choose a fill colour that’s different from your current painting colour. This screen puzzled me a bit as it includes an opacity slider. This seems redundant as you’re already able to set and change a layer’s transparency in the layers screen. So, it’s possible to select a fill colour with an opacity of, say, 50%, come back into the layers screen and, even though the layer is set to 100% opacity, it shows as 50% transparent. As far as I can tell, this duplication of opacity sliders doesn’t allow you to do anything more than if you simply had the layer opacity slider, hence my puzzlement.

Starting a new painting creates one with two layers by default. The lowest layer is filled with white and you paint on the next layer up. It’s possible to erase the colour on the bottom layer (i.e. the ‘paper’) which will display the familiar chequer pattern indicating transparency.

When you’re back in the painting screen, the layers icon reflects how many layers exist (with white lines) and which is currently selected (with a longer line). This is a lovely bit of design, giving you all the information needed in an efficient way without hogging screen space.

Which implementation of layers people will prefer between Layers and Brushes is difficult for me to predict. They both have their plus and minus points – the layers are displayed larger in Layers, Brushes shows a preview, Layers animates the transition from the painting screen, Brushes allows you to adjust the opacity of each layer, Layers gives the option to rotate layers and Brushes allows you to copy and paste layers between paintings. They could both slug it out, feature for feature to a standstill.

Overall though, I prefer the larger, animated, 3D style used in Layers but there’s not a lot in it and Brushes succeeds in also offering a different but perfectly usable implementation of layers. The bottom line is you don’t really need to base your buying decision on the layers feature as they both work fine.

Painting
Enough exploration – on with the painting.

As mentioned before, I was initially surprised at the apparent lack of features in Brushes but the proof of the pudding is in the painting (or something like that) so, I jumped right in. At first it seemed pretty standard stuff. Pick a colour, size the brush, zoom into the area I want and start painting.

There was the inevitable process of finding the best way to do stuff given the tools available but once I got over that hump, I started to notice little things. Or, rather, I’d slowly realise that, here and there, something worked a bit better and more naturally than I was used to. It’s actually quite difficult to pin down the various things that just feel right but here’s an example.

Brushes doesn’t come with a blend/smudge tool which I’ve found to be a great aid and speeds up the process of painting. But, while using Brushes, I found I developed my own way to blend between two colours that seemed quicker to me than the one described in the user’s guide as it only required one colour to be picked rather than several. Let me explain.

Imagine you have a splodge of dark blue next to a patch of light blue and want to blend between them. First, use the colour picker to change to the darker shade then make the opacity fairly low (25% or so). Now make a stroke on the lighter patch near (and parallel with) the border of the colours where you want the blend to begin. Move slightly closer to the darker patch and make another parallel stroke so it overlaps the first stroke a little. Then, move slightly closer to the darker patch again and make a third stroke so it overlaps the second and so on until you’re well into the dark patch. If you’ve done it right, the transition should be smoothed out.

There’s nothing clever about this technique at all but in other apps my teeth would be on edge doing this. In Brushes, it’s not nearly as much pain to do as I would have thought as I’d subconsciously been expecting the toolbar to interfere but with the clever coding, it largely stayed out of the way, allowing me to work the way I want to.

In Brushes, a single tap hides the toolbars and another one bring them back. But, while painting, when you slap down several ‘dabs’ or strokes in quick succession (as you might, for example, when blending between two colours), the app (usually) doesn’t get confused and have the toolbar repeatedly popping in and out. I don’t know if this is clever coding, luck or black magic. All I care about is that the app behaves as I’d like it to.

Don’t get me wrong, a dedicated blend/smudge tool would make this technique redundant (and good riddance to it) but given that I have to work this way, it’s made as painless as possible. This is just as well as the developer says that although a blend/smudge tool is a common request, it’s not something he has immediate plans for.

Another little touch that makes quite a difference is the fact that the opacity level doesn’t change when a new colour is picked. In the version of Layers I reviewed, whenever you used the colour picker to select a new colour, the opacity level was reset back to 100%. In Brushes, the opacity doesn’t change until you want it to. I should point out that a recent update of Layers has fixed this behaviour and it no longer resets the opacity automatically.

There’s something about the ‘feel’ of painting with Brushes that adds to the experience. For example, there were times when I’d swear the app recognised the pressure of my stroke! Yes, I know that’s impossible so you can probably imagine my surprise when I’d make a stroke, lifting my finger off at the end and the stroke appeared to get correspondingly weaker at the same point. After scratching my head for some time the only two explanations I could think of were 1) I was imagining it or 2) Brushes took the contact patch of the finger into account and altered the size of the brush accordingly, giving it a pseudo pressure sensitive effect.

I had to check on this with the developer, Steve Sprang. This was his reply: “The OS may have information about the size of the contact area, but that information is not accessible to 3rd party apps. Perhaps you’re just seeing subtle differences in paint opacity at the ends of the stroke?”

Which obviously suggests it was my imagination – shame. However, it does lead to two conclusions. First, the fact that I had this feeling while using Brushes is an indication of the excellent ‘feel’ it imbues – not a very scientific thing to say but that’s the effect it had on me. Secondly, it prompts me to wish Apple allowed access to the contact patch information in the SDK (or, at least, make use of it themselves), giving the iPhone pseudo pressure sensitivity for free! Painting apps could adjust the strength of the stroke according to the pressure applied, piano apps could allow soft and loud notes to be played depending on how ‘hard’ you press the key… Come on Apple, how about it?

Zoomin’ and a Pannin’
A pinch allows you to zoom out to 70% and in to a generous 1600% which really puts your nose right up against the pixels and seems, if anything, a little too much – which is good as it’s unlikely you’ll feel the need to zoom in further.

You’re also able to double tap on an area to immediately zoom between 100% and your last zoom level. If you find yourself accidentally double tapping and zooming when you didn’t mean to, you can turn this off in the Settings app if you prefer. Although I didn’t use this feature much I didn’t find it was triggered accidentally so I was happy to keep the option switched on, just in case. Another nice touch is the ability to pull the picture away from the edge of the screen when you’re zoomed in making it easier to paint up to the edges. When you zoom in or out to anywhere near 100%, Brushes ‘snaps’ to it making that much easier to return to normal view although the double tap feature makes that less of a necessity.

Panning is accomplished with a two finger drag but it’s tweaked to work while you zoom. It’s difficult to describe but they work together very fluidly making it a feel a completely natural action to zoom and pan simultaneously. Another example of something that simply feels ‘right’.

Brush size bottleneck
For all its good points, inevitably, there are some additional features that I felt were required. Apart from the missing blend/smudge tool, I wish there was a way to alter the size of the brush on the fly without having to go back into the brush screen to do it. I found this quickly became the main bottleneck, slowing me down from painting. Not by a huge amount of course but you tend to notice the small stone in your shoe when you’re running.

I always try to propose fixes to problems I find in apps and here I’d suggest using a three finger gesture to resize the brush without needing to activate the brush screen. Moving the fingers apart would increase the size and, obviously, bringing them together reduces it. Alternately, perhaps a two finger gesture turning clockwise to increase brush size and anticlockwise to decrease it would do the job – either way, options are there for a solution to this.

I’d also like a permanent indication on screen of the current size of the brush. It’s easy to forget what size you have selected after being distracted with picking a new colour, messing with layers or whatever. My suggestion (as it was with the Layers app) would be to include a circle in the brush (and eraser) icon – a large circle would represent a big brush and, obviously, a smaller one indicates a small brush with various sizes in between.

I also wish that when I turn my device upside down, the toolbars switch round but the image remains the same way up. I often draw upside down as a good way to get a fresh perspective on a picture. This is particularly handy if you’re drawing from a photo which you can also turn upside down. As it stands, you have to work the controls the wrong way up which makes it tricky to say the least. Working in landscape orientation would also be made much easier by the toolbars adapting to it. Why developers don’t routinely incorporate this feature is beyond me as it’s my understanding that it’s relatively easy to code (easy for me to say, I know).

As with all Painting apps (although I may have neglected to mention it before), I’d also love to have dodge and burn tools, maybe as two extra modes on the brush screen. These would allow users to easily lighten and darken colours meaning less need to fiddle around trying to find a colour’s neighbouring hi-light and shadow tones.

Exporting
When you’ve finished your painting, there are a couple of ways to get your work off the iPhone and onto a computer. Arguably the easiest is to email it to yourself. To do this you have to first save it to the camera roll by selecting the ‘Add to Photos’ option from the viewing mode toolbar (which first gives you the option to rotate your painting). You’d then exit Brushes and run the Photos app where you have a choice of two ways to email it. First you could select and copy your picture, go to the Mail app and paste it into an email. This gives you a 320×480 JPG. The other option is to email directly from Photos which results in a 533×800 JPG. Although you get a higher res output using the second method, it does appear to be a rescaled version of the 320×480 image i.e. there’s no extra detail, just a stretched version of the smaller one.

Your better bet is to use Brushes inbuilt web server to copy the paintings directly to your Computer. This is easily done by tapping the ‘Connect’ icon in the Gallery screen and following the instructions. It’s simply a case of firing up the browser on your computer and typing in the address displayed on the Brushes screen. Assuming they are on the same wireless network, the paintings in Brushes Gallery appear in your browser and you can then right click and save the files in either PNG or ‘brushes’ format. The PNG file comes across as 320×480. Not only does it mean getting your painting out in a lossless format but PNG will also retain any transparency in the picture.

By far the best method to get hold of your work in high resolution is to open the ‘brushes’ file using the free viewer available to download. To quote the description on the website, the viewer “allows you to replay your Brushes paintings stroke for stroke, export them at very high resolutions (up to 1920 x 2880), and even export them as QuickTime movies.” Unfortunately, the viewer is only available for the Mac and, therefore, I’m unable to test it. The good news is the developer tells me a solution is in the works for Windows users and should appear in a few months.

Help
Anyone familiar with other painting apps will have little trouble getting to grips with Brushes. However, like almost all other apps, it does have it’s little foibles and semi-hidden features that many will not be aware of without prompting. The only help available within the app is to be found in the information screen accessed via the Gallery view. Here the help consists of “tap once to toggle tool visibility” and “pinch to zoom when painting”. Not exactly comprehensive.

To his credit, the developer provides a good user’s guide available as a PDF on his web site. I would suggest that although there’s a (non active) link to the website within the information screen, it is a little hidden away (especially to new or inexperienced users) so mentioning the website and user guide on the title or Gallery screens may reach a wider audience.

Natural Media?
Like Layers, Brushes is advertised as a ‘Natural Media’ application. This continues to bug me as it (along with Layers) is certainly not a natural media app as I understand the term from using the real McCoy in the shape of the fantastic Corel Painter. The developer, not surprisingly, disagrees saying “Brushes tries, to a reasonable extent, to make marks that look like something a real brush might make.” which, on the face of it, sounds fair but I personally don’t feel that a superficial resemblance to oil or acrylic brushstrokes is the same thing as realistically simulating the behaviour of paint on different surfaces as Painter does and indicates by using the term ‘Natural Media’.

But if my arguments aren’t enough to sway the developers of Brushes and Layers then perhaps the fact that the term ‘Natural Media’ is a registered trademark (of Corel, I assume) might. As with Layers, I think there’s enough good things about Brushes to boast about without misleading claims. I hope the developer changes this before Corel’s lawyers come a calling.

Just as an aside, I wonder if Corel are considering making a version of ‘Painter’ for the iPhone? Imagine that with the pseudo pressure sensitivity idea. Hhmmm, iPhone Painter… [sound of Homer Simpson drooling as he contemplates doughnuts]

Verdict
Brushes recently reached its first year anniversary on the App Store and I think it’s fair to say it felt like it had been out for a while – both in a good and bad way. On the one hand all the little, under the hood settings had time to be tweaked to perfection while on the other, it had a fairly sparse set of features, giving it the feel of slightly aging software when compared with the recent competition.

The V2.0 update added a very decent and usable implementation of layers which is a great new feature. Only the fact that, for my money, ‘Layers’ does it a little better stops me from raving about it. The other additions (eraser and increased zoom level) are welcome but hardly ground breaking.

But there’s something about Brushes that means the whole is greater than the sum of its rather ordinary seeming parts. It’s just tiny little things here and there that feel right, like how the toolbars keep out of your way when you don’t want them and easily appear when you do and the gap between taps before it’s counted as a double tap and so on. All these things are basically numbers chosen by the developer. So easy to get wrong and so pleasing when they are right.

To make me a complete convert, I’d like the addition of a blend/smudge tool and a way to alter brush size without interrupting my workflow. Not every Artist will want the same features though and a great many will (and do) find Brushes provides all they need already with the addition of layers only serving to please them even more.

To be honest, I think Brushes fame probably has more to do with the length of time it’s been around than its inherent quality. As good as it is, judged objectively against the likes of PhotoForge and Layers, it’s not exceptional. But it’s been around for a year whereas those others are recent additions to the App Store, building on Brushes success and features. So, I’m not surprised it was used to paint the cover of The New Yorker (although I’m not a fan of the picture used) but the fact is, there are at least two or three other painting apps that could have been used to produce a picture of at least equal quality.

But it’s the indefinable ‘feel’ that is Brushes key strength. It’s nothing major or something you could really list as a feature but it seems a little easier and more natural to paint with it.

After reviewing Layers, PhotoForge remained my favoured painting app mainly because of its smudge tool. Has Brushes replaced it? That’s not so straightforward to answer. I feel the need to stick with it for now, if only to see if it reveals any more nice touches and if a blend/smudge tool comes along in the near future, I can see Brushes becoming my favourite. However, with the competition bringing out updates all the time and new apps hitting the Store regularly, Brushes will have its work cut out to continue to hold its own against its rivals.

It arguably remains leader of the pack for now, but only just.

Here’s a video of an earlier version of Brushes in action:

Brushes
Version reviewed: V2.0
Category: Entertainment
Developer: Steve Sprang
Current Price: £2.99
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
UK App Store Link

I’ve been reading 2000AD since I was 12 – with only a few years off as a poor student – and I still get excited when the latest edition comes through the door. I’ve also read some amazing graphic novels, and love the way that the artist, colourer, letterer and writer combine to tell the whole story.

As with other print publications, comics are moving to digital distribution. But can the experience of reading a comic transition to a digital device? Will sitting down with a comic on my iPhone ever replicate my weekly paper-based fix of 2000AD?

Comics, by Comixology, looks to do just that. So let’s get on with the drokking review!

The app itself is a bit like the iTunes Store for comics. Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you can browse the store by:

• Title
• Creator
• Publisher
• Genre
• Rating

There are quite a few free comics to get you started – I recommend Atomic Robo and Action Philosophers, which are both excellent. Downloading is straightforward, and takes place within the app. Most comics seem to be priced at $0.99, and are bought using the in-app purchasing system, tied to your iTunes account. All prices are quoted in US dollars, unfortunately, but that’s not much of a hindrance.

• My Comics (ones you’ve downloaded)
• Featured
• Free
• Top 25
• Browse

But the thing that makes the Comics app work is the superb built-in reader, and the way in which comics are presented. I’ve tried other comic readers, such as Comics Zeal and Clickwheel. These both use the same system – comic panels are all a uniform 640 x 480 pixels, and is navigated by flicking through just like in the Photos app. I find this quite a boring way to view your comics. It just feels like scrolling through a load of photos.

The Comixology approach is to adapt the viewing interface to fit comic panels (which can quite easily be non-standard sizes) and the interesting part of the action, in a “guided style”. The focus is on a panel or part of the panel, moving through the comic in terms of where the story takes you (an overview of the page is available as well, but I haven’t turned that option on). Letterboxing is also used to hide content outside the current panel, again helping focus on the current part of the story. It works much more effectively than just keeping to a standard panel size. It feels like the comic is allowed to flow.

Here’s a video of it in action:

You can choose to:

• Animate transitions at variable speed
• Rotate automatically
• Turn letterboxing on or off
• Show full page on enter/exit – so that you get an overview of the page and a chance to review what’s happened

Bookmarking is automatic: if you quit and re-launch the app, you will be taken back to the page you were reading. The same is true if you quit reading the comic within the app. You can zoom using multi-touch or double-tap, and also “Browse to page”, giving you a coverflow-style overview of the whole comic. Very nice!

Extras

There are a couple of extra features:

• Find a Local Comic Shop
• Buy in Print

Neither of these worked for me – there are no shops listed for my location (the UK), and the option to buy takes you to Amazon.com (but no localisation to .co.uk).

Improvements

So is there anything wrong with this app? That depends on your point of view. The two main things are:

• You can’t add your own comics

Just like the iTunes Store – you wouldn’t want to buy everything from one source. So it’s a shame that you cannot use your existing collection; comic book archive files (.cbz and .cbr) are not supported and there’s no way to upload them.

• The selection of publishers is quite small

They don’t have the big publishing houses on board. There’s no DC or Marvel. There’s no Rebellion, so I can’t get my fix of 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine using this app (they created and use Clickwheel). I doubt they will get these big names on board, as they are likely to run with their own systems. Saying that, Comics is a good way of finding less well-known comics – I’ve already discovered a few that I’m really enjoying, especially as its quite affordable.

Is this the future?

Is it the future of comics, and of periodicals in general? There is a move towards digital distribution – aside from iPhone-specific apps, Marvel have already made a move into this space with their (web-based) digital comics. For me though, reading comics at a computer doesn’t work for any decent-length comic (or book). Perhaps this is where Apple’s fabled tablet will come in.

James Burland wrote an interesting piece on the possible Apple tablet, which could serve as the uber digital book reader. Apple could then own this space by allowing comic, magazine and other subscriptions through iTunes. Could this replace paper? Convenience will beat aesthetics, for some people.

But for now, the Comics app from Comixology is a superb platform for discovering and viewing new comics. The app could especially come into its own as a method of distributing indie comics. It’ll never quite be the same as reading it on paper, but I have to say it’s pretty damn close.

UPDATE: comiXology has just released a free version of the Comics by comiXology app that includes all the free comics (30+). Here’s the link to the new app: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=325005270&mt=8

Comics
Version reviewed: v1.1
Category: Entertainment
Developer: Comixology
Current Price: £0.59
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
App Store Link

When it comes to the different genres of apps available on the App Store, the Project Management area is one of the least populated. A quick search of the store reveals only a handful of likely candidates and it’s clear it won’t be rivalling fart apps for sheer quantity anytime soon.

Far from the exclusive domain of accredited Project Managers, PM software can be used for anything from planning the Olympics to remodelling your kitchen or sorting out the family holiday. Good PM software can help organise the tasks, assign appropriate resources, identify bottlenecks and (in theory) predict when various milestones will be completed.

Defining exactly what qualifies as a Project Management tool is quite tricky. My broad, crude definition is software that includes Gantt charts. Try searching for ‘Gantt’ in the app store and you’ll not need to trouble your shoes and socks in order to count them all. Actually, at the time of writing, on the UK app store there’s a grand total of two apps that include a Gantt chart. The latest of these is ‘Projects’ from developer Thomas Blackburn.

PM software can be a little daunting for a novice so it’s important that it’s well explained and easy to use. This is especially true when running on the iPhone with its reputation for ease of use. Projects falls a little short here.

Almost immediately after starting Projects you’re confronted with the choice of ‘Groups’ or ‘Phases’. I’ve done a little Project Management work in the past and am familiar with several PM applications but this had me scratching my head. What difference the choice made wasn’t explained and so my decision had to be essentially random. As it turns out, the choice doesn’t make that much difference and can be changed later should you wish. Even so, it’s off putting to face this baffling choice right from the start especially for a novice. A little explanatory text here would help enormously.

Help?
It’s clear early on that a little help is needed both for the concepts of Project Management in general and the intricacies of Projects in particular. The user is left to his or her own devices when it comes to general PM concepts (get Googling) but the developer has created a helpful ‘Getting Started’ section on his website to give an overview of various elements of the app (although, oddly, the difference between Groups and Phases are not explained anywhere).

I deliberately avoided reading this until after I’d played with the app for a while to see how easy it was to use without external help. This resulted is confusion in a couple of places with some screens and features only being stumbled across by accident. Some would argue this indicates the developer should work on the design in a couple of areas to make things clearer to the user. I’d suggest he work on rather more urgent features first but add the stop gap of a link to his Getting Started web page on the opening screen of the app. Without this, many users simply won’t be aware that an external source of help exists.

As the developer provides a decent overview of the various screens and functions of the app on his website, I won’t duplicate the same information here. Instead I’ll report my experiences in using the app with a simple project.

Anyone for tea?
My standard test for PM software is to create a project listing the steps required to make a cup of tea. The immediate problem this hi-lighted was that Projects deals in units of a day or longer – there’s no option to have tasks of minutes or hours. I think this is a real problem as many tasks (some of them vital) can be only an hour or two long (perhaps less). I understand from the developer that he intends to rectify this in a future update but for now, it remains a problem. How big a problem depends on the nature of your project but this one omission could mean that the app is useless to you. It’s technically possible to work around it by pretending one day equals one hour and proceed on that basis but that’s a huge fudge and not something a user should reasonably expect to have to make in an app of this type.

Adding a task is pretty straightforward but there’s a quirky little control that’s worth mentioning. As well as calendar buttons to mark start and end dates, you can drag the duration bar left to decrease the time and right to increase it. This works but feels a little fiddly and coarse. If you drag it above 1 week, it increases by multiples of weeks and then after 8 weeks it switches to months so a task with a duration of, say 10 days will have to be set manually. I found this control a little odd at first but decided that it was due to it being above the calendar buttons. This made it feel like the primary way to enter duration. By simply moving the bar below the calendar buttons, I think it would make their relative importance clear to the user and help end the awkward input of the start/end dates that I experienced.

Gantt Chart
Projects largely revolves around the Gantt chart. For those unfamiliar with them, they’re a way to present tasks so their duration and order are clear. Being a very visual person, I love anything that portrays complex or detailed information in a simple, visual way and this is exactly what a Gantt chart does. The implementation of the Gantt in Projects is quirky but not unusable.

For example, in order to see future or past months you’ll want to scroll the view horizontally. Your natural inclination is to swipe left and right. In portrait mode, this brings up the option to delete the task you happened to swipe. In fact, to scroll, you have to swipe a narrow band at the very top of the chart.

This is a good example of a feature that I only learned about after reading the developer’s website. It’s also a good example of the odd design evident through the app. Is it really best to use swipe to delete tasks here or would it be better used to scroll the view and delete tasks on the task edit screen? The choice seems obvious to me but perhaps I’m in the minority.

Unsurprisingly, given the format of Gantts, it also works in landscape mode but this is at the expense of functionality. The toolbars and search bar visible in portrait, disappear in this orientation but it’s generally a reasonable trade off. What feels less so is the fact that it’s not possible to zoom in or out of the Gantt. The only options available to you is a choice between displaying 3 weeks, 3 months or 5 months. You’re also able to choose the number of past weeks to display. I’d like the ability to choose the length of time to display from 1 day to a year (or more) and not be limited to pre-sets.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to use a pinch gesture to zoom in and out, showing not only the length of time I want but also more rows of tasks. On that subject, although it’s generally well laid out, I felt the vertical space was a bit wasted. If each row had less height, more tasks would happily fit on screen. The rows seem to be set to the current height to accommodate the notes but they don’t shrink down even if the display of notes is switched off or for tasks that have no notes so, all in all, it’s a bit of a waste of space.

Incidentally, swiping left or right on the main body of the view in landscape mode neither deletes a task or scrolls the view – another odd design decision.

No dependents
For me, the single biggest fault with Projects is that it doesn’t include dependencies. This is where you can say Task B doesn’t start until Task A has finished. So, if you need to amend the start date or duration of Task A, Task B automatically updates to accommodate the changes.

In Projects, tasks can only be set to start one after the other by ensuring the start date of one task coincides with the end date of another but that’s a lot of fiddly work and isn’t the point of software to make things easier? Having to explicitly state every single start and end date of each task is not only a pain when setting up your project but means that any changes or delays have to be manually input. It also discourages experimentation trying to find a more efficient project setup or to shorten the critical path. For me, this tips Projects over the line from useful to, well, not very useful. The good news is that the developer is already working on this and we should see dependencies in the not too distant future.

The omissions don’t end there though. Several other standard Project Management features are missing such as resource management, critical path and import/export of MS Project files. You’re also unable to mark what percentage of a task is complete and you’re limited to changing their status to either ToDo, Waiting, WIP (Work in Progress) or Complete.

Verdict
Anyone expecting a fully featured portable version of MS Project will be disappointed with Projects as it’s lacking some important functionality. This is the developers first app and while it’s a good start, I can’t help but feel this is closer to V0.5 of the software rather than V1.0.

More than any other app I’ve tried, a project management application needs to have a minimum set of particular features to really be of use and currently, Projects is short of a few of them. At least some of those missing features are planned to appear in future versions so the question becomes, is it usable in its current state?

If you’re already familiar with PM software, I think it’s pretty impossible to use Projects without noticing and missing at least one or two favourite features. If, on the other hand, this is your first taste of a Project Management application and plan to use it for only fairly simple projects where tasks are at least one day long and unlikely to change start dates, you may find Projects delivers in a reasonably effective way.

So, a promising start but you may want to wait for version two.

Projects
Version reviewed: V1.0
Category: Productivity
Developer: Thomas Blackburn
Current Price: £3.99
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
UK App Store Link

Don’t want to pay for MobileMe and have to use a me.com email address? I’ve been using the latest apps that bring push email (sort of) to your iPhone.

GPush and Pushmail are currently racing up the App Store, so which would I recommend?

Forthcoming Updates to GPush

• Premium version allowing multiple GMail accounts
• Custom notification sounds
• Tap on notification to launch the message in Gmail within Safari (not native Mail client)
• Tap GPush icon to go to Gmail in Safari

Forthcoming Updates to PushMail

• Badges and custom sounds
• Tap on notification to launch the message in native Mail client
• More display options, such as only showing “From” or “From” and “Subject”, not the start of the message
• Quiet time – mute notifications for a set period (nice!)

Privacy concerns

Both developers seek to allay concerns about privacy. With GPush you’re giving up your GMail username and password (read more on their privacy policy). With PushMail, all your email will go to your @dopushmail.com address, but this isn’t a full email account though; all emails forwarded are only held long enough to sent you the push notification, then discarded (read more on the website). Neither approach is ideal, so if you want pushed email without forking out for MobileMe, then you’ll have to think about which approach you prefer.

The biggest benefit?

As well as getting quicker notice that you’ve received an email, saving battery life is the biggest benefit. Turning off Mail fetching your email every 15 minutes to an hour saves a lot of power. Push notification does maintain a persistent connection to Apple, but I’ve found the battery drain to be far less than frequently checking email through the Mail app.

You may also want to turn off the sound that Mail makes when it actually downloads the emails (that you’ve already been notified of).

If you don’t like to be disturbed you could set up GPush, for example, not to pop up a notification or play a sound, but just update its badge. Position the GPush app near Mail, and you’ve got a way of unobtrusively checking for new messages without overly draining the battery.

The verdict

Neither app actually brings push email – you only get a notification, and still have to download the actual email by launching Mail app. But it’s good enough and saves a fair bit of precious battery.

The downside is that there isn’t a way of stacking notifications on either app – so if you get two notifications come in, you’ll only see the second one displayed. This is a limitation of the SDK as far as I’m aware. The workaround is to badge the GPush or PushMail (when the latter is updated) icon with notification numbers.

My recommendation has to be PushMail. Even without the problems that GPush are having, PushMail is a service that you’ll unobtrusively use everyday, so it’s worth the extra money. It also allows for plenty of customisation, so long as you’re happy to set up filters to forward your email. If they can fix their problems, users who do not want to fiddle with filters or forwarding should probably go with GPush.

I’m sure you’ve heard that T-Mobile are giving iPhones to some customers in the UK. As with the unlocked iPhones available on Play.com, these are grey market imports that are not locked to any network. T-Mobile customers will apparently be offered an iPhone 3G if they spend £75+ per month and threaten to leave.

Initially, this will only affect a small number of high spending customers. And, it has to be seen in context of T-Mobile trying to maintain subscriber numbers – in order to make themselves more attractive if the network is sold.

But for the first time, you can now get an officially-supported iPhone in the UK on a network other than O2. Are we about to see iPhones available on other networks as well?

It’s important to remember that this T-Mobile offering will only be for a small number of retention deals, so it’s pointless comparing any pricing to regularly-advertised tariffs. I’m not even sure if they are the 8Gb 3G or 16/32Gb 3GS. And let’s ignore for a moment that T-Mobile carries the iPhone officially in other markets. This move is likely to annoy Apple, and there could be some manoeuvring on the part of O2 and/or Apple to stop grey market imports, as Levis did when Tesco imported and undercut the price of their jeans.

There have been plenty of rumours that other carriers are going to get the iPhone, as early as October. All the main carriers (but not MVNOs) have existing relationships with Apple, and sell the iPhone in territories outside of the UK. And I’m sure they’d like to sell the iPhone in the UK as well. But O2 are maintaining that their exclusive deal will continue.

But exclusive on what exactly? Other networks may get the iPhone, but possibly only the older model, the iPhone 3G (although there may be a 8Gb 3GS model on the way). O2 may maintain their exclusivity on the 3GS – but I don’t think that’s really crucial in terms of sales. The 3G sold pretty well, despite its limitations, and I don’t think that the 3GS has that many extra features to make it stand out above the older model to your average customer (maybe with the exception of the improved camera). So I think the 3G on competitive tariffs will sell pretty well.

Competition is a great leveller. O2 losing their exclusive deal to sell the “iPhone” (the 3G/3GS distinction being irrelevant to many potential purchasers) will bring tariffs down. But it’s not just the headline monthly tariff of bundled minutes and texts that is of interest. Competition will also come in the form of:

• Bundled Wifi access
• Tethering thrown in (I’m sure that 3, as the most data-centric network, would consider that)
• iPhone offered unlocked / unlockable at the end of contract

Not to mention PAYG pricing, although the up-front purchase price of the device is likely to remain the same, adhering to the no-discount policy enforced by Apple on their goods.
O2 has had well publicised data network outages, and is generally thought to have worse 3G coverage than other operators. Coupled with their policy of offering no concessions to existing iPhone 3G customers who wanted to upgrade to the 3GS, what can they do to stop churn? Remember, there are quite a few customers who upgraded from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G on 18 month deals, which will be ending in January 2010. There’s nothing to keep many of these customers – except that they’re still locked to O2 on their iPhone 3G as O2 won’t unlock them even at the end of contract.

If they don’t keep the iPhone as an exclusive, what should O2 do to stop churn?

1. Offer well-priced upgrades for existing customers to the 3GS
2. Lower the monthly tariffs
3. Offer to unlock existing iPhone 3G customers at the end of contract

However, the possible increased availability of the iPhone has to be seen in the context of lots of high-featured touchscreen phones coming out Apple, in my opinion, needs to make the iPhone more available especially in very competitive mobile markets such as the UK.

For example, the Samsung Jet is free on Vodafone with a 5 megapixel camera. On paper, it looks like a match for the iPhone, but doesn’t have the accompanying ecosystem, or any decent way of syncing it with the Mac. But most people don’t care about that. If they do, then Android devices, especially, are gaining mindshare and slowly gaining marketshare as well. Now is the time for Apple to make the iPhone easier to get hold of, if they want to take a serious proportion of the UK’s high-end mobile subscribers.

My personal take is that I’m likely to hang on with my iPhone 3G until the next model is announced in June 2010. But for all the new iPhone customers, hopefully things are about to get a bit cheaper