Like John, I’m a long time Sketchbook Pro fan and had been using it for sometime. While it was great on my desktop I never quite got in the groove with it when I started trying their Sketchbook Express on the iPad. With Paper though, I immediately connected with it and just loved the quality of the default brush. Drawing features are kept to a bare minimum (brush selection, fixed palette, draw & erase & undo – aka ‘rewind’.) & changing/adding pages is simple and straight forward.
Nice Touches
A couple of things I really like:
- Multiple ‘Sketchbooks’
Paper lets you create multiple “Books” in the app, so I can section off my personal stuff form my work stuff really easily – or if I’m working on a specific project I can give it its own book etc. - Rewind
Their interpretation of “undo” is great. Rather than simply undoing and removing the entire last action you made you can simple ‘rewind’ by placing two fingers on the screen & then moving them counter clock-wise. And it backs up your actions, just as rewind implies. Go too far? Just rotate your fingers clockwise. I found it a little finicky at first but after a bit of use it’s become pretty natural.
One Feature Request/Wish
While I appreciate the minimalism there’s one feature I’d love to see added and that’s very, very basic layers. I don’t eed full blown layers like Photoshop or Sketchbook but even just having two layers would be great. I’ve encountered a few times where it’d be great to be able to sketch something out on one layer, then ink & colour over it on a second and finally remove or hide the sketch layer when finished. I know it breaks the paper metaphor, but still…
Highly recommend it – Paper is available in the Apple App Store for iPads.