Drawing apps on the iPad are pretty neat, but it always seemed to me that they cleaved to strongly to the limitations of the physical world. Why, for example, should your piece of virtual paper be limited in size and shape like a piece of paper paper? It shouldn’t. And that’s the premise of Sketchology, a vector app with an almost infinite canvas.
You know how you sometimes start a drawing or sketch and realize that you should have started further over to the left? That’ll never happen with Sketchology: you would just zoom or scoot across to give yourself more space. You can also zoom in and in, allowing you to work on tiny details before zooming back out to see the full picture.
This is made possible by vectors, which record your strokes as mathematical descriptions instead of pixels, letting the app render them at any size without pixelization or blurriness. This is Sketchology’s USP, and it’s a killer: you can expand your canvas many times over and just keep on drawing. I imagine it’s perfect for drawing maps, where I always seem to run out of space.
The actual drawing tools are fine, if nothing special. The basic app comes with a pen, another pen and a watercolor tool, plus an eraser. A $5 in-app purchase buys more tools (pencil and marker) plus a color picker. The ink engine is smooth, but I’d like better options for picking colors and setting opacity (many app use a long press to bring up a color-picking loupe, for example.
Then again, this is the launch version, so I imagine a lot will be added.
Sketchology is available right now, and runs great even on the iPad mini.
Source: Sketchology
