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02 June 2011
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This app attempts to bring the ancient Japanese discipline of ink drawing to the iPhone, and while it may do a decent job of it, it's not everybodies cup of miso soup, and it's definitely not mine.
I got excited when I first saw this in the App of the Week section, and downloaded it without hesitation. I was obviously going to get it anyway, for the purpose of writing this review, but I was genuinely looking forward to being able to do ink painting on my iPhone. Lets just say I would've hesitated a bit if I'd known exactly what it was like.
In ink painting, there's many things you have to compensate for that you don't normally need to with regular drawing. The ink leaches into the page, for example, and if you make a mistake, you can't just rub it out and keep going. A single mistake means you have to redraw the entire picture, which is why I personally have great respect for people who do it.
But this is an iPhone app, people, not an actual sheet of Japanese paper with actual ink. We shouldn't have to put up with hardly any tools, we shouldn't have to cope with a half-pie undo button, and we definitely shouldn't be charged $3.99 for it, that's for sure.
I should probably explain where I'm getting at here, otherwise you might just think I'm ranting. Which I kind of am, I guess. I just don't see for the life of me why Apple chose this as App of the Week, when it's lacking obvious features that almost every other art app out there incorporates. Let me start from the beginning...
Undo. It's an absolute life saver, from spelling mistakes to drawing a line in the wrong place to un-deleting something. It's something we've come to expect in our digital age, and when you start drawing something, you expect to be able to just hit undo and remove your mistake from existence. You can do that in this app, but only once, meaning if you make two mistakes in a row, you can only undo the second one. Yeah, sure, I see that maybe they were trying to go for realism here, since actual ink painters don't have an undo button. But then actual ink painters probably aren't going to get this app, are they? And why give us the ability to undo the most recent mistake only? It just doesn't make sense.
I would've drawn something like this, but I'm not Japanese. Or patient.
And if it was realism they were going for, then they shouldn't have included tools such as the Eraser. Although I'd probably say the only reason they included this was because there weren't many other tools available. Actually, all you get are 3 different brushes, although the only differences there are levels of opacity. You can adjust the size of each of those brushes to whatever you fancy.
The other glaring omission is a lack of a zoom button, or a zoom function of any kind, actually. This means, especially if you're working on an iPhone, that you'll be trying to work in painfully small detail, and your finger keeps getting in the way, and then you can't undo your mistakes because of the near-useless incorporation of that function. Frustrating? You bet.
But it's not all negative, and reading through those last paragraphs I'm on a bit of a rampage, so I'll cool off while I write about the positive points here. What it does do, it does well. The ink acts well, bleeding slightly into the surrounding paper, and it gets thicker the slower you move your finger, like it would in real life. Posting your finished product on Twitter is easy, although seeing some kind of Facebook integration would be good.
On top of those, there's an enormous amount of different styles of paper, from plain white to patterned, and almost everything in between. The interface, though glaringly empty, is clean and sharp, and it won't take you long to work out how everything works.
That's really it. I just want to say that, although I sound like I want to strangle the developers, it isn't that at all. I just feel that the app could have done with more work before releasing, and everything I've mentioned can be fixed in an update. I sincerely hope those issues are fixed, as it could turn into quite a good app, since they have the basics down pat already. But until there's a new update, I wouldn't recommend downloading; There are better, cheaper apps out there that do more, and they won't leave you frustrated about missing features. Shiage!
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