iDoodle2 lite

Michael (Admin) | Aug 12, 2008 Entertainment

User rating:

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I’ve played very briefly with a couple of other iPhone drawing apps and my best work could have been described as kindergarten finger paintings from hell. Granted, I’m not what you would call an “artist,” but I’ve worked professionally as a web designer and I think I’m fairly qualified in the area of graphics software. I haven’t given those other drawing apps a full review, so in the interest of fairness I’m not gonna name names. Suffice it to say that they suck. iDoodle2, on the other hand, is surprisingly sophisticated and… brace yourself… it features actual drawing tools! OMG.

Josiah Larson gives iDoodle2 lite users the ability to draw freeform lines, straight lines, ovals/circles, squares/rectangles, and “blobs”. The blob tool is pretty nice – it cleans up your finger motions as you draw more complex shapes, and the result is usually superior to what you would have drawn freehand with the pen tool. If this sounds complicated, the best thing for you to do is to give it a try and see what I mean.

You also get to edit the background color which is awesome. Have you ever tried to fill in a background color by scribbling furiously from corner to corner with your finger? Yeah, unfortunately so have I. You don’t need to do that here. Line and fill colors can also be set separately, plus you can even set transparency and line thickness. Another interesting thing that iDoodle2 lite lets you do is watch a replay of your drawing as you created it! I didn’t see an option to save the replay, but it was pretty cool to watch.

iDoodle2 lite does a lot of great things but its most unique feature has to be the way Undo/Redo is performed. Even with a full set of tools, drawing on such a small screen can be a major pain in the ass. With this app, you just tilt your iPhone 90 degrees to the left to undo your latest mistake, and tilt 90 degrees to the right to redo it. This is stated in the instructions in a not-so-clear way, but once you figure it out it becomes second nature. Sometimes you have to do it more than once (depending on how you’re holding the iPhone) but it’s still awesome to even be able to undo at all.

Being that this review is based on the free version of the app I can’t really complain about things that are missing, but a few features on my wishlist for the full version would be some transformations (such as scale and rotate), layer support, constrain shape (to draw a perfect circle or square), more colors, and the ability to export the replay of the drawing to a video file. I don’t see any of these items listed in iDoodle2′s description so I don’t really know if the full version includes them or not, but any iPhone app that does those things well would be pretty unbelievable.

For most people’s casual doodling, the lite version should be more than sufficient. If you’re looking for more features like the ability to add text and import photos to draw over, then you’ll need to get the full version of iDoodle2. It’ll cost you $2.99 but that seems like a very fair price for the best drawing app I’ve seen yet for iPhone.