Show HN: Sketchology
sketchologyapp.com
sketchologyapp.com
I, for one, downloaded it because I want to take notes on my iPad, but the resolution isn't built for that with a stylus. Now I can take sketch notes, written notes, and doodle to my hearts desire.
Kudos on taking the leap a few years back and kudos on building something "featureless".
Monetization will always be your biggest hurdle. The sure bet that I've found, and you can look no further than Candy Crush for this mechanic, is to get someone as close as possible to the end of what they want to do and if they can't do it in that amount of time/moves/etc, they have to pay to get one more move/life. How that integrates with a "drawing" app will require time and thought.
Having the 'Show HN' posts all tagged with platforms would sorta make me feel like I'm in a supermarket, skipping past the isles containing stuff I'm not going to walk out with.
The link is useful for anyone who wants to check out the link, see someone's work, and provide feedback.
The linked-to product/app/service is usable by anyone who is interested enough and has the requisite platform or device(s).
Your devices do not determine the usefulness of someone else's work.
Only one problem: I have zero artistic talent or ability. I've often wanted to start practicing drawing, but it was never THAT high a priority, and I never put in the effort to get a pad, pencils, start carrying them around with me, etc. An app like this can make it close to zero effort to get started and to doodle something every day.
Now there's still the problem of guidance or knowing where to start. Give me something like daily challenges or tutorials - can range from something as simple as "here's a picture of a cat, draw it" to more advanced animated tutorials - and I could see myself getting hooked. I would not mind paying for "content" or for a monthly subscription under this model.
I actually spent a while trying to come up with an introduction to the app that would do a drawing tutorial of sorts. (Along the lines of http://www.drawastickman.com/episode1) - but the line between the app telling you what to do and guiding you is very thin, especially in content creation software. In the end I decided that it was best to try and build motivation and a personal connection through more subdued means, and that that method would be "truer" and deeper as well.
This is the same reasoning behind not having sample artwork within the program, not even as a tutorial. I didn't want people to open it up and see anything that they had not chosen to create.
I don't know what the proper solution to what you're asking would be - I want it to exist in theory, but I can't convince myself that it would be good in practice.
There are two possible kinds of guidance, I think. One would be actual tutorials - draw a circle, the circle becomes the head, etc. - with the goal of teaching technique and building up skill.
The second would be aimed more at motivation and inspiration - getting people to draw something every day, no matter what their technique is or how good they are. Maybe it's a "Seinfeld calendar"-like nudge to draw every day, maybe it's a "daily challenge" or "idea of the day" for various skill levels.
Easy to say, of course, but much tougher to get it right in practice, especially with the level of simplicity and elegance you have right now. Maybe it's a completely separate app, but I think there's a lot of potential there if someone can get it right.
I do wish there was an Android or PC version.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/sketchologyapp/static/img/old-icon.p...
Or Inkscape
Also very alluring marketing.
Best of luck, I hope you do well, you clearly have vision. Your app made me smile.
On a more skeptical note, how does it compares with Evernote's Skitch and Omnigraffle?
Note that I'm not into designing at all but I might suggest this to a friend for their projects
You can export to web[0], which creates a zoomable raster copy of the drawing, but this is obviously limited to getting an editable vector copy.
[0] For example: http://www.sketchologyapp.com/u/sketchology/18
Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.
Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lines) done with the pencil tool in Sketchology would cause Illustrator to lock up for hours and consume all available memory. Larger drawings would fail to open altogether.
Ultimately I think offering the feature would have been extremely misleading and frustrating for people. I'd rather cut a feature than ship a bad experience.
Often these have been generated by another SVG tool, support another tools idiocy for whatever marginal gain he might make is maybe why he doesn't want to do it.
Though, I have to say, I'm growing really weary of dramatic copy that insists on telling me how "beautiful" (4x) everything is.
0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adsk.sketc...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.thoster.no...
Can't say how it compares to Sketcholgy (not being in the target audience) but it exports and imports SVG and also has what seems to be near infinite zooming.
You need to buy the full version (US$2.00) to get all the features but the free version is still quite nice.
Stuff I'd like to see:
sync sketchbook across devices (maybe via evernote?)
palm rejection with bluetooth styli
an equivalent to AI's artboard - a way to say "this is the edge of my canvas, please export a 72/150/300/other DPI image" instead of making the user futz with it
some way to organize drawings into different sketchbooks, also a way to delete a drawing from the home page
I also kinda feel like I'd like to see some calibration notches on the sliders.
The UI could be a bit more streamlined? I'd love to have immediate access to all the tools and a color popup instead of having to possibly double-tap on the brushes/tools icon to get the menu. ArtRage really gets it right with its little popups in the corner and a tiny toolbar on the bottom, but bitmap apps just make me itchy.
I went back and forth on the number of taps required to open up the brush or tools menu - the current implementation will open the menu directly if you already have that tool selected, and switch to the tool otherwise. Ex if calligraphy is selected then you touch brushes -> menu opens. If calligraphy is selected and you touch tools, then the eraser (or the MRU tool) is selected and the menu does not open.
This flow works really well when you switch are switching between 2 types of anything, like between calligraphy and the pencil, or calligraphy and the eraser and (I like it because) it doesn't have popups flying in your face constantly. It works less well if you switch between 3 (ex calligraphy->eraser->pencil.) A second downside is that the logic behind when 1 or 2 clicks is required is somewhat less than obvious.
(You can delete drawings, press and hold on the thumbnail in the homescreen)
the lack of boundaries will make me continue to use your app! it is how i ever felt those apps should work in the first place. you nailed it.
only critic i have now: the fake width of the traces are ok for testing out the app. do a few swipes and something similar to a brush drawing appears. nice. but using speed for that is completely unintuitive and impossible to "use".. no way to make a thin straight line (have to do it slow, so it ends up jittered) and no way to do a short bold line (no way to get to speed). either find a way to get finger pressure or just leave it flat.
and a feature request: add simple text tool so my schema designs are easier to do :)
The inkpen brush is also 'untextured' (for lack of a better word) and has a shape profile opposite to the calligraphy brush (slower=wider).
I tested against Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, iDraw, and Inkpad and was unable to load a file equivalent to drawing for more than about 2 minutes in Sketchology. I'll have a more in depth technical analysis of this soon.
Are you going to be sharing the details of how you've done it or will it remain secret? Just interested because I've done a lot of work with large svgs (sometimes million+ nodes) over the last year (for an ongoing project) so I'm well aware of the performance issues you mentioned.
If you ever decided the secret was too much to bear and you'd like to get it off your chest you could always drop me an email (in my profile) and we could discuss it :)
"What makes Mischief tick? Mischief uses Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), originally invented and developed by Ron and Sarah at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and further enhanced by 61 Solutions. ADFs are a new digital representation of shape which provide numerous advantages including high quality anti-aliasing, very fast rendering, support for massive parallelism, very small file sizes, and the ability to succinctly represent variable-width, scalable, textured strokes. This technology is protected by over 50 patents."
I'm working on something similar for Android but focused on note taking and diagramming instead of drawing. I think of it as a kind of handwritten wiki. I allow placing of links in the document that jump to other parts of the document. It is still very much a work in progress and my lines don't look anywhere near as good as the ones in Sketchology.
The way Paper implemented their tools is pretty interesting. I'd put the #1 feeling difference as due to their automatic layering system. (The most recent line you draw in Paper is not always on top.) This goes a long ways to creating interesting effects but isn't a direction that Sketchology went in for a bunch of reasons.
There's also other tradeoffs ex: - I'd say Paper's watercolor tool is better than Sketchology's for intra-line interactions. (i.e. keep your finger down and draw for a while) However Sketchology's is better for building up layers of watercolor (lots of lines.) - Drawing responsiveness is one or two input frames faster on Sketchology than Paper, but Paper will do slightly more shaping in that time.
There's also different design requirements, as an example Sketchology needs line shaping algorithms that work across a wide variety of brush sizes, and the ability for them to look consistent across zoom sizes. A lot of my early work on shaping algorithms would look great at one size but not another.
I've a really high opinion of Paper, the drawing feel they achieved is bounds ahead of everyone else. (Except Sketchology, again in my biased opinion.) Ultimately though after getting used to the ability to just move drawing around in Sketchology though I couldn't go back. Then again I wrote Sketchology so there'd be a problem if that wasn't the case... :)
I am far from an artist, and I mostly use Paper to sketch out rough interfaces and interaction impressions, and I always like how Paper somehow makes my stuff look nicer than it should. I'm terrible at space planning though, so I'd pick function over style any day :)
Funny thing that came to me about an artist using it, falling into "recursion stack overflow":
- This is it, it's finished... Wait, I can make this beautiful picture as only a detail of a greater, bigger and better masterpiece? (3h later) This is it, it's finished... etc. :)
Android? Windows 8?