Hacker News Reader

Comment by hippee-lee | Hacker News Reader

I'm a paper user. Here are my pros and cons:

Pros: - easy to get started or back into drawing - easy to sketch UI concepts and send them around - easy for my daughter to play with

Cons: - fixed canvas size; you can scale an are a tiny bit but not much - no layers - customer support has shown an indifference to existing technogy (with pressure and palm detection) even for the styli they support. - customer support seems to have a (IMO) arrogance in how they respond to things on the forums. - including the upgrades makes Paper 2x as expensive vs Procreate which has more drawing fools and the abity to customize and save my own tools.

It was a good app to have and my daughter still uses it. But for my own doodling or quick UI concepts at work I switched to procreate. The wacom creative (http://intuoscreativestylus.wacom.com/en/) stylus was on my Xmas list u until I saw the adobe tool mentioned. I'll be checking that out.

View on HN

I wonder why so few people complain about the speed.

I tried to use Paper and while I love the results I can get (nice-looking drawings even if you are not artistically inclined), I can't stand the slowness, and the fact that I can't properly dot my i's.

I switched to Upad for all my tech drawings. It works great, and is very responsive. No, my drawings do not look as cool, but at least they get drawn.

I noticed that too when I colored things fast. It was fast enough for most things. The most frustrating speed issue for me was when painting with watercolor brush where the variable speed changes the effect of the ink.

Thanks for the tip re: Upad! I'll check it out.

I hadn't heard of Upad before. The screenshots look nice, especially if it really does work well for handwriting. Just yesterday I tried doing some mathematical note-taking in another app (already forget which one) and it was pretty bad.

Sadly, the support links leave me with little confidence in the product. The "PockeySoft Web Site" link is actually a youtube video, and "UPAD Support" takes me to a 404 (http://www.pockeysoft.com/upad). If I remove the path on that URL, most of the images on the resulting site are broken. If their site is that broken, and the app hasn't been updated in 11 months, it sure gives the impression that the app has been abandoned.

Perhaps it has — but for the moment it works great, and for the amount of money that you have to pay for it, who cares if it will work a year from now?

I use apps like this only rarely. I don't want to have to hunt for a new app every time I decide I need this functionality.

My problem with Paper is the undo/rewind function. It really is frustrating to use and often doesn't work as intended. There is a long thread on their forums about it but they insist this is a minority problem and they know best.

I get the feeling that much of the development is focussed on concept over function.

Then there is the price gouging. You can't blend unless you buy their stylus. And their 'active' stylus doesn't even have pressure sensitivity even though they claim they have been developing it for over a year. All you get for your $50 is palm rejection, blending, and a novel eraser functionality.

I think I will stick with my simple Bamboo stylus which I already own and doesn't require charging and lament not being able to blend/smudge.

I also own Bamboo Paper, and Procreate - while I have gripes with Paper's business practice, I can't get the same results with either of the other products. The watercolour, pen, and pencil are superior in Paper. I can't even get an effective watercolour in Procreate at all.

Hmm, that's unfortunate since my biggest use case would be able to have a large canvas that I can move text around on. What's the syncing like? Is there some way I would be able to access my images via a desktop or web interface?

No access to images and you can only email an image or export a collection to pdf via several channels: Google drive, computer sync, iBooks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com