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I wrote this tool (started on Thursday) called Doodle that is designed to give kids a quick drawing canvas. It's a super simple app that I made for my son who kept drawing over all of my Apple notes. You can draw, then press the button in the top right to quickly erase your drawing (Like an Etch A Sketch).

Someone nerd-sniped me and I added in the ability to record a video as well. Technically, you could use it to do quick 5-10 minute drawing/narrated lessons and export them for educational purposes.

Site: https://joeblau.com/doodle/

Source: https://github.com/joeblau/doodle

AppStore: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1503601939

3 comments

Thank you. Just installed it. I had the same problem with the Notes app. I ended up creating a separate folder for our son, but this is much simpler.

I would very much like that for Android. It seems much better than the tablet drawing app my kids currently use.

Unfortunalty, the only reason I was able to make this work in a day is that it uses two proprietary Apple libraries.

PencilKit — which provides all of the UI for drawing and selecting drawing tools.

ReplayKit - which is designed for games but, I'm using it to just record the whole screen.

There is really not that much code outside of just calling into those frameworks which is what allowed me to make this in such a short time. If these types of libraries exist on Android, I could probably create something, but I'm not super familiar with Android's library ecosystem.

Very cool my kid loves doodling on my iPad but always accidentally clicks some part of another app

There is a child/lock mode, need to triple click home button (you may need to enable it), however the problem remains if the app has extra buttons that little ones love pressing.

Yeah — That is called guided access mode. I use an Apple API that requires you to double gesture to bring up any menus or leave the app. This has actually proved sufficient for keeping my kid kid in bounds. You can always 4-finger pinch and leave my app though.