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Just downloaded it and gave it a spin with my Bamboo stylus. Here are my impressions, FWIW:

* First impression: Nice tutorial, nice animations when picking a notebook. Great idea to do your app planning sketches as its own notebook.

* First impression while writing: Nice inky strokes, I like the colors.

* Second impression: Hmmm...this seems a bit laggy compared to Noteshelf or Penultimate. <flip over to those programs> Yup, definitely laggier (I have an iPad 2). Probably only a few milliseconds lag, but noticeable.

* Third impression: I like the rewind interface instead of an undo button. Very cool.

* Fourth impression: No zoom or magnifying glass? bummer.

* Final decision: Nice, impressive, innovative UI but unfortunately especially the lagginess will cause this to not replace Noteshelf as my default go-to notebook. The lack of zoom is also a bummer, since with a magnifying glass you could add so much more detail, it makes up for the iPad's lack of pinpoint accuracy.

3.5/5 (edit: just realized i'm not on the app store so I can give decimal ratings :P)

P.S. Also, a "hand guard" area to ignore touches as in Noteshelf would REALLY be nice to be able to draw without having to make sure you never touch the screen with your hand while drawing.

4 comments

I had incredible difficulty with the rewind/undo interface. Almost as often as I bring up the rewind UI, it'll do some other action instead, like drawing little dots, or zooming in/out, or bringing up/dismissing the tools palette.

When the dialog is finally brought up, it doesn't respect my finger motions. I'll drag my one finger a full 360 around my other finger but the pie chart moves less than 5 degrees in total, jerkily. Or, it flaps forward and backward rapidly as I smoothly move my finger in one direction. Maybe there's a heuristic that's trying to pick a "pivot" finger and a "rotating" finger, and it's picking wrong each time. I dunno.

Willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because the rest of the app is so well done, but, this brokenness of such a key feature makes a bad initial impression.

It sounds as if you're rotating one finger around the other? The idea is to use two fingers together (like one big finger) to do a pan in a circular motion.

In all my messing around it did not occur to me to try that. Thanks! Solution blinders in action! I suppose a little animation would have gone a long way towards clearing that up initially.

Even doing it correctly, I still feel it's a little too slow, and still relatively easy to flub it into closing the book. I applaud the idea, though.

I had exactly the same problem - I agree that a little animation would go a long way here.

I had the same issue. Thanks for clarifying. This is something that should be improved in the next version.

A tip (workaround) for the missing hand guard, as often done with Wacoms: Wear a glove (e.g. wool) on your drawing hand. It will not register any unintended touches, and your hand will glide easier over the iPad, allowing for smoother curves and straighter lines.

Wow, genuine thanks! That's one of those "why didn't I think of that before?" ideas.

I just downloaded and tried it. Lack of wrist protection and no vertical orientation is a deal breaker.

How does this compare to say, procreate or sketchbook pro?

There are many products in this space on the app store, and probably one to suit every taste. Procreate is more capable - layer blending, design your own brushes. Then there's Brushes, beloved of David Hockney. Plenty of notebook apps too: Notability is particularly versatile, Autodesk has SketchbookX, SketchClub and SketchPad are fun, SketchShare is multiuser via wifi, ArtRage is .... OK better stop.

Paper has a pleasing feel but the minimalism won't suit everyone.

I've tried most of the sketching/drawing focused apps except ArtRage, with pro and procreate and the now seldom used brushes, I never felt the need for ArtRage - is there any good reason to pick it up?

I was quite underwhelmed by paper after being exposed to the others, and I have notability as well.