Sketches

Developer: LateNiteSoft
Price: $5.99
Version Reviewed: 1.3

iPhone Integration [rating:5/5]
User Interface [rating:5/5]
Re-use / Replay Value [rating:5/5]

Overall Rating:

Sketches is an application that has been around since the early days of jailbroken 1.x iPhones. It has matured from a well designed but simple sketch based notepad to a real productivity tool. Standard drawing features include everything you would expect including multiple size/color drawing pens, text input, clip-art, and shapes. Additional cool features include the ability to pull in a background from the camera/photo library, from a web page, a solid color, or a map.

This latest version has fine-tuned the features and included some tips for usage in all the right places. In addition, memory usage features have been tuned to help keep the application from taking up too much memory and crashing.

Here are some the the uses that I've come up with that have saved me a lot of time:
- Pointing out needed web site changes -- grab a web page and in Sketches, note needed change then email.
- Sending people directions -- grab a map then add notation
- Adding clip art, cartoon balloons to a picture of a person for fun
- Sketch out site ideas / software feature ideas

Once you are done, you can save your creations back to your camera roll or post them to Twitter.com. In addition, this latest version includes web sharing. You can connect to your phone from a web browser and grab the images in JPG, PNG, or PDF format.

And you can do all of that on the go, on your iPhone. Nice indeed.

Sketches is a very nice and useful application. I've enjoyed it since the early days of jailbroken phones. It easily straddled the line between amazingly fun and wonderfully useful.