Glow Doodle review

Mark Mackay

We review Glow Doodle, an iPhone application that lets you made your very own neon sign

Published on Jan 28, 2010

There are a lot of drawing apps on the iPhone, but many are of a decidedly average quality.

The pens are either of limited use or scope and many of them render your pictures in a slower than satisfactory manner.

While many developers have attempted to make serious drawing apps with a professional finish, the vast majority have failed, with just a few, such as Sketchbook proving to be of any worth.

One way around the trap of trying to make a serious drawing app for a 3.5-inch touchscreen which is clearly unsuited to such an endeavour is to make a drawing app that isn’t so serious.

This is exactly what the developers of Glow Doodled have done. If ever you’ve wondered what your name would look like in a neon sign, then Glow Doodle would be a good place to start.

Mainly because a 59p iPhone application is a damned sigh cheaper than the real thing, but also because it’s this effect that the application aims to emulate.

The interface is orientated in a landscape view with your limited toolset along the bottom. There are five colours from which to choose, being red, green, blue and yellow.

As with all drawing apps, drawing is done with your finger rather than a finer stylus. This is little clumsy but the iPhone screen doesn’t pick up many finer tips.

There’s an undo button for any mistakes made but a redo button is too much to ask. At the right hand side are options to clear the screen entirely or save your handiwork to your iPhone library.

Once you’ve drawn your masterpiece, it’s time to make it light up. The glow button applies a filter to your previously unglowing drawn lines to give it that neon appearance.

Where two lines cross over one another, the light will be lighter which breaths some much-needed dynamics to the app. The primary colours bleed into one another a little too which varies things up a bit. The premise of Glow Doodle is incredibly simple and tools at your disposal are incredibly limited.

The best thing to do before buying this app would be to check out the screenshots on the apps page and decide if you like it. We thought they were pretty cool but, a few more features with future updates would really make the app worth the money.