SimpleDraw review

Andrew Williams

We review SimpleDraw, an app that does what it says on the tin, albeit with frequently garish, occasionally hideous, results

Published on Sep 4, 2009

The iPhone makes a surprisingly good graphics tablet- as long as you’re just a hobbyist doodler. Thanks to its capacitive screen, even the lightest of touches can be used to draw, paint and create, so you can let you finger dance over the screen as effetely as you fancy – in proper artist’s fashion.

Unlike Brushes though, SimpleDraw isn’t really trying to release your inner artist, more your inner scribbler. We’re not sure about you, but the inner scribbler’s not all that far from the surface most of the time.

It’s a painting program where you use your finger to drawn on the iPhone’s touchscreen. One finger on the screen paints, while a two-fingered press on the screen takes you to the menu. Here, you can select how thick you want your paintbrush to be, and what colour you want it to paint.

There are no options for opacity or brush type. Each one is bold, opaque and, well, simple. Of course, there are technique you can use to make your drawings more sophisticated, such as initially drawing with large brushes and then essentially sculpting something more refined out of them with daintier brushes. However, any refinement you manage to eke out of SimpleDraw is strictly the result of your own ingenuity.

Thankfully, you do have an eraser to work with, but that’s the limit of SimpleDraw’s drawing fidelity.

The trade off for this lack of feature diversity is that the app is painfully easy to use. The one finger paint, two finger menu dynamic works extremely well, and there are buttons on the palette menu that let you save your image to your iPhone’s gallery and start from scratch with a new canvas.

Even the idea of working under limits has its limits though, and some of SimpleDraw’s lacking elements make us question whether it’s worth a download. Firstly, the colours you have to work with are uniformly horrible. They’re garish, highlighter shades and, without editing your final images in Photoshop, there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Even if SimpleDraw didn’t let you use more than five colours at once, it could at least let you tone them down a bit. Pastel shades may not be fashionable any more, but we’d prefer them to the colours included here.

There’s also no zoom function, making anything more than the most basic of images borderline impossible to conjure up. To an extent, it’s pointless to criticise SimpleDraw in these terms though. If SimpleDraw came in a tin, it would be more-or-less doing what it said on front, and in a manner that requires zero effort to understand.

Considering it has no functions beyond painting, we do have to wonder who would use this app for any length of time over something like Colors! or Brushes, regardless of cost. The conclusion? Children under the age of 5.