Scribbles review

Gallery

Verdict:

Needs: Mac OS X 10.4

Review Date: 3 Jan 2008

Price when reviewed: (about £10)

Reviewed By: Giles Turnbull

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Scribbles is a doodling and drawing application that offers a fresh approach to interface design.

It cheerfully ignores years of software development and displays just four controls: a brush stroke chooser, a colour picker, a brush size slider and a layers control. These are huge and chunky, as though made for kids.

Animation is everywhere. Click on one of these controls and it fills your workspace. The 3D layers manager is very well done, offering a simple way to move between, rearrange, or add and remove layers.

The various brush strokes are perhaps a bit limited, but offer enough variety for most tasks. That's the point of Scribbles - it's a simple tool for simple drawings. The stroke rendering and infinite canvas are both attractive features too. Brush strokes look realistic and respond well to pressure-sensitive tablets. Artwork is beautifully rerendered to scale as you zoom out to create more canvas space.

So is Scribbles made for kids? We'd argue not. Sure, kids will have fun using it, but the way it's built isn't to be simple to understand, but simple to use. Scribbles might be cheap and cheerful, but it has a lot to offer the professional who wants a lo-fi doodling environment, without all that messing around in pro-level illustration apps.

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