Show HN: Sketchology

This looks excellent - as a designer my brain has always worked better with infinite canvases like Illustrator/Sketch.app; I feel really constrained by Photoshop etc. Great stuff.

wingerlang• 13 years ago

Sketch.app is just great, this was probably the first app I instantly bought when the trial ended.

NLPsajeeth• 13 years ago

Can you export to SVG, PDF or some other vector format?

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

No unfortunately. While it's fairly trivial for me to support, the performance difference (a factor of more than 100) between Sketchology and other vector drawing apps makes it impossible to actually load the exported file anywhere.

I tested against Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, iDraw, and Inkpad and was unable to load a file equivalent to drawing for more than about 2 minutes in Sketchology. I'll have a more in depth technical analysis of this soon.

aidos3• 13 years ago

Congratulations, it looks really nice.

Are you going to be sharing the details of how you've done it or will it remain secret? Just interested because I've done a lot of work with large svgs (sometimes million+ nodes) over the last year (for an ongoing project) so I'm well aware of the performance issues you mentioned.

andrew_gardener• 13 years ago

So does the tool just abstract pixels or is it using Vectors? If it is vectors, what kinds of tools does it offer for exporting?

Note that I'm not into designing at all but I might suggest this to a friend for their projects

aidos3• 13 years ago

"Sketchology is based on technology called vector drawing. Previously the sole domain of thousand dollar professional tools, algorithmic breakthroughs bring that power to something that’s useful, simple, and beautiful."

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

It's fully vector but you cannot export to SVG or any other open formats due to the performance difference between Sketchology and other vector apps. (More than 100x even against x86 hardware.)

You can export to web[0], which creates a zoomable raster copy of the drawing, but this is obviously limited to getting an editable vector copy.

[0] For example: http://www.sketchologyapp.com/u/sketchology/18

unwind• 13 years ago

Due to the what? It's not up to the application to decide if its data is useful in other applications or not, that's just ... silly lock-in talk. Quite an annoying attitude, if that's representative.

Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.

arcatek• 13 years ago

"Make something big" with a very little download button looks a bit awkward.

flyosity• 13 years ago

This looks like a really wonderful app, but the icon needs a lot of work. Maybe export a beautiful, colorful world as the icon and have it look sort of abstract? A big ugly S is something I really don't want on my home screen, to be completely honest.

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

Appreciate the feedback - at the very least though it's better than the development version:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/sketchologyapp/static/img/old-icon.p...

mortenjorck2• 13 years ago

How about a big S made out of a colorful cluster of microscopic creatures (like the zooming demo image)?

gnufied• 13 years ago

Does it require any special pen or works with hand? Looks pretty sweet btw.

guizzy• 13 years ago

Any plans for other platforms?

Android? Windows 8?

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

The first 6 months or so of development were on Windows/Linux, so cross platform compatibility is something I've always had my eye on. I can't say when though, in all honesty an iPhone version is far more likely to come before Android or Win8.

ewebbuddy• 13 years ago

iPhone version awaited! :) The app does seem nice and handy. A better icon and nicer website would help though not a big deal.

tsenkov• 13 years ago

Looks great. Congrats!

Funny thing that came to me about an artist using it, falling into "recursion stack overflow":

- This is it, it's finished... Wait, I can make this beautiful picture as only a detail of a greater, bigger and better masterpiece? (3h later) This is it, it's finished... etc. :)

bennyg• 13 years ago

Looks awesome! I can't wait to get my hands on an iPad at work and download it. I love vector drawing/illustrating - and based on your other comments, I'm hoping there's some export functionality (even as svg) in the near future so I can edit my creations on the internet. Your demo illustrations look amazing too - nice artistic touch.

fwdbureau2• 13 years ago

First, congrats on the app and the selling method. Free trial and extras for sale are definitively a honest way to go on the app store! I understand it's hard to export a svg, but how about exporting a hi-res picture? When choosing 'save image', the super resolution option disappears, and zooming before saving exports only a partial tile. It would be great to be able to save a huge picture, for pro printing, for instance

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

Definitely - it's on the todo list!

fwdbureau2• 13 years ago

yay! In the meantime there's always the possibility to export to web, save the tiles one by one on your HD and reassemble them in Photoshop like a puzzle. Quite a fun operation

honzzz2• 13 years ago

It would be nice to indicate in a title that the link is only useful for people with specific platform. It's kind of disappointing to go there and find out I cannot try it because I don't have that kind of device. Something like "Show HN: Sketchology [iOS]" or "The thing [Android]" or something like that could be helpful.

chrisdevereux• 13 years ago

Not useful doesn't imply not interesting.

Having the 'Show HN' posts all tagged with platforms would sorta make me feel like I'm in a supermarket, skipping past the isles containing stuff I'm not going to walk out with.

honzzz2• 13 years ago

Why all? My estimate is that most of them are web apps, mobile apps are often at least Android/iOS, I would say that those tags I proposed would be needed quite rarely. And it's not like I am demanding it, it was just a proposal to see whether others would like or not - just my $0.02 - you certainly raise a valid point, we certainly do not want to complicate things too much.

bobwaycott• 13 years ago

HN doesn't need to take on responsibility for managing your disappointment level.

The link is useful for anyone who wants to check out the link, see someone's work, and provide feedback.

The linked-to product/app/service is usable by anyone who is interested enough and has the requisite platform or device(s).

Your devices do not determine the usefulness of someone else's work.

asadlionpk2• 13 years ago

The app encourages me to buy the device this app is intended for. So it was useful for me that he didn't mention the platform in the subject and scare me away.

alecsmart1• 13 years ago

Got really excited. But it's only available for iPad. I use an iPhone :(

AlexDanger• 13 years ago

Well done. After a couple of minutes playing with it i see your app has nuggets of subtle UX brilliance. I think my favourite is the eraser and how it responds when you start erasing faster....

Also very alluring marketing.

Best of luck, I hope you do well, you clearly have vision. Your app made me smile.

incision• 13 years ago

Looks very neat, I'm disappointed that's it's apparently iPad only. I'd love to give it a try next to Sketchbook Ink [0] on my Android devices.

Though, I have to say, I'm growing really weary of dramatic copy that insists on telling me how "beautiful" (4x) everything is.

0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adsk.sketc...

gabriel34• 13 years ago

Are there Android and Windows Phone ports on the horizon? This App would pair up nicely with active digitizers such as Samsung's S-pen and Surface Pro's pen input.

On a more skeptical note, how does it compares with Evernote's Skitch and Omnigraffle?

seanMeverett• 13 years ago

Don't listen to the naysayers. You've created something simple, elegant, and instantly understandable. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with technical discussions of whiz-bang jetpacks, an app like this turns the corner into the basics of what can be done with one simple mechanic: infinite zoom.

I, for one, downloaded it because I want to take notes on my iPad, but the resolution isn't built for that with a stylus. Now I can take sketch notes, written notes, and doodle to my hearts desire.

Kudos on taking the leap a few years back and kudos on building something "featureless".

Monetization will always be your biggest hurdle. The sure bet that I've found, and you can look no further than Candy Crush for this mechanic, is to get someone as close as possible to the end of what they want to do and if they can't do it in that amount of time/moves/etc, they have to pay to get one more move/life. How that integrates with a "drawing" app will require time and thought.

jmelloy• 13 years ago

This is the iPad app I've wanted to build. Nice work.

toddmorey• 13 years ago

A couple of years ago, I watched a guy explaining his concept starting with nothing but a blank canvas in Adobe Ideas (very similar iPad vector drawing app that's been out a while). He'd sketch the high-level stuff and continually zoom in to provide more details. It was like watching a Prezi being built in realtime and it was memorizing. It held my attention and communicated way more than any prebuilt presentation would have done.

edgarvaldes• 13 years ago

Very nice, it reminds me of the approach of Mischief[1]

"What makes Mischief tick? Mischief uses Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), originally invented and developed by Ron and Sarah at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and further enhanced by 61 Solutions. ADFs are a new digital representation of shape which provide numerous advantages including high quality anti-aliasing, very fast rendering, support for massive parallelism, very small file sizes, and the ability to succinctly represent variable-width, scalable, textured strokes. This technology is protected by over 50 patents."

[1] http://www.madewithmischief.com/

nacs• 13 years ago

I'd been looking for Paper/Sketchology type apps for desktops but the only solutions looked to be overly complicated vector apps like Illustrator and Inkscape. Had never heard of Mischief before thanks.

oib• 13 years ago

Looks like a closed source Ipad clone of mypaint. If you want this for the desktop I recommend mypaint instead, it already has 8 years of development and its free.

alex_c2• 13 years ago

Very, very cool. It "feels" great to use it - the lines look smooth and satisfying to draw. I can see this being a lot of fun to use for random doodling. The simplicity is also great - it does exactly what it needs to, and no more.

Only one problem: I have zero artistic talent or ability. I've often wanted to start practicing drawing, but it was never THAT high a priority, and I never put in the effort to get a pad, pencils, start carrying them around with me, etc. An app like this can make it close to zero effort to get started and to doodle something every day.

Now there's still the problem of guidance or knowing where to start. Give me something like daily challenges or tutorials - can range from something as simple as "here's a picture of a cat, draw it" to more advanced animated tutorials - and I could see myself getting hooked. I would not mind paying for "content" or for a monthly subscription under this model.

egypturnash2• 13 years ago

Go to http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le..., get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises. You will get a lot better, a lot faster.

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

Having recently taught myself to draw (somewhat) I know where you're coming from. From a design perspective this is a super challenging problem though.

I actually spent a while trying to come up with an introduction to the app that would do a drawing tutorial of sorts. (Along the lines of http://www.drawastickman.com/episode1) - but the line between the app telling you what to do and guiding you is very thin, especially in content creation software. In the end I decided that it was best to try and build motivation and a personal connection through more subdued means, and that that method would be "truer" and deeper as well.

This is the same reasoning behind not having sample artwork within the program, not even as a tutorial. I didn't want people to open it up and see anything that they had not chosen to create.

I don't know what the proper solution to what you're asking would be - I want it to exist in theory, but I can't convince myself that it would be good in practice.

alex_c2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I understand what you mean - the devil is in the details.

There are two possible kinds of guidance, I think. One would be actual tutorials - draw a circle, the circle becomes the head, etc. - with the goal of teaching technique and building up skill.

The second would be aimed more at motivation and inspiration - getting people to draw something every day, no matter what their technique is or how good they are. Maybe it's a "Seinfeld calendar"-like nudge to draw every day, maybe it's a "daily challenge" or "idea of the day" for various skill levels.

Easy to say, of course, but much tougher to get it right in practice, especially with the level of simplicity and elegance you have right now. Maybe it's a completely separate app, but I think there's a lot of potential there if someone can get it right.

asdfs• 13 years ago

DrawQuest might be interesting to you: http://drawquest.com/

I do wish there was an Android or PC version.

mortenjorck2• 13 years ago

This is probably outside your vision for the product, but adding a text box tool would transform this into a pretty amazing notebook app. All the type-and-draw apps I've used are locked into the physical concept of a page, and combining a ZUI with art tools and text would be a delightfully organic way to take notes, build loose wireframes, or annotate concept sketches.

jamesbritt• 13 years ago

Folks on Android might want to check out ScribMaster:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.thoster.no...

Can't say how it compares to Sketcholgy (not being in the target audience) but it exports and imports SVG and also has what seems to be near infinite zooming.

You need to buy the full version (US$2.00) to get all the features but the free version is still quite nice.

micheljansen2• 13 years ago

I much prefer Sketchology's freely zoomable canvases over a fixed canvas, but somehow the brush styles don't look as nice as 53 Paper (http://www.fiftythree.com/paper). I don't know how to better explain this, but can Sketchology be configured to produce similar results?

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

No it can't, more than it is already at least. I'd definitely put Paper by 53 in the top spot for drawing feel on the iPad though by a fairly wide margin - second to Sketchology :D - I might have a slight bias though.

The way Paper implemented their tools is pretty interesting. I'd put the #1 feeling difference as due to their automatic layering system. (The most recent line you draw in Paper is not always on top.) This goes a long ways to creating interesting effects but isn't a direction that Sketchology went in for a bunch of reasons.

There's also other tradeoffs ex: - I'd say Paper's watercolor tool is better than Sketchology's for intra-line interactions. (i.e. keep your finger down and draw for a while) However Sketchology's is better for building up layers of watercolor (lots of lines.) - Drawing responsiveness is one or two input frames faster on Sketchology than Paper, but Paper will do slightly more shaping in that time.

There's also different design requirements, as an example Sketchology needs line shaping algorithms that work across a wide variety of brush sizes, and the ability for them to look consistent across zoom sizes. A lot of my early work on shaping algorithms would look great at one size but not another.

I've a really high opinion of Paper, the drawing feel they achieved is bounds ahead of everyone else. (Except Sketchology, again in my biased opinion.) Ultimately though after getting used to the ability to just move drawing around in Sketchology though I couldn't go back. Then again I wrote Sketchology so there'd be a problem if that wasn't the case... :)

micheljansen2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the extensive reply. I haven't been able to try Sketchology yet, as I'm waiting to get my iPad back after repair, but when I do, I will pay attention to the responsiveness you mention. Snappiness is definitely important.

I am far from an artist, and I mostly use Paper to sketch out rough interfaces and interaction impressions, and I always like how Paper somehow makes my stuff look nicer than it should. I'm terrible at space planning though, so I'd pick function over style any day :)

egypturnash2• 13 years ago

Fiddling around with it some. Interesting. It's not going to replace Illustrator by any means (that's been my main medium for 13 years) but I kinda like it more than Ideas - I think I might take it out to doodle some this week.

Stuff I'd like to see:

sync sketchbook across devices (maybe via evernote?)

palm rejection with bluetooth styli

an equivalent to AI's artboard - a way to say "this is the edge of my canvas, please export a 72/150/300/other DPI image" instead of making the user futz with it

some way to organize drawings into different sketchbooks, also a way to delete a drawing from the home page

I also kinda feel like I'd like to see some calibration notches on the sliders.

The UI could be a bit more streamlined? I'd love to have immediate access to all the tools and a color popup instead of having to possibly double-tap on the brushes/tools icon to get the menu. ArtRage really gets it right with its little popups in the corner and a tiny toolbar on the bottom, but bitmap apps just make me itchy.

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I could see all of those features being useful and integrating well into the rest of the app, though setting up edges to work within might require a bit to much UI compared to the gain in typical usage.

I went back and forth on the number of taps required to open up the brush or tools menu - the current implementation will open the menu directly if you already have that tool selected, and switch to the tool otherwise. Ex if calligraphy is selected then you touch brushes -> menu opens. If calligraphy is selected and you touch tools, then the eraser (or the MRU tool) is selected and the menu does not open.

This flow works really well when you switch are switching between 2 types of anything, like between calligraphy and the pencil, or calligraphy and the eraser and (I like it because) it doesn't have popups flying in your face constantly. It works less well if you switch between 3 (ex calligraphy->eraser->pencil.) A second downside is that the logic behind when 1 or 2 clicks is required is somewhat less than obvious.

(You can delete drawings, press and hold on the thumbnail in the homescreen)

ulyssesgrant• 13 years ago

Been thinking about this for a long time, glad to see it's a reality now. I'll absolutely download it

alexmorse• 13 years ago

This is what I've been looking for since the iPad came out. Your brushes aren't as good as Paper, but the zoom feature is killer and makes the iPad a real drawing tool for the first time.

jbrooksuk• 13 years ago

A very cool idea - definitely an app I'll be downloading once I finally purchase myself another iPad.

gcb0• 13 years ago

i was actually trying to use sketchbookX from autodesk to take quick notes and draw schema diagrams.

the lack of boundaries will make me continue to use your app! it is how i ever felt those apps should work in the first place. you nailed it.

only critic i have now: the fake width of the traces are ok for testing out the app. do a few swipes and something similar to a brush drawing appears. nice. but using speed for that is completely unintuitive and impossible to "use".. no way to make a thin straight line (have to do it slow, so it ends up jittered) and no way to do a short bold line (no way to get to speed). either find a way to get finger pressure or just leave it flat.

and a feature request: add simple text tool so my schema designs are easier to do :)

mickrobk13• 13 years ago

Glad you like it! Straight bold/thin lines really aren't possible with the default calligraphy brush. There's a marker tool if you open the brushes menu which just does unshaped, straight lines. It's locked to the full version of the app however.

The inkpen brush is also 'untextured' (for lack of a better word) and has a shape profile opposite to the calligraphy brush (slower=wider).

droelf• 13 years ago

wow, something like this and no one points out two fantastic FOSS alternatives: krita and mypaint

bwr• 13 years ago

This app looks pretty neat.

I'm working on something similar for Android but focused on note taking and diagramming instead of drawing. I think of it as a kind of handwritten wiki. I allow placing of links in the document that jump to other parts of the document. It is still very much a work in progress and my lines don't look anywhere near as good as the ones in Sketchology.

davidppp• 13 years ago

Wow! This is a fantastic app. All of the basic tools feel natural to use, and the vector smoothing "just works". Well done!

psuter• 13 years ago

Excellent execution for something I always wanted on the iPad, congratulations!

Lauricio• 13 years ago

Awesome app, well done! Any plans for POGO stylus support?

uses• 13 years ago

You could use something like this to hide secrets 5 levels of zoom deep - steganography. Someone could always export it and use tools to find your secret, but they'd have to know it existed first.

asiekierka• 13 years ago

Rather seriously consider porting it to the Mac and adding actual tablet support. This could be a hit if done right - see Paint Tool SAI for some inspiration.

RaSoJo• 13 years ago

Looks awesome. Is there any specific stylus that is recommended for this app? Also would it work on an iPad Mini

asadlionpk2• 13 years ago

Now only if I had layer support and export to some standard format

Show HN: Sketchology

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