Definitely :) - Even getting this to run on the iPad 3 was a lengthy adventure in profiling. I wish I could have hit the 1, but it just wasn't meant to be.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks! I want to talk about it - I think it's probably the coolest part of the program. It's difficult though, I left my job about 2 years ago to work on this so commercial success is a definite goal. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll be able to give out algorithmic details without compromising that.
Totally understandable. I'm in a similar position myself (though in a completely different space).
If you ever decided the secret was too much to bear and you'd like to get it off your chest you could always drop me an email (in my profile) and we could discuss it :)
"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."
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.
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.
Well no, I could never say that there isn't tremendous benefit to being able to use multiple tools in a workflow and have control of your data.
Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lines) done with the pencil tool in Sketchology would cause Illustrator to lock up for hours and consume all available memory. Larger drawings would fail to open altogether.
Ultimately I think offering the feature would have been extremely misleading and frustrating for people. I'd rather cut a feature than ship a bad experience.
That sounds like a problem with your app, not theirs. There's no reason why a compliant SVG with only 20 lines shouldn't be easily compatible with any vector drawing program.
Inkscape which uses SVG as it's "internal" format often chokes on seemingly "simple" svg files (which when you look into it have thousands of points on a simple curve).
Often these have been generated by another SVG tool, support another tools idiocy for whatever marginal gain he might make is maybe why he doesn't want to do it.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
84 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadOr Inkscape
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.
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.
If you ever decided the secret was too much to bear and you'd like to get it off your chest you could always drop me an email (in my profile) and we could discuss it :)
Note that I'm not into designing at all but I might suggest this to a friend for their projects
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
Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.
Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lines) done with the pencil tool in Sketchology would cause Illustrator to lock up for hours and consume all available memory. Larger drawings would fail to open altogether.
Ultimately I think offering the feature would have been extremely misleading and frustrating for people. I'd rather cut a feature than ship a bad experience.
Often these have been generated by another SVG tool, support another tools idiocy for whatever marginal gain he might make is maybe why he doesn't want to do it.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/sketchologyapp/static/img/old-icon.p...
Android? Windows 8?
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. :)
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.
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.
Also very alluring marketing.
Best of luck, I hope you do well, you clearly have vision. Your app made me smile.
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...
On a more skeptical note, how does it compares with Evernote's Skitch and Omnigraffle?
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.
"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/
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.
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.
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.
I do wish there was an Android or PC version.
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.