I’m currently at a challenging points with basic sketching and drawing apps for the iPad. I use these apps almost daily for the initial ideation stage of my design work.

Recently I had to purge all of the artwork from Linea Sketch, numbering in the hundreds, and disconnect the the app from iCloud. These were forced measures to try and speed up the time to use the app. Slow software sucks, and that’s the line Linea crossed in the past few years. No, no pun in tended. The solution is imperfect. I have to manually cut out the artwork I’ve done, back it up as .PNGs to my computer, and hope I can find it later. All layers are lost, the fancy time lapse feature is lost. Yes, there’s ways around it, but I was in a hurry.

Given that, I tried switching to Apple Notes. It’s…. possible, or passable. It kind of works; but it’s not a pro app by any means. If Linea could just get a bit faster, and allow for a larger canvas, I’d be a happy customer for years to come. Apple Notes has an infinite canvas, and the drawing tools are okay. However, just try to get the artwork out of Notes and you quickly run into a world of trouble.

The technical details aren’t that interesting for why, although I might write about these at some point. Needless to say, I wonder at some point if I need to design the app I’d like to use.