It’s pretty nice, it has some features that SketchBook Pro doesn’t have, most notably; The Smear Tool & The Easy to Access Color Palettes—
But there are some other things that drive me crazy.
Very Crazy.
Very, Very - C - R - A - Z - Y - ( !!! ) !
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The First most annoying thing is that after i bought The very inexpensive Pro Activation Dealie, it just forgot that i’d bought it a week or so later ( ? )
But far more annoying; i just today accidentally deleted a picture that i’d put maybe 5 hours into. i was closing The app or opening a new frame palette, & a window came up that i wasn’t paying attention to, & when The blank screen came up, i soon realized that The previous picture was deleted.
Completely.
Then a Few Days later when i passed through a WiFi HotSpot & it Reactivate my ProStatus; After working on Another Picture for A few hours, i Tried Saving it through The Gallery, And— i Deleted it.
It seems to me that The Default Function for Any Sort of Activity in which you are moving from one thing to another, or starting a new project or doing whatever— Would be to Just Assume that The User wants to Save Everything. Everything Possible. [ SAVE ].
There are Two Options; Save & Delete. Delete or Save.
This App seems to think that these two Functions should be divvied up into Several Functions, & All of them are very wordy, & very ambiguous.
The Two Choices are; Save under all Circumstances.
Delete only through a Special Menu that double checks to ask, Are you sure you want to Delete this. And then; After Deleting it; It should be possible to undo The Delete. To Really Delete Something; you then have to Empty The Trash, where you’re given The Option of Reviewing everything that is in The Trash.
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The Odd thing is; i’d been working on another image earlier, then transferred it to my computer, since it was ‘done’ & it was very, very tedious & difficult to get that image to be deleted from The ArtFlow App. And then later, hours later, hours after i accidentally deleted The ‘Second’ image, The First picture that i worked so hard to get rid of; Popped Back up, but The Second Picture that i wanted to Save is still gone !!!
Then Again; i tried & tried to Delete this older image, & it just would Not allow me to do that. The Trashcan Icon, while appearing for all The images that i wanted to Keep, would be Dimmed for this one Image that i so very much wanted to get rid of ( !!! ) ?
It seems to me that when you’re starting a new image, The App should never ever, completely never, just ‘Assume’ that you want to delete The Previous Image. To Delete Any Image, There should be a ‘Reasonably’ lengthy protocol that asks at least once, ‘Are you sure that you want to delete this?’
So those are The Two Things.
Another Thing.
i am a big fan of The Hierarchal Menu System. There is An Alternative Menu System called The; Hide a Dozen or So Menu’s throughout The App, that sometimes work with combinations of other keys, or sometimes The icon that brought up a menu in One Context, Now brings up a Completely Different Menu if you’re doing something Else; System.
The Hierarchal Menu System works like this; You have one Menu, & One Menu Tree. Each Tier of The Menu Tree has a small Number of Well Worded Menu Choices so that if you have 4 Tiers of 6 Choices each; That allows you easy access, that is never ambiguous, to 1,296 Features.
So if you’re ever looking for something, something that you’re sure you’ve seen before; Somewheres, but now you can’t find it ! If The App had an Hierarchal Menu System, you could thread your way right to it.
One of The Choices in The First Tier Menu would be : User Manual.
This User Manual should be In a .pdf Form, that comes up through a pdf reader, & has lots of illuminating & clear illustrations, instead of mind-fawking blocks of text that never seem to be accessible to a glossary or references to The Icons that appear in The App. ( ! )
Another Thing :
Which is Related to The Last Item a Little Bit.
When you bring up The Left Side Menu which features The little ‘Planes’ or ‘Layers’ Windows; Along The Bottoms of these Panes are The Options for [ Normal ] ( which is never explained anywhere, but should be in The .pdf, which is non-existent ! ) & The 100% ( which apparently, in this App, actually refers to many different things, unlike The previous incarnations of this App, in which it only referred to one thing. )
The Point Being; If you try clicking on either of these, they will do nothing. They are Not Connected to anything. They are purely Decoration. To Access these ‘Features’ you have to find The Other ‘Menu’ which is located along The Side Strip, slightly to The Right. This is never explained anywhere.
i Realize & have Accepted for some time, that The Way to Learn How to Use any App or Application is by Trial & Error. Click, Click, Click ! But this ’New’ Philosophy of So Methodically, So Deliberately, So Punctually Diabolically Evilly; Keeping all of these Features, Their Locations & Functionality A Secret — There’s something Wrong with that.
There is something Wrong with Spending hours & hours with a New ‘Promising’ App in which you spend a great deal of The Time Trying to Figure it Out, Screaming at it ‘NO NO NO !!! STOP STOP STOP !!!’
That is wrong.
The Crime here is that The App Seems ‘Promising’.
Most of The Time; If It doesn’t look that Promising, & i’ll just delete it. It’s annoying if i just paid $5.00 or more for it. If it’s Not Promising looking, & i’ve just exhausted my allocated 500 Screaming ’NO NO NO’s’ on it. I’ll Delete it.
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i Just discovered something else that annoys me.
When you open A New Drawing Pane, The Proportionality of width to height is Always Wrong !
That is; When you choose a Size from The Menu; The Drawing Sheet will be UnAligned with with Tablet’s Orientation, & there is ( apparently ! ) no way to simply Turn The Drawing Sheet Itself 90˚, even though you can ‘easily’ turn The image 90˚, you can’t turn The Sheet Itself.
The only way to get around this is to Custom Define all of your First Sheets.
( ??? ) !
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Art Flow Looks Promising.
i just wish it weren’t so Frustrating.
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It also seems like given The Features on this App, They should have just ‘Added’ them to SketchBook, possibly even at a small additional Fee, rather than create an entirely new App ( ? )
It’s essentially The Same App, with some small tweaks.
Also: One of The Most Promising Features is The Smear Tool, which is The Best Smear Tool i’ve ever seen ( The Second one i’ve ever Seen ). But whenever i use it, After about 15 seconds, it crashes The App. ( ? ) !
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If you make a mistake using The Layers; Such as start painting on The Outline layer, for like 10 minutes— It can be a Fawking N-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E trying to fix it !!! First of all, once you’ve made this mistake, you are scarred for life concerning your confidence about painting on any given layer. You suddenly become OCD, if you weren’t already, & if you were already OCD, then you become ADHD-Tourettes-OCD.
The Simple Cure for this May Be to —
And this Solution may be used for many other Attributes ! ( ! )
— Bring up an Indicator telling you what Layer you’re on, while you’re painting or drawing. The way i envision this is slightly complicated, So that When you Create a New Layer, you can ‘Name’ it from a list of Generic Names; Such as; ‘Reference Photo’, ‘Outline’, ‘Base Colors’, ‘Details’, ‘Shadows’, ‘Textures’ or Customize a Name by Typing one in. Then: When you’ve exited all of The Side Menus & begin to Draw or Paint, The Layer name will appear in a small, but clear font in one corner — And then ( ! ) after you’ve been drawing for a few moments, it Disappears. ( ! ) Then when you stop drawing for a few moments, it ReAppears ( ! ). Then when you start drawing again ( ! ) It Disappears ( ! ).
This could be used for lots of things; Like The Brush Type, Layer Opacity, Special Attributes, Memory Concerns, The Color Palette, Mixing Board or Whatever. The User would be able to pick from a long list of ‘Awarenessers’ to pick from. ( ! )
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Additional Features :
What i would really like to see; Is something that emulates The Way Water-Colours bleed out when you apply them, stopping at Boundaries, & Distributing their Color Density in Random Puddles; The way real watercolors Behave when they hit a Prismacolor’s line or a dried color area.
And — A Mixing Palette in which you can smear colours together & then save them into little boxes, like a plastic water-colour palette.
Also; It should be Easy to Customize various tools & Set them aside in a Box, Where they are then ‘UnEditable’ — with an Option of ‘Freezing’ The Color on a given pencil or crayon.
And — A Feature that ‘Makes’ A Color Palette of 8 or 16 colours from a Seed Color that you’ve created; So that you’d then have -Either- a new spectrum of colours that run from White to Your (x Color to Black or Alternatively; From Color (a to (x to Color (b, or Just from Color (a to your Color (x.
And — If your Device has sufficient memory to support a very large Drawing area, such as 20 by 20 feet at a resolution of 300 dpi, Then The App should allow for that. If The App knows that it would come to a drooling crawl if you tried that, then it would break The image up into manageable pieces & arrange them to The Users Interests when needed for drawing or for Viewing.
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Overall; Good when it’s Good, Horrible when it’s Horrible.

Brand	N/A
Rating	3.6 (7079 ratings)
Price	$N/A
Category	Novelty

ArtFlow - Sketch, Paint, Draw