First Look: Sketches

Sketches was one of the apps I picked up the very first day the App Store opened -- in fact, it was the first I ever bought, and I bought it as a mistake: Apple's one-click shopping bit me for $7.99 (the app has since dropped in price to $5.99). But it turns out, as a mistake, it was a fortuitous one, because it's one of the apps I've been most impressed with. There are a few other "Paint" style apps floating around the store nowadays, but Sketches is worth the price of admission for doing exactly what it says: letting you easily and quickly draw whatever you want on whatever you want.

The quantity of options in a simple app like this are surprising. Choose from six different kinds of backgrounds, including photos shot with the phone's camera, existing album photos, a solid color, a webpage pulled from an in-app browser, a map of your location or a library of six included backgrounds.

Next, select from a bevy of colors and line thickness for drawing or the provided clip art. Finally, save the sketch in the app, export it out to your photo album or send it to Twitter. And even as you use the app, more fun appears -- there's a cool Etch-a-Sketch-like shake feature to erase what you've drawn, and the zoom button can move you in close for even more detail.

Text input is missing (and reportedly will be included in a later version), but as a quick sketch creator (you won't be designing the Mona Lisa with this, more like circling something on a map or pic before a quick upload to Twitter), Sketches is a really fun, very professional app. LateNiteSoft has it up to 1.2 so far, and even though I had no intention of buying it when I pressed the "Buy App" button without thinking (weren't we all a little feverish when the App Store first dropped?), I don't regret my purchase one bit.