You Doodle Pro: Drawing, Editing, and Sharing

Drawing, photo, and collage apps for the iPad are all over the place, and each person has their favorites. I certainly wouldn't contest your choice, and I'd love to hear what they are and why you like a special app best. I am certainly no artist, but I'd like to offer for your consideration an app that I just bumped into (temporarily for free, regularly $2 or so depending on options purchased) called You Doodle which comes in free and pro versions.

First off, there are TONS of photo editing, collaging, pen, shape, filter, frame, and stamp tools available. You have control of both background and foreground and can work with them separately or merge them together. The feature list can look overwhelming, but they've done a pretty good job of keeping the interface clean so you only have to work with the features you want. Except for some very specific tools in some if my specialty art apps, I saw everything I'd expect or want. Here's a snapshot, but there is a lot more info on the App Store.

What really caught my eye in the features list, though, was the ability to connect to other iPads via Bluetooth (Draw with Friends above) which is available in the pro version. I got to try the pro version for free through Apps Gone Free. There's lots of potential here for group projects of all kinds, and we're always looking for ways to streamline collaboration, for the students and ourselves. The way it works is you start up a drawing and host a session to which you can invite neighbors. In order to receive invitations, you need to have 'accept invitations' turned on.

Once the session is up, host and guests can see the drawing, but the host iPad retains drawing control until another user asks for it. Only one user can have control of the drawing tools at a time, but everyone sees the changes. See below for a quick one I did with my 5 year old daughter using an iPad and an iPad mini. The red bar at the bottom tells me I don't have control of the drawing tools.



There is also a chat window for the session (which I don't believe is automatically saved, but one could always screenshot it).

At first, I was disappointed that only one person could draw at a time, but given the large numbers of tools, it makes sense that multiple artists at the same moment would be unwieldy. Also, taking turns probably makes for a more structured discussion.

Just recently in biology, we had a mini project that involved a group of students building a food web together. I wish we had had this app at the time because it would have streamlined the group work. As an interesting aside, once you have downloaded the picture to link into the session as a guest, it remains in your copy of the app even when you disconnect from the session. So, a group could work on part of a drawing together. Then, each person would have a copy of the group's work that could be developed further by the individuals after the group session was over.

One caveat... As far as I could tell, the app doesn't save multiple work files, and you get one drawing at a time. So, if you have unsaved work on the screen and you join a session, I think the original work is lost. Ditto if you don't save your work. So, I think all work has to be completed in one continuous session, though you can certainly reload your picture from the photo album (although layers don't seem to get saved), and your drawing isn't lost if you close the app and reopen it. (If someone knows how to save the file in a form that saves the layers, please tell me!)

Overall, this is a neat app that I look forward to exploring a lot more thoroughly and can see lots of classroom applications to try with it. Anyone know of similar apps without some of the minor drawbacks?

Normal app requisition procedures would apply.