modbook: Sat Dec 6 15:42:00 2008

Sat Dec 6 15:42:00 2008

I haven't had much drawing time lately, but the Autodesk Sketchbook 2009 deal fell in my lap (apparently they're bundling it with new units - you can download it for old ones given a serial number.) Pretty nice implementation of "pencil", and good use of pie-menus for selecting obvious things. Very much a "teaser" version, though:

• only 3 layers
• only saves in bitmap formats with flattened layers (and no transparency, at least in TIFF)
• only 30 levels of undo
• crashed once (though it a "save your work" dialog first, which is a nice touch on a bad situation... especially since you can't save layers)

That said, it did get me back into drawing (though I'll probably get back to using Scribbles, at my skill level Sketchbook Pro isn't really tempting, and the limitations of the downloaded version have already wasted my time after only two drawings.) I'm starting to consider picking up an old HP TC1100 (under-$400 "obsolete" tablet) to have something I'll carry around, though...