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Show HN: Sketchology

sketchologyapp.com

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Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#41

Post by mickrobk »

unwind wrote: post #35
mickrobk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fully vector but you cannot export to SVG or any other open formats due to the performance difference between Sketchology and other vector apps. (More than 100x even against x86 hardware.) You can export to web[0], which creates a zoomable raster copy of the drawing, but this is obviously limited to getting an editable vector copy. [0] For example: http://www.sketchologyapp.com/u/sketchology/18

Due to the what? It's not up to the application to decide if its data is useful in other applications or not, that's just ... silly lock-in talk. Quite an annoying attitude, if that's representative. Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.

Well no, I could never say that there isn't tremendous benefit to being able to use multiple tools in a workflow and have control of your data.

Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lines) done with the pencil tool in Sketchology would cause Illustrator to lock up for hours and consume all available memory. Larger drawings would fail to open altogether.

Ultimately I think offering the feature would have been extremely misleading and frustrating for people. I'd rather cut a feature than ship a bad experience.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#42

Post by dublinben »

mickrobk wrote: post #41
unwind wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to the what? It's not up to the application to decide if its data is useful in other applications or not, that's just ... silly lock-in talk. Quite an annoying attitude, if that's representative. Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.

Well no, I could never say that there isn't tremendous benefit to being able to use multiple tools in a workflow and have control of your data. Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lin…

That sounds like a problem with your app, not theirs. There's no reason why a compliant SVG with only 20 lines shouldn't be easily compatible with any vector drawing program.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#43

Post by honzzz »

chrisdevereux wrote: post #39
honzzz wrote: post #29

It would be nice to indicate in a title that the link is only useful for people with specific platform. It's kind of disappointing to go there and find out I cannot try it because I don't have that kind of device. Something like "Show HN: Sketchology [iOS]" or "The thing [Android]" or something like that could be helpful.

Not useful doesn't imply not interesting. Having the 'Show HN' posts all tagged with platforms would sorta make me feel like I'm in a supermarket, skipping past the isles containing stuff I'm not going to walk out with.

Why all? My estimate is that most of them are web apps, mobile apps are often at least Android/iOS, I would say that those tags I proposed would be needed quite rarely. And it's not like I am demanding it, it was just a proposal to see whether others would like or not - just my $0.02 - you certainly raise a valid point, we certainly do not want to complicate things too much.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#44

Post by gabriel34 »

Are there Android and Windows Phone ports on the horizon? This App would pair up nicely with active digitizers such as Samsung's S-pen and Surface Pro's pen input.

On a more skeptical note, how does it compares with Evernote's Skitch and Omnigraffle?

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#45

Post by seanMeverett »

Don't listen to the naysayers. You've created something simple, elegant, and instantly understandable. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with technical discussions of whiz-bang jetpacks, an app like this turns the corner into the basics of what can be done with one simple mechanic: infinite zoom.

I, for one, downloaded it because I want to take notes on my iPad, but the resolution isn't built for that with a stylus. Now I can take sketch notes, written notes, and doodle to my hearts desire.

Kudos on taking the leap a few years back and kudos on building something "featureless".

Monetization will always be your biggest hurdle. The sure bet that I've found, and you can look no further than Candy Crush for this mechanic, is to get someone as close as possible to the end of what they want to do and if they can't do it in that amount of time/moves/etc, they have to pay to get one more move/life. How that integrates with a "drawing" app will require time and thought.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#46

Post by toddmorey »

A couple of years ago, I watched a guy explaining his concept starting with nothing but a blank canvas in Adobe Ideas (very similar iPad vector drawing app that's been out a while). He'd sketch the high-level stuff and continually zoom in to provide more details. It was like watching a Prezi being built in realtime and it was memorizing. It held my attention and communicated way more than any prebuilt presentation would have done.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#47

Post by edgarvaldes »

Very nice, it reminds me of the approach of Mischief[1]

"What makes Mischief tick? Mischief uses Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), originally invented and developed by Ron and Sarah at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and further enhanced by 61 Solutions. ADFs are a new digital representation of shape which provide numerous advantages including high quality anti-aliasing, very fast rendering, support for massive parallelism, very small file sizes, and the ability to succinctly represent variable-width, scalable, textured strokes. This technology is protected by over 50 patents."

[1]: http://www.madewithmischief.com/

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#48

Post by oib »

Looks like a closed source Ipad clone of mypaint. If you want this for the desktop I recommend mypaint instead, it already has 8 years of development and its free.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#49

Post by jmelloy »

seanMeverett wrote: post #45

Don't listen to the naysayers. You've created something simple, elegant, and instantly understandable. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with technical discussions of whiz-bang jetpacks, an app like this turns the corner into the basics of what can be done with one simple mechanic: infinite zoom. I, for one, downloaded it because I want to take notes on my iPad, but the resolution isn't built for that with…

This is the iPad app I've wanted to build. Nice work.

Re: Show HN: Sketchology

#50

Post by noir_lord »

dublinben wrote: post #42
mickrobk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, I could never say that there isn't tremendous benefit to being able to use multiple tools in a workflow and have control of your data. Lack of SVG export isn't due to wanting lock in, or even a question of priorities. I spent considerable time working with all the leading vector drawing programs and investigating their performance. The simple fact was that it couldn't work well. Even trivial drawings (20 lin…

That sounds like a problem with your app, not theirs. There's no reason why a compliant SVG with only 20 lines shouldn't be easily compatible with any vector drawing program.

Inkscape which uses SVG as it's "internal" format often chokes on seemingly "simple" svg files (which when you look into it have thousands of points on a simple curve).

Often these have been generated by another SVG tool, support another tools idiocy for whatever marginal gain he might make is maybe why he doesn't want to do it.

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