iPhone App: Brushes
= 5 stars
Brushes is a simple — yet surprisingly robust — drawing / painting application for the iPhone.
The Good
- Simple, intuitive controls that prove very useful in combination with each other. A brushes button lets you choose from three different brushes and adjust the stroke width via a slider. A color picker provides a color wheel, a darkness slider, and an alpha (transparency) slider. The combination of the soft edge brush shape and the alpha allows you to overlay color in a manner that simulates watercolors — your brush lays down a stroke that the underlying colors can show through. Other tools are a color picker, fill, and undo / redo.
- Pinch the screen to zoom in and out of your drawing.
- There’s an associated Mac app called Brushes Viewer that you can use to replay the awesome creation of your drawing, stroke by stroke.
The Bad
- Tapping the screen brings up the program’s menu bar, which makes it hard to create dots. Dots therefore need to be rendered as really short strokes.
- Getting the iPhone App to work with the Brushes Viewer app wasn’t that straightforward. You have to export your paintings in the “brushes” format, which means you have to share your iPhone’s Brushes library by clicking the icon in the lower left corner. Make sure your Mac is on the same Wi-Fi network as the iPhone. Then point your Mac to the URL listed there. On that page you’ll see an image gallery in which you can download each image’s brushes format version. It’d be nice to have a simpler export option in iPhoto or iTunes that just copied the paintings right off the iPhone when hooked up via USB.
Conclusion
After just fifteen minutes of playing with Brushes, it’s easily the best iPhone drawing app I’ve used. You only need to check out some of the awesome art created by others to know this app gets out of your way and lets creativity shine. Highly recommended.
iTunes App Store Link: 
The question I have is who will use this sort of application? It may be well designed and user friendly but would anyone who seriously needs to use a graphics program create their graphics on an iPhone where the canvas is by definition very small? It cannot be many people. Therefore, why does Apple develop such applications for the phone? Does it actually sell more phones?
iPad.