This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Every Drawing Application, Reviewed. Additional details may be found in the original article.
Squiggles ($5) is a highly ambitious drawing application that simply tries to do too much. Unlike many of the other applications in its price range, Squiggles doesn’t offer any sort of built-in gallery, instead letting giving users a main drawing screen and a number of buttons which access options such as saving the drawing to the photo library, creating a new drawing—which replaces the current one, although it asks if you’d like to save first—accessing settings, tools, colors, and brushes, and undoing the last stroke.
Users can also clear the screen by shaking.
Squiggles offers an impressive list of tool options, including brush, eraser, clone tool, stamp, overlay image, and text buttons, a variety of basic filters, including brightness and contrast adjustments, and a section for layer control. The brushes/overlay/stamp selections are equally robust, with controls given for the opacity and blend mode for each brush. The settings menu allows the user to toggle the ask on shake, smart shape, load cropped, cursor, and smoothing features on and off, along with a slider to adjust the smoothing and a button that lets the user set a finger offset for more accurate drawing.
Despite all these features, Squiggles lacks simple features such as zoom and multiple undo, and its handling of certain features, such as layers, makes them all but unusable.
A re-thought menu system, a more clear way of letting the user know exactly what layer they are on and what will and will not be editable at a given time, a slightly lower price, and a more attractive overall interface would do a lot to make Squiggles better. It’s not terrible as it is, but it’s not outstanding either, and it lacks the polish and ease of use found in its direct competition. With some improvement, it could certainly become a powerful app; it currently falls slightly short of our recommendation.
