Overview
While the iPhone helped ring in the age of mainstream touch-screen mobile phones, aside from manipulating images to get bigger and smaller, there was seemingly very little use for it. Now, NetSketch has fundamentally changed all that, by turning your cell phone screen into an endless easel.
NetSketch allows you to draw brilliantly detailed images with the touch screen, and provides an unlimited canvas to continue to expand and expand. Add in a WiFi connection and friends with NetSketch and you've got an unprecedented real-time collaborative effort.
Functionality
Open up NetSketch, name your first piece of art, and choose your network settings. Here's the first choice, and it's a big one.
NetSketch allows you to team up with other users in your WiFi network to create art. If you decide to open up the piece to chosen group members, they can view the changes you make to the piece, in real time, on their own iPhones. They can also make changes, allowing for a truly collaborative effort. This also allows real time tic tac toe games to be played, something iPhone users have been clamoring for, no doubt.
Choose your colors and get started drawing. While the iPhone screen is relatively tiny, you can utilize the same zoom in and out methods that you use on the internet, or photos, on NetSketch drawings. Zoom out to increase the canvas, infinitely, and zoom in to put more detail in your burgeoning art piece.
Proud of your work? You can email it to a friend, send it to your photos, or send it to your NetSketch account online, a terrific bit of web integration.
Review
I'm no artist, but, pardon the French, this application is still friggin awesome. Just the sheer power behind it; the endless canvas is genius, and provides for supremely talented artists to create something awesome right on their iPhones. The sheer number of colors available, and the ability to easily delete any mistakes by pressing a key on the bottom of the screen, it makes it so simple to create something pretty darn cool.
Think of it as MS (Finger) Paint, on steroids.
And the ability to not only share it via email or the cool community they have online, but to work on it in real time over a WiFi network is absolutely ingenious, and, more to the point, fun. Pass notes without using your text messages up; hell, pass three-way notes while you're at it.
One issue that it does have, however, is what helps make it awesome: the finger painting style. Unfortunately, I am unable to control the thickness of my fingers, or the lightness of my touch, and I believe that many people will find themselves unable to fully control the "paintbrush" as they would like. Perhaps a later version can have customizable paint brush translations.
Summary
Nearly flawless, NetSketch is one of the most fun and creative ways to pass your time. It's also a productive utility for note sharing and collaborating, and as such, it is well worth the $5.99 that you'll pay.
