A Picture Is (Almost) Worth A Thousand Words In FB Chat With Doodle
FB Chat with Doodle (Free) by VoyagerApps.com aims to bring new life to Facebook by eliminating the need for all those boring old words.
The idea is simple: Instead of just typing to your Facebook friends, you can draw them a picture. Just pick a friend from the list and type a message, or touch the doodle button and let your creativity do the talking.
The tools at your disposal are few, but adequate for this type of doodling. You have a pencil, an eraser, and an undo button. Under settings, you have two sliders: one for the size of the line, another for the color. Other options allow you to clear the whole canvas, or save the doodle to your photos.
It's a universal app, but the two versions look very different.
The iPhone version is very bare bones. It basically looks like any other Facebook chat client, with a list of available friends and a list of active conversations.
On the iPad, however, it looks completely different. The theme is that of a notebook sitting on a desk. Through the transparent list of friends you can see a pencil and an eraser, and even a cup of coffee. Active conversations appear as multi-colored tabs at the top of your notebook, as if each friend has his or her own page. It really looks quite nice.
Unfortunately, the app doesn't perform like you would hope in either version.
When you send a picture to a friend and they receive it via their pop-up chat window, what they're really receiving is a link to the conversation in their message inbox. It's only when the conversation replaces the News Feed that any pictures are visible.
Having to abandon your News Feed might not be the end of the world, but it's disappointing. It's less like chatting with doodles, and more like sending doodle messages. The same thing applies to Facebook chat on your iDevices.
The app description implies that if both you and your friend have the app, you can doodle back and forth. This sounds fun, in theory. But when I tried it with a friend, all we got were links; links that I couldn't even click on within the app.
Beyond that, there doesn't appear to be a way to manually refresh your list of online friends. So eventually you become inactive without knowing it. The only way I found to reconnect is to manually close the app by double-clicking the home button and removing it from your active apps.
The app is free, but supported by an ad for ApolloBrowser+IM, which you can remove by downloading Apollo (also free). So you should check it out if you're looking for a way to draw pictures and send them to your friends' inboxes.
Ultimately, though, what sounds like a fun idea simply fails to perform in the way you would hope.
