Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The brushes and tools on the wheel are selected by tapping on the one you want to use; tapping on a selected brush or tool again opens its settings. The full set of brushes includes: The eight slots in the tool wheel can also be assigned to selection, nudge, hard eraser, soft eraser, text, and pan tools. The first two work well for taking notes and the marker set at a low opacity is an excellent highlighter. Whether your ideas result in something like Cheney’s whimsical concept art for The Grinch or my messy soup of notes, screenshots, and highlighting, the core utility of Concepts, which is right there in its name, is the way it facilitates the exploration of ideas. The app currently has 4.5 out of five stars from users. Before diving into Concepts’ workspace though, it’s worth noting that the drawings you create with the app are vector art. The tools are well-laid-out and very user-friendly, There are plenty of ways to be creative with the app and it offers limitless canvas, Many of the tools and features require in-app purchases. Concepts drawings don’t sync between multiple iOS devices either. When Concepts is first opened, users can select a previously saved sketch or start a new one by tapping on the plus button. We'll notify you of price drops, news, and updates for this app. I’d used both apps for a long time, but with the new Apple Pencil, I found myself using them more often. When you receive this email, your app is marked as Draft in your app listing dashboard. Each layer can be hidden, copied, locked, duplicated, renamed, selected, and manually or automatically sorted. Adjusting line width (left) and using the color picker (right). Copyright 2020 MacStories, Inc. All rights reserved. Export supports eight file formats as well as exporting an entire canvas or just what you see onscreen. Free from the constraint of orderly lines of text, ideas evolved more organically, which I’ve found works exceptionally well during the early stages of a project. I’m not much of an artist though, so I was unsure how I’d use the app. I’m using a tool meant for artists to take notes, doodle, and mark up screenshots. The tilt and natural media sketching in Concepts is really nice, and better implemented than other vector natural media brushes (such as Affinity Design). Concepts includes extensive customization for brushes, tools, and colors. The infinite canvas, 16 brushes, and five layers are all part of the free version of the app. Long pressing the plus button reveals options to add a new drawing, section, or project, or to paste from the clipboard, import a compatible file, or take a picture. It’s great for professions of all types from architecture and fashion from engineering and teaching. Because the app doesn’t integrate with the Files app, there is no way to store drawings in project files with other types of documents. Users have described the app as professional, great, and very easy to use. 21K likes. While this app can certainly be used by professionals such as designers, surveyors, engineers, and architects it's also user-friendly enough to be used by kids, students, and anyone with a passion for art. Once users are ready to create, they can utilize all the tools readily available. I started with familiar apps like GoodNotes, which I reviewed last week, and Linea Sketch from The Iconfactory, two of my long-time favorite apps. I dont know how they do it. The Concepts app allows you to really take your creative endeavors to the extremes given you even more possibilities than a paper and pen can. 148Apps is an independent publication of Steel Media Ltd that has not been authorized, sponsored, or approved by Apple Inc. Concepts is a free drawing app designed to make precision drafting and sketching simpler thanks to its intuitive interface and easy-to-use toolbar. It even offers AirPlay support for the AppleTV, which is a nice bonus. There’s multiple pens with adjustable sizes, an adapting large eraser, an undo and redo button, a color palette and a quick export button for sharing creations through Twitter or email or saving them directly to the Camera Roll. There are several options for setting up your work environment, the majority of which are accessed from the gear icon on the right side of the bar at the top of the main drawing view. That’s a lot of brushes, tools, and color options. The top right corner of the bar across the top of the app includes a button for sorting drawings manually, by date created, date updated, and alphabetically too. Opacity can be adjusted by layer too, which is handy for tracing over an image on another layer. The multi-gesture support is what makes this app stand out the most. I’ve used this to create quick flow chart-style mind maps. The one-page-at-a-time interface of both apps also made it hard to annotate more than a single screenshot per page without running out of space. The next ring has three sections dedicated to line width, opacity, and line smoothing for the tools assigned to the outer ring, which can be adjusted by tapping or dragging out from each. A toolbar on the left side of the screen features all the tools, but it's possible to hide it with a left swipe.