Flow by Moleskine
Legendary notebooks go digital
The app’s canvas is effectively limitless horizontally
Free, offers in-app purchases FrOM Moleskine, moleskinestudio.com needs iOS 12 or later
Flow is new to iOS, but the people behind it know about sketching: Moleskine makes beautiful notebooks that are coveted by writers and artists alike. Flow promises to bring that Moleskine experience to your iPhone or iPad. It doesn’t, but it’s probably as close as digital drawing gets to the combination of a Moleskine notebook and a nice pen.
The Flow of the title refers to two things: the flow of creative ideas when you’re in the zone, and the flow of the app itself. Unlike most sketching apps, which limit you to a specific drawing area, this app’s canvas is effectively limitless horizontally. It’s a fixed height vertically, though, so it’s best suited to an iPad or iPad Pro; while it’s perfectly nice on iPhone, it does feel cramped.
You can choose from a range of paper types, including lined or dotted ones, and there’s a set of realistic pens and brushes in a range of colours. You can also create your own set of tools from these, so if you tend to stick to the same brush and colour combinations, you can get the toolset just-so. It’s nice with a stylus and nicer still with Apple Pencil, which draws with no apparent latency.
Show your work
You can create up to six gesture controls that respond to touch input or your Apple Pencil. Documents can be organised into specified collections for easy classification and later retrieval, and everything is automatically synchronised using iCloud.
Paid-for sketching apps such as Flow are usually used to produce work for others to look at, so export options are crucial. Here you can choose to export the entire screen, an on-screen selection, or the entire document in its near-infinite width. You can also choose whether to include the paper colour and background pattern. Sharing then happens via the iOS share sheet, or by dragging and dropping into another app.
Moleskine’s notebooks certainly aren’t cheap, but its Flow app is free for the first seven days of use, after which it’ll set you back £1.79 a month or £10.99 for a year. Carrie Marshall