Linea Go
Quick on the draw
$2.99 From The Iconfactory, linea-app.com/go Made for iPhone Needs iOS 11.4 or later
On iPad, Linea Sketch is a superb sketching environment with a great balance of elegance and power. On iPhone, Linea Go shoots for a similar kind of effortless sketching. It’s not quite the slam dunk its bigger brother is — but it does come pretty close.
It’s worth noting this is not a fully–fledged painting app — you need something like Procreate Pocket for that. Instead, Linea Go is designed for quick doodles, visual notes, and perusing iPad Linea Sketch creations on the move, since they all flawlessly sync over iCloud.
When drawing, you can add a background texture and grid, and work with five layers. Layers have opacity controls, image import capabilities for tracing, and can be reordered via drag and drop. Your toolset is otherwise fairly limited: two pencils, two pens, and an eraser. Beyond that, there’s a color picker, and a copy/paste/transform tool.
That might not sound like much, but Linea Go does a lot with a little. Drawing is responsive, and after a recent update makes great use of 3D Touch for subtle pressure adjustments. A Zip Line feature helps with geometric compositions — just hold after a stroke to straighten the line; do the same twice and the lines connect. Unfortunately, there’s no tool for circles.
The color picker is superb, offering a big selection of pre– defined color sets. On picking a specific color, you’re presented with a range of shades. Should none do, you can create a custom set. The transform tool also works well, providing a finger–friendly approach to a complex interaction.
With plenty of crop and export options, and even the means to create live broadcast and sketch recordings, this simple app reveals itself to be surprisingly feature–rich. It is, however, slightly hemmed in by the iPhone itself. On iPad, you get to see all of the controls at once, and that works wonderfully. On iPhone, tools are accessed from a toolbar at the foot of the screen, and switching between them can sometimes be fiddly, requiring too many taps.
That’s only a minor grumble, though. For the most part, Linea Go succeeds in being a thoroughly polished, powerful, and compact sketching tool for your iPhone.
the bottom line. One of the best sketching apps you can buy for iPhone.