Peintureroid

Summary

What kind of a name is Peintureroid? Did someone make a typo? Well, actually, peinture simply means painting in French.

Today I'm testing an Android drawing app, which has a lot of different functions according to its market description. Find out if you can paint a masterpiece using Peinturedroid in our test! 

Regardless of how you feel about touchscreen devices, it goes without saying that the smart phone industry is growing with phenomenal speed. The touchscreen is an integral part of these new devices. That's exactly what makes them so perfect for drawing applications. Unfortunately, many of these apps lack a good number of features and are way too basic. Peintureroid is one of the better apps out there. 

Quite a few of these drawing applications make drawing with your finger a real pain. The screen either won't recognize your finger movements or traces very crooked lines. Peintureroid finally puts a stop to all this nonsense: you can draw with precision and produce wonderfully clear drawings. 

The screen view includes a clean virtual canvas with two rows of menu options. In the top menu bar you'll find the following features:

• L: "Layer" - switch between active layers. 
• W: "Pen Width" - Adjust the width of the pen stroke.
• Col: "Colour" - Open up a color selection.  With the Spuit options you can pick a color that's already been used (like the eyedropper symbol in Photoshop or Paint).
• D: "Pen Density" - Adjust the thickness of a color. Lower thickness makes the paint more "transparent".
• P#: "Pen #1 - 4" - With this option you can switch quickly between the 5 main colors: red, white, green, blue and the color currently being used. 
   

The bottom menu bar includes the following:

• Draw: Select this mode to start drawing.
• Shift: You can move and zoom around the drawing board in Shift mode with your finger. 

In addition there's a main menu that opens up via the menu button:

• undo
• clear image
• load to current layer
• save image
• save current layer
• quit

As you can see, Peintureroid includes a ton of neat and useful tools. With a huge variety of different brush types (over 50 different ones available), three levels, adjustable brush thickness (100 different settings!) and amazing color selection - this app provides you with a lot of creative space. The zoom feature using multi-touch finger combinations is available in Android 2.0 and up, but doesn't work perfectly yet and is still listed as an experimental feature. Some cool features missing are: different drawing tools (pens, airbrush, pencil etc.) and the option of trimming down the size of pictures. All in all, the app is really comprehensive and pushes you to be as creative as you can!

Useful feature: Every time you quit the app by either selecting quit in the main menu or pressing the back button, your current drawing gets saved automatically and is opened the next time you use the app. 

A lot of improvement is need in this area. The symbols in the main menu may look really cute (they look like small hand-drawn sketches), but are really are really hard to see. 

Also, the tool bars at the top and bottom of the screen take up too much space. It would be great if they could add a single button that could blend these options in and out. Now that's a small change that could really improve this app. 

 I don't have any really complaints about the app's speed. Even when you add a photo and are drawing on multiple layers at the same time, everything runs smoothly. There are, however, big problems related to the app's actual reliability. Although the app works fine while drawing, it tends to crash when certain options are selected. 

Here's an example: If you select the an option in the top toolbar and try to close it using the Back button instead of touching the screen, the app automatically closes as I explained earlier. You just have to remember that the Back button always closes the app. The problem is that Peintureroid crashes every time you try to open it after accidentally pressing the Back button. On the second try, the app should open up normally again, but that doesn't solve the initial problem.

Another example: The app tends to crash when you select "load to current layer" in the main menu. Although the app never crashed while I was drawing, I still found these issues to be highly irritating. 

Peintureroid is comprehensive, free of charge and ad-free.