Animation Desk Review – A great app gets better with awesome updates

Our rating:

By: Kdan Mobile

Version #: 1.5

Date Released: 2011-08-29

Developer: Kdan Mobile

Price: 4.99

User Rating:

Loading...

Download App

I bought Animation Desk the same week Apple decided it was New and Noteworthy for the iPad. I agreed wholeheartedly with Apple’s staff: Animation Desk was (and is) awesome. Even if I’m more of a hobbyist drawer than animator (my only animations were flipbook animations in school… but I love the book “Gesture Drawing for Animation”…), I found Animation Desk too good to be true. And it just got better for the time of this review.

Animation Desk for iPad features an awesomely well thought layout, allowing you to do almost anything with just a few taps… And in case of need, forget it and just draw full screen. Several brushes, a whole array of colours and an opacity and size selector just at the tip of your fingers. Draw a frame, and just tap to add a new frame… And the clever onion skin system will show what you want to see, dimmed below: the previous two frames, the previous and next frames. Just like you would do this in the 50s with semi-transparent paper… But in your lap, at home, for your enjoyment. In addition to this, starting in this release, 2 layers: foreground and background.

When I started playing with Animation Desk, a few months ago, just when it was launched I did what I usually do: checked for a version for my iPod Touch. I found none, and was the least surprised: Animation Desk’s starting screen looks very hard to model in such a small screen. Pity, drawing animations in the train looked like a good time investment. Of course, I didn’t know I’d get to do this review back then.

This is why the title states “the app gets better”. Now there’s a separate iPhone version of Animation Desk. With a cleverly designed UI, to get the most of the tiny space (collapsible tools and zooming). Completely unexpected… And very, very well thought out. With this new release, they have added an export option between iDevices. The file is zipped and put to share via iTunes. You connect your device, get it out and transfer to the other iDevice (in my try, from iPod Touch to iPad in just 2 minutes from machine to machine). Quite seamless, although I’d love to see Dropbox integration to make it “over the air”. After all, the file is just a zip file. Even mail sharing could be more handy. The sample video below was started in my iPod Touch and finished in my iPad. Seamless. Don’t miss the related videos in Youtube… There are awesome animators using this app.

All in all, this is a must have app. Even if the iPad app may be a little pricy for just a little playing every now and then, it’s probably one of the very few apps you’ll have a quick look and think “the guys behind this absolutely deserve it”. And when you find one of this kind, you want to spread the word like we’re doing now.