Aliass SketchBook for Creative Types

Alias’s SketchBook for Creative Types

Manufacturer: Alias/Wavefront

Web site: www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/sketchbook/info.shtml

Estimated price: Free limited version; full software coming soon, pricing to be determined

Do you have a burning desire to be a great artist — or at least a great doodler? Alias SketchBook Pro turns your Tablet PC into a digital sketchbook where you can sketch ideas, add comments, and present what you’ve created all from one powerful little program.

SketchBook sports cool pop-up tool palettes, such as the Color palette shown in Figure 14-10. When you tap a tool palette, the choices appear in a circle of icons. Tools include one set to move or reset an image, another set of pen styles (marker, highlighter, number 2 pencil, and airbrush, for example), a color palette, and tools for saving a sketch or moving among sketches.

Figure 14-10: Pop-up palettes are fun to use and offer simple, yet effective, sketching tools.

You can pull out floating toolbars for colors and pen styles as well as use the pop-up variety. These floating versions of toolbars offer more options and can be moved anywhere on your screen. You can write directly on an Alias SketchBook Pro document by using one of the pen tool settings and your Tablet PC pen. Unfortunately, this program has no feature to convert handwriting to text or to insert text.

Alias SketchBook Pro provides a simple-to-use tutorial when you first open it that shows you how to use the available tools (as shown in Figure 14-11).

Figure 14-11: You can figure out how to use all the tools of Alias SketchBook Pro in about five minutes and then just have fun with it.