iPhone Painting Apps: Layers by Ben Gotow
Layers is a brand new iPhone natural media painting app by Ben Gotow which comes with unique features as well as some well thought interface-details. I was lucky to be one of the beta-testers, so here is a little preview of what to expect.
Feature: Layers
One of the most anticipated feature for painting apps is probably is the ability to use up to layers, so Layers lets you do exactly that:
you can use up to 5 (transparent) layers, either blank, filled with a color or even use a photo. This is probably the most powerful feature and Ben really lets this shine: you have to see the sliding animation when the layers actually fan out and in! I keep doing it just for the fun of watching 
Layers lets you also drag and rearrange your layers, merge them or fill with the actual color.
Brush tips
Layers comes with a set of 8 different brushes:
As you can see the brushes selector pane is tabbed with the color selector which is one of the nice design-details of Layers: that way you can easily switch back and forth between the settings. Another great little addition is the possibility to change the brush sizes in single steps by tapping on the icons left and right of the slider.
The transparent eraser tool
The color settings are pretty straightforward and let you choose any color, transparent or opaque. A great new feature is the eraser that uses the same brush tips and is also adjustable in impact
Last not least the gallery has a nice micro/macro switch.
There is some more nice details, like the 55%-1000% zoom (the basic canvas size is 512×512px), auto show/hide of the buttonbars or the zoom in/zoom out by double tapping on a specific area on the canvas. The app will costs 4.99$/3.99€ and still awaits approval from the app-store [Update 1] and is available now (iTunes App Store).
[Update 2] There were some issues with the viewer, more about that over at justiphoneart.
July 20th, 2009 at 03:31
So when oh when will it land in the store??? Waaahhhh, I can’t wait to try it.
July 20th, 2009 at 13:35
It’s there everyone!
July 28th, 2009 at 09:16
[...] Layers, the iPhone painting app that lets you stack, has been out for over a week now and for me it took some time to adapt to its possibilities as [...]