Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Based on the list price of this software, you might think that it would be a powerful, efficient, BUG-FREE application that would rival Adobe Creative Suite for ease and power of vector and paint content creation. Or at least it would be as easy to use and as well-polished as its sister product, Sketchbook Pro 2011, which does pixel painting only, no vector art.
You would be wrong.
Despite being their 2.0 product (2012 release), this feels like a rough beta in many ways on my system. This may not be fair, because I also use Sketchbook Pro, which is so well-polished, that my expectations for Sketchbook Designer were high, especially given that for little more than the addition of vector tools, Autodesk is charging TEN TIMES the price of Sketchbook Pro 2011. After using it SBD 2012, I consider this price to be utterly ridiculous.
BUGS!!
I am using this on a system that absolutely sings with Sketchbook PRO 2011, so I did have the expectation that SBD 2012 would work at least moderately well. Instead, there are random lock-ups of many seconds, during which mouse actions are captured, and then result in a mess of unintended operations once the SBD GUI wakes up again.
Occasionally, SBD will out-right crash to the desktop, losing all your unsaved work.
This behavior is with light usage, NOT loading multi-megabyte image resources, using dozens of vector and paint layers, etc. Just doing a circle and trying to fill it with something was pretty crashy.
Layer blending is buggy _sometimes_. I was trying out several blend modes, it will show a mode, appear to accept the change, and then as soon as I selected a different layer, it switched itself back to the previous mode. At one point I did get it to accept a mode change, but not the mode I wanted, so it kept reverting back to screen when I actually wanted overlay. I couldn't even get it back to normal blend mode. At one point, I went on with my work, created and edited a vector layer, and came back to the blend layer, and retried it. This time it worked, staying as an overlay blend after I set it to overlay and selected a different layer.UI bugs and 'issues' are collected in the following section.
UI ISSUES
Unfortunately, SBD appears to have been written by a completely different team who decided that certain aspects of the look and feel of SBP were simply not acceptable for their product, which does not speak well for their intelligence. SB PRO has to be the most remarkable software that I currently use, both for ease of use, and cleanness and useability of the UI. The result is a new interface to learn in SBD, even for tools and operations that are supposed to be identical to their SB Pro sister-product. More than half the shortcuts are missing, there is virtually no customization of the UI, and the Marking Menu now requires the use of a keyboard (Control key on Windows). (Well, some marking menus require the CONTROL key modifier, and depending on context, some don't. Inconsistent UI.)
One reason that complex software is forced to use a modifier key is that there are multiple functions that are activated by different mouse buttons, but SBD is NOT complex software. THERE ARE NO OTHER FUNCTIONS. There is just click to draw, and control-click to bring up the marking menu. It is as if the programmers have never seen or heard of a system with a two or three button mouse, or used a Wacom stylus with dual side switches, or even a single side-switch, for that matter, since that is the equivalent of a two-button mouse. Is that you, Steve Jobs, moonlighting as an Autodesk programmer? This is infuriating on my system, since I have a mobile tablet with a two-button Wacom stylus. With SB PRO, I can use both buttons freely, and map them to whatever I like, including a custom pop-up menu (which allows me to map key-board shortcuts to a custom pop-up marking menu mapped to a middle-mouse button click, obviating any need for a keyboard, in addition to the mildly customizable marking menu within SB PRO). In SBD, the marking menu is not customizable AT ALL, and it wouldn't matter if it were, since I usually use my tablet in very mobile situations for which it was created, and I don't have the required keyboard to enable holding the Control key, so that I can actually use the marking menu. I have a two-button stylus, equivalent to a three-button mouse, and since pressing the stylus to the screen is the equivalent of a left-mouse click and drag on a mouse, I have two completely useless buttons on my stylus. I mapped one of these buttons to act as a Control-key press. Testing in Chrome and other software, this works perfectly as a Control key replacement. But in SBD, it works NOT AT ALL. Instead, it appears that any stylus button press acts just like using the stylus tip, and indeed, using a three-button mouse, the behavior is identical. Press ANY button on the mouse, whether it is a 3-button, 4-button, or 5-button mouse, and it acts the same as pressing the Left mouse button. This behavior interferes with the display and operation of the custom pop-up marking menu I mapped to one of my stylus buttons. So for example, if I try to perform an undo with my custom pop-up, the stylus, not in contact with the screen, is nonetheless creating a mark on the drawing while I am bringing up the custom pop-up, and this operation becomes the operation that gets undone, resulting in the inability to actually undo a previous operation.
The only supplied toolbar is a very long, floating toolbar, longer than my screen in landscape mode. By default, the tool icons cannot be seen or used, and nowhere else can the functionality of these tools be accessed. Normal WINDOWS programs place all program functionality in pull-down menus, and the toolbars are just customizable shortcuts to this functionality. Apparently, SBD programmers (and SBP programmers for that matter) are completely unaware of this concept, not bothering to place all functions in the pull-down menus. Oh, sure, screen space is wasted by an always-visible menu bar, even in 'UI-hidden' mode, but various tools and operations, somewhat at random, are missing from the menu bar, and are only accessible on the tool-bar, or in marking menus from various panels. So, there is hidden functionality on the right side of the bar that normally can't be used at all. Another bug actually allows me to get to those buttons: The tool bar, if clicking in just the right spot, jumps to a right-justification, showing the missing functionality, but hiding critical, toolbar-only functionality on the left side of the bar. I'd say this was a feature, but unfortunately, there is no way to get the bar to jump back to left-justification. It's stuck until the 'return to Default UI' function is invoked. Then, randomly, it may or may not return to left-justification. This would at least be an acceptable work-around, but the default arrangement of panels is somewhat buggy itself, putting panels in the middle of the screen and on top of other panels, requiring another step of resorting every thing to your ideal arrangement.
Regarding the UI layout, maybe this is another bug: When I checked the Help on customizing the screen (SBD Help on my Windows system is labeled 'for Mac', so maybe this feature only exists on Mac) the laughable 'Customizing' page lists only the ability to move toolbars and panels around the screen as the only customization possible! LOLZ! It also lists a function, accessed in the Window menu or by Alt-3 on Windows (^3 Mac) to restore a custom layout (panel position). It doesn't explain how a custom layout is stored or saved. In a separate short-cut help PDF, accessible from the Help menu, it explains that Alt-4 will save a custom layout. Unfortunately, neither the menu buttons, nor the short-cut key functionality for these two functions, Save and Restore a custom layout, are included in the actual application. So when restoring the Default UI, which you have to do if you have the toolbar issue on a small screen like I do, OR if you like to switch between a GUI-less fullscreen mode and then necessarily back to GUI so you can access the many functions that exist only in panels and toolbars (no keyboard shortcuts for them either, remember), you are stuck redoing any custom moving around of palettes, panels, or toolbars you need to do.
These bugs and UI issues are what has cropped up with about 24 man-hours of usage, including a new one just as I'm experimenting with it while writing this review, so I doubt I've encountered all the bugs there are to find. (P.S. Correct. A new issue is that the "Sample all layers" check box in the Fill tool on a paint layer became unselectable.)THE GOOD
Since SB DESIGNER is supposed to be SB PRO with added vector drawing capability, the expectation is that it should be at least as good as SB PRO at painting and sketching, and should have some joyful experiences in store for vector-art creation, much as SB PRO has made sketching, drawing, and painting more fun for the user than its predecessors and competitors.
It meets these expectations.
As much as I love using SB PRO and SB Mobile on my mobile Pen-Tablet PC, Desktop PC with Intuos tablet, and my Android DroidX, the pixel sketching and painting in SBD actually feels even better. While SB PRO on my pen-tablet finally makes me feel like I truly have something as good as pencil on paper, SBD feels like something BETTER than paper. I can't put my finger on it, but it is smooth, responsive, easy to shade delicately, and make truer lines to what you intended. All SB PRO functionality, with the obvious exception of the above bugs and UI issues, is present in SBD. Dodge and Burn tools have been added, and I think that the one major addition to...Read more›
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