Scribbles: A Great Bitmap editor for Mac

About a week ago, my friend Darren (a.k.a. onekopaka) got an application for twitter called Tweetie. He started using it, so when I hovered over the “From Tweetie” part of the tweet, it went to a URL called atebits.com

Intrigued, I followed aling and discovered that atebits.com also authored this “revolutionary” new app called Scribbles. I had been searching for a new bitmap editor other than sucky old Paintbrush, and I finally came across Scribbles. Without hesitation, I downloaded the program and to my delight, it was not an annoying .pkg file that required admin permission to install. I could try it for myself without hacking my Mac!

The moment I opened the application, I wondered “where did everything go?” The user iinterface was very simple: a color picker, four “function” buttons and a brush selector. I quickly discovered that each button did way more than I expected. My favorite feature was the 3-in-1 move feature, which comprised of move, rotate, and resize. Scribbles also ran much faster tan sluggish Paintbrush, and I knew that I would stick with this for a while.

A few days later, I designed the header image for this blog using Scribbles. I also discovered that I could publish my drawings to the atebits website, and I did that with “Dots in a Matrix”, a drawing I made, literally, in two seconds. I also discovered the tracing paper function which allowed the Scribbles canvas to be semitransparent so that I could trace an image from a website. I started doing one today, but gave up. However, there are some great artworks that have been done using the tracing paper feature.

Although this program was awesome, it did lack a few features. It had a brush, but only a brush; no fill color, no rectangle, circle, square… but there were a plurality of brushes from rainbow to calligraphy. The color picker was also lacking in some features such as the ability to select preset colors and define colors by a hexadecimal code. It was, indeed, just a color wheel. Unfortunately, Scribbles wasn’t really a “free” application, meaning to get the “full” version, you had to pay $19.95, which is an overrated price to pay just to get rid of an inconspicuous watermark and disable the registration reminder screen.

Scribbles’ functionality and simplicity both deserve big stars, but it does lack in some features. I would recommend the software to all you Mac Users, and I give it a rating of 8/10.