Its full title in the App Store is
Carbo -- Handwriting in the Digital Age and you're already thinking iPads, stylus or scribbling on the screen, but you're wrong. This is not another app about mimicking the experience of writing on paper, it's not really about replacing paper at all. Carbo is about letting you continue to use paper, but now use it in the digital world: take paper you write on and edit, copy or share it as you would anything you create online from scratch.
If you've still got any blank paper near you, and you can find one of those pen things with ink it, sketch something out. Despite the app having handwriting in the title, it is more about drawing than it is writing your novel. Yet, those sketches can be annotated plans for a house, they can be math formulae, they can be short written sentences. It has to be short, it has to be fairly small, because the next thing you do is photograph the paper with your iPhone or iPad.
The app has the usual features of taking and retaking shots, seeing what you've grabbed and keeping or deleting them. You can rotate the shot before committing to using it, and once you've said yes, that's the one, you can then add tags to describe it.
The fun starts when you've got the shot into Carbo and can begin working on it. Tap a tool and draw the very roughest of circles around part of the drawing and Carbo will isolate it. It's as if it has parsed every pixel and knows that this line connects to that line, that this squiggle is part of that drawing. The isolated section gets a blue outline, and you can press and drag to move that around. You can also increase and decrease the opacity of it, you can delete bits, you can add to them.
There's an Instagram-like range of filters that can turn your pen sketch into a chalkboard one, a blueprint style or more.
What you can't do is type text onto it. You can erase a pen-written label, so we'd like to be able to type in a more legible description, but you can't. We'd like to be able to duplicate items, we'd like to be able to continue drawing directly on the iPad.
Yet, we're probably less into drawing on paper and more into trying to draw on iPads: we may not be the target audience for this.
What we very much liked was how you can link your Carbo app to Evernote, so that your scribbles can be saved in there -- and consequently be retrieved from there. However, if you're already an Evernote user, you may well also be using the same company's free Skitch app and that can do much of what Carbo can. Plus, you can annotate in Skitch and you can continue drawing.
If you must keep paper in your life, if you are just not happy without a pen or pencil in your hand, then Carbo does the job and what it does, it does well. We just think you should go an inch further and look into using the Evernote and Skitch combo.
Carbo 1.0 requires iOS 8.2 or later, and
currently costs $4 in the App Store. That's a launch offer; the regular price will be $8.
Who is Carbo 1.0 for:
Pen and paper holdouts, aka people who know a stylus and an iPad just isn't the same.
Who is Carbo 1.0 not for:
Existing Evernote and Skitch users won't get much extra from this.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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