ePen

Name: ePen
Price: 2.99 USD
Rating: 3 (1 reviews)
Author: STUDIO A

Needs to use with Apple Pencil

$2.99

1 Rating
Ages

4+
Years
Category

Education
Developer

STUDIO A
Language

EN
+ 4 More
Size

761
MB

iPad

ePen provides calligraphic writing, ink painting and various painting functions, which contains brush sizes, stroke pressures, borders and background color options. Even more, ePen gives you the option to create personal stamps. In addition, the app accommodates knowledge of Chinese characters that allow you to have the insights into the evolution of Chinese characters, provide handwriting samples and scholar work gallery to learn well-known calligraphy, and also enable you to store all your work.

Ratings & Reviews

3.0

out of 5

1 Ratings

A mediocre attempt at an important concept
01/27/2022

Calion
The idea here is important and profound: Bring Chinese calligraphy into the digital age. However, this app only does a barely-passing job at accomplishing that. The good: • This is one of the few Chinese calligraphy apps that take full advantage of the iPencil's capabilities, with both pressure sensitivity and angle detection. • It's actually a Chinese calligraphy app, not just a painting app. Indeed it's the *only* app that teaches you Chinese characters that takes full advantage of the iPencil (yes, I know its real name). Skritter makes a half-hearted attempt, but doesn't really count.•It has character templates you can put on the canvas so you can trace over them. •It has videos of how to actually create the characters digitally in calligraphic form, rather than just showing stroke order, something I've seen *nowhere* else; not in an app, not on YouTube, nowhere. •It includes various interesting bits of useful information and history in its Knowledge section. That's the good. Sounds great, right? Well, not so much. Here's the bad:•The interface design is…poor. Not abysmal, but nowhere close to iOS par. I can't list all the problems here, because this isn't a matter of making a few minor or even major tweaks; the entire UI/UX needs to be redesigned by an expert. •The aforementioned videos are small, not expandable to full-screen, and can't be slowed down (only speeded up). -Worst of all, they're *videos.* They don't happen on the canvas, but in a little window that makes the canvas inaccessible. It's impossible to watch the video while you draw the character. These should not be videos, but should happen on the canvas, where you can trace over them or draw next to them (and can be slowed waaaay down so you can follow along step-by-step). This is by far the biggest failing in a potentially very useful app. •The character templates that you can put on the canvas don't even show stroke order; they're just static. •While you can trace over the character templates, they seem thicker than you can get the pen, so my tracings never look right. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but that just further illustrates the need for step-by-step tutorials. •The actual painting feature is…fine. It's functional. But it pales in comparison to the Zen Brush apps. I've taken to trying to recreate the movements in the video with Zen Brush 2 open in slideover mode, which works moderately well, but at that point the *only* feature of this app that I'm using is the videos. I think what the developers of this app really need to do is create some sort of add-on module for Zen Brush 3, rather than create their own inferior painting app.
A mediocre attempt at an important concept
01/27/2022

Calion

The idea here is important and profound: Bring Chinese calligraphy into the digital age. However, this app only does a barely-passing job at accomplishing that. The good: • This is one of the few Chinese calligraphy apps that take full advantage of the iPencil's capabilities, with both pressure sensitivity and angle detection. • It's actually a Chinese calligraphy app, not just a painting app. Indeed it's the *only* app that teaches you Chinese characters that takes full advantage of the iPencil (yes, I know its real name). Skritter makes a half-hearted attempt, but doesn't really count.•It has character templates you can put on the canvas so you can trace over them. •It has videos of how to actually create the characters digitally in calligraphic form, rather than just showing stroke order, something I've seen *nowhere* else; not in an app, not on YouTube, nowhere. •It includes various interesting bits of useful information and history in its Knowledge section. That's the good. Sounds great, right? Well, not so much. Here's the bad:•The interface design is…poor. Not abysmal, but nowhere close to iOS par. I can't list all the problems here, because this isn't a matter of making a few minor or even major tweaks; the entire UI/UX needs to be redesigned by an expert. •The aforementioned videos are small, not expandable to full-screen, and can't be slowed down (only speeded up). -Worst of all, they're *videos.* They don't happen on the canvas, but in a little window that makes the canvas inaccessible. It's impossible to watch the video while you draw the character. These should not be videos, but should happen on the canvas, where you can trace over them or draw next to them (and can be slowed waaaay down so you can follow along step-by-step). This is by far the biggest failing in a potentially very useful app. •The character templates that you can put on the canvas don't even show stroke order; they're just static. •While you can trace over the character templates, they seem thicker than you can get the pen, so my tracings never look right. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but that just further illustrates the need for step-by-step tutorials. •The actual painting feature is…fine. It's functional. But it pales in comparison to the Zen Brush apps. I've taken to trying to recreate the movements in the video with Zen Brush 2 open in slideover mode, which works moderately well, but at that point the *only* feature of this app that I'm using is the videos. I think what the developers of this app really need to do is create some sort of add-on module for Zen Brush 3, rather than create their own inferior painting app.