Rated #1 Technical App for Architects by ArchDaily!
Arrette Scale for iPad is an app for designers who want to draw freehand while maintaining a measurable drawing scale like vector drafting tools. Architects, urban planners, surveyors, home remodelers, field archaeologists and dozens of other kinds of professionals will find this app useful. Unlike some other vector drawing tools, Arrette is simple to use.
Arrette provides the platform to begin design work and generate ideas without moving too quickly to rigid straight lines and curves. We want to help you draw much as you would normally draw on paper, but to give you the extra tools and ways to share your work that make your life easier and make the design process simpler and more productive.
The basic drawing structure is a familiar one - drawing layers which can be overlayed on a base image. The Grid keeps you aware of the size of what you're drawing, and the Edge helps you draw straight lines when you want. When you're ready, you can easily share drawings by email or save them to your device.
We've designed Arrette to be extremely easy to learn. In about five minutes, you'll understand how to zoom and scale your canvas, draw lines, and load base images to work on top of. Our tools will seem familiar from other structured drawing applications, but every tool we've built has been simplified and optimized with scale in mind.
Uses for Arrette:
* An urban designer drafts plans for a new sub-division in a small town
* A real estate agent snaps a photograph of a living space and begins to sketch out ideas for staging
* A new home owner sketches the plan for an elaborate garden in the back yard
* An archaeologist precisely records the provenience of a newly discovered artifact, including its location on an aerial map and the outline of its form
* A construction manager notes progress on a work site, sending annotated precision-scale documents back to the general contractor live from the work site
These are just a few of the ways that we have envisioned Arrette becoming an essential tool for many professionals. Arrette is the ideal tool for sketching because of its ease of use, preservation of scale, and flexibility in working with original source material such as other drawings, photographs, and maps.
Included drawing tools:
* Freehand drawing pens that scale like vector lines but are as easy to use as pencil and paper
* An adjustable grid system that you can easily flip between the metric system and decimal feet
* A straight edge tool for drawing perfectly straight lines or arrays of parallel lines
* A circle edge tool for drawing arcs and circles of arbitrary, but precise radius
* Distance and area measurement tools for measuring the lengths, perimeters and areas of arbitrary pathways in your drawing at precise scale
* A lasso tool to select, move, copy and paste previously drawn lines
* Layers, for separating out parts of composite objects or for adding new ideas to an existing document that overlay earlier designs
* The ability to share Arrette documents with other users or to e-mail documents in PNG or PDF formats
* An eraser tool, for revising your designs or removing objects from previous work
* The ability to adjust the width of all lines globally even after the lines have been drawn
* A color picker to choose from a variety of different pen colors for your drawing
Base image imports:
* The ability to load base images to draw on top of; base images respect their original scale and direction when the document is zoomed or panned
* Import base images from Email, Dropbox, and Adobe Creative Cloud
* Copy and paste from other apps that support JPG, PNG or PDF
Document sharing features:
* Send PDFs with scale and direction information to colleagues, clients, and other parties via email
* Save your work to your Photo Gallery
* Share raster versions of your work with anyone via email, Twitter, or Facebook
Their free version is Arrette Sketch. I used this for a couple months before I took the plunge and paid for the full Arrette Scale version. I’m glad I upgraded, though the Sketch app could be enough for some people. Anyway, I use this for working through design ideas and sending quick thoughts to my team by email. I occasionally send things to clients as well, though a few more output options (like vector PDFs) would make this app even more useful.
Best design sketching app
noone419
I’m an architect and I take work home all the time (apologies to my family...). On the way out the door I snap a photo of my current sketch and at home I can bring it into Arrette and put down any new ideas to explore in detail at work the next day. Since the app works at scale, I can sketch details without driving myself crazy the next day trying to make the furniture fit.
Mostly good
KernNBurn
The pinch to zoom feature has gone haywire. Otherwise it’s a good app.
I am obligated to write a review.
Transparent Text
I was initially looking to get a drafting app to help myself organize furniture for my new apartment. I have decided to construct an impartial review of the following app I have just purchased for $8.99. It does have its uses and setbacks as you will see listed below. Use this app if you would like to achieve the following:- Find incentive to throw your newly purchased Ipad against a wall. - Realize you have too much hair and would like to pull some out.- Trade places with a deathrow inmate who is about to be murdered by the state. - Decide that your eyes are not essential organs and you would like to proceed to gauge them out with a plastic fork. - GIVE MONEY AWAY TO INCOMPETENT APP DESIGNERS OUT OF SYMPATHYIf you are looking to do something such as DOWNLOAD A SLIGHTLY NOT TERRIBLE APP, i'd suggest you look elsewhere in the app store. Thank you for reading my review. If I can get a refund on this app, I would very much appreciate spending my lunch money elsewhere
Developer Response
Hello “Transparent Text”,Thank you for your feedback. We are sorry that you have not found the app useful. Thousands of architects and other designers use Arrette Scale and the free version, Arrette Sketch, for design sketching at scale. Arrette provides a canvas for design with essential tools like a straight edge and measuring abilities.While the app has been used successfully by many people, it is not for everyone. We have provided the free Sketch app to allow people to use many of the app’s capabilities to see if it will be useful for them before purchasing the full featured version, Arrette Scale.User input has been very helpful to us as we improve Arrette. Please contact us through our website if you have specific feedback about app use and performance.Regards,The Arrette team
Adds a menu option to allow you to easily sort by your most recently modified Projects.
Version 1.4.39
The developer, Arrette, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Location
User Content
Identifiers
Usage Data
Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
