Concepts 4+

This is an amazing sketching app. The speed and huge number of customisation & export options are a big plus. The pencil and marker tools look especially true to the real thing and "feel" great when drawing. The new version 4.5 updated the watercolour tool significantly and I think this might become my favourite colouring brush for my sketches. The current version 4.6 added a few really helpful settings that make the app even more productive.

My previous criticism was the lack of a in-app ruler similar to the real world (like Apples native Note app or Morpholio Trace have). I just really don't like the use of the shapes for architectural sketching when it comes to scale. However I recently discovered that once you set the scale within the app and zoom to 100% (the app catches key zooms) then the drawing is true to scale on the screen. I can now use a traditional physical scale ruler to draw and especially measure. In fact I use the same scale ruler I use for all my other paper sketching. This has made a huge impact and made the app just so much more useful.

I wish TopHatch would publish that on their manual and blog as I could not find this method anywhere and only discovered it by chance.

For Architects, Interior Designers, Landscape Architects etc. this is truly the perfect app in my opinion. I highly recommend it when using it to scale with a physical ruler.

On top of all the great drawing capabilities, one of the big things that I use it for is drawing out reactions, reaction mechanisms and sharing my thought processes with people.

The integrations that this app has with screen sharing makes it really good for Zoom group meetings, the ability to select and duplicate structures means that I don’t need to redraw a molecule for each modification in a reaction, but can instead just duplicate amend modify, and the fact that it’s an endless canvas means that I don’t need to plan out my page layout before I start.

I used to use OneNote, but this is infinitely better, and with the PDF export add-on means that I can easily send my work off as vector PDF files to group members, without having to compress images till they’re blurry, or send massive files.

Using this app has become so natural that when drawing with pen and paper, I often find myself trying to undo lines by tapping the page with two fingers :p

The only thing I’d ask for, is the ability to import long documents to be able to annotate them, as most PDF annotation tools are actively terrible in comparison to concepts, but dragging in pages of a PDF one at a time can be quite laborious.

When after a seamless app for sketching, note taking and everything in between I found concept to be intuitive but also comprehensive. The infinite art board is amazing, always felt constraint with a set size - now I can go with the flow and edit later. The ease of importing and drag and drop is beautiful. After watching a few of the tutorial videos I feel all set. I also think the price is right so I’ve subscribed. I wish there were more brush options and I love the colour wheel but find myself sometimes wanting to make completely custom colours, but wouldn’t trade that for the ease of using vectors - which I’ve never liked using before Concepts. Changed my perspective. I wish there was a concepts for raster files - if there is let me know.