Pixaki 4 Pro 4+

Best pixel app for iPad but not without its flaws

I’ve been using the pro version heavily for over a week now. Overall the experience is wonderful. Being able to use the pencil for pixel art is great. The app is intuitive and easy to use. It is hands down the best option available for iPad but I have to say there are better desktop programs than this.

Where it can be improved:

Let us measure! The marquee tool ought to show the dimensions.

Line tool. Let us select a width.

Free drawing. I would love to tap my finger while drawing a line to make it straight (as in. Procreate). Same for circles.

Animations. Wow the animations feature is so bad I don’t even know how to begin. It is unusable for me at the moment.

Brush size. Let us change the size on the main menu without needing to click twice. It’s a small but important QoL feature.

Grid size. Let us enter custom number without using + - keys.

Overall though this app is great!

A bit limited

I’m a bit disappointed, I just finished an illustration and I’ll have to take it to Aesprite on the pc as this app doesn’t have a rotation tool.

Edit: there is a rotation tool now and overall is a great app. I would love to be able to flip the canvas horizontally/vertically or flip a group without having to flatten it though, it would help a lot as it’s something widely used to check for mistakes on an illustration

Developer Response ,

Hi, the app has been updated recently to add support for rotation — I hope this helps!
Thanks,
Luke

One of the best pixel art editors

I have experience with other pixel art editors and, being primarily a photoshop user, I was reluctant to try an Ipad app as an alternative to my desktop options.
Being frequently on the move (commuting to work ~1 h everyday), I decided to give it a try and boy was I surprised.

Pixaki is a joy to use! It has tools that I wasn’t really expecting, such as pixel perfect and dithering brush. It runs fast, has animation capacities, robust layer system, great rotation tool and everything else one would expect. Super pleased with Pixaki, to the point where this has become my main software (I kid you not, it has been good 10 days that I don’t touch Photoshop).

For what is worth, I do have a few kind suggestions to the developer:

1. The colour palette is a bit unusual and, while I love that you give us four different options to manipulate colours, the wheel doesn’t seem to cut it too much. A photoshop-like grid would be a bit clear I reckon.
2. Allow for multiple animation sequences, as currently we are only able to have one per file. Otherwise, there is a bit of adjustment that needs to take place to assure the animation is running smoothly on all layers.
3. Definitely not required, but some kind of symmetry system for tile editing would be amazing.
4. Having things snapped to grids would make things easier, particularly when you need to paint pixels in the middle of two lines that are 30+ pixels apart. The way you currently have to do this is manually count till the middle and draw from there.
5. Some markers when using the line/shapes tool showing us the length (width and height in the case of rectangles) in real time of the trace would be great, as it allows for precision work to take place.

Really, these are just suggestions. The software is great as it is and one of the best I have ever used, but it could be THE NUMBER ONE in the market if a few more features are implemented :)
Thank you for making such an amazing tool for us artists.