Idea Sketch 8.1

Sometimes you need an easy and quick way to draw up a diagram, for instance, to better arrange whatever ideas you have in your mind. Whether you’re trying to flesh out the character list for your next story, or the plan for the next business meeting you’re going to host, you need a reliable tool to work with.

Idea Sketch is an app that seeks to give you a helping hand when it comes to mind maps, concept maps, or flow charts. The tool can basically be used for anything you feel the need to plan out.

The clean interface won't save this app

The app comes with a clean interface, minimalist really, with a few buttons to help you out. Even though having an airy design is usually a good thing, this time around it will make things a bit difficult for first-time users since they’ll have absolutely no idea what most of those buttons stand for since there’s no label behind them. While some of them are pretty much intuitive, the others will take a bit trial and error before learning what they do.

Idea Sketch makes it easy to draw a diagram in just a few steps. Tap the “plus” button, fill in the note’s title, add in some notes if you want, and design the entry. Once you hide the keyboard, you can more easily pick the color of the entry, as well as a shape (square, circle, ellipse, cloud, and so on). You may also decide whether the box will be about as wide as the font is or whether it will grow more and more.

Gesture control

In order to move one of these boxes to the right position you simply have to long-press it and drag it to the desired place. Linking them together is also possible and all you have to do is tap on the one of them and then the one you want to link it to. The direction of the arrow flows from the first to the second entry.

Additional features enable you to choose a new color theme for the buttons, as well as a new font and a new way to link the ideas together (curved line, 90 degrees angles or straight line).

All in all, Idea Sketch is a nice tool, but it’s not necessarily the easiest to work with or the nicest to look at. It’s a tool that could use some fixing in many areas.

Add to watchlist:

Task-managementOfficeData analysis

• Complete 2.0.1
• ChoreMonster 2.5.1
• DoNext 0.4.0
• Microsoft OneNote for iPhone 2.10.1
• Roambi Analytics 7.4.5
• Microsoft Word 1.7

Portable version:

• Idea Sketch for Windows Phone