by At first glance, Napkin (Mac App Store link), by Aged and Distilled, appears to be a Mac program for sketching and annotation of images. And indeed, it does that. But a closer look reveals the program is best suited for idea illustration and quick comps, rather than finished output. Napkin gets the job done using a remarkably sparse feature set, with a hefty dollop of innovative ideas, and with an almost fanatic attention to your workflow. It’s not a tool for everyone, but it’s wonderfully suited to people who need to rapidly create annotated design concepts and blast out iterative changes.
It’s rare that software so clearly expresses a point of view. Napkin’s says, “Be reasonable. Do things our way.” It conveys this design philosophy by paring down its tool set, intentionally limiting the user’s ability to fiddle with images. And frankly, in a world of software measured by the length of feature lists, Napkin is a refreshing change. Rather than having a ton of features, the ones it has are curated and tweaked to a fare-thee-well.
I Want it Like This: Napkin makes creating magnified callouts and image annotations fast and easy.
Keeping it simple, because you’re not stupid
Whenever possible, Napkin dispenses with modes and tool selections. Drag any image you want to annotate onto the napkin (what other programs would call the canvas, and you have exactly three choices of backgrounds: a napkin texture, white, or transparent). Want to add a text label? Just start typing. A text box appears under the cursor, or positioned to label a selected item. Care to add a callout (a magnified area of the image you’re annotating)? Scribble a rough circle on the napkin, and a circular callout appears, with an instruction to drag the bull’s eye in its center over the part of the image you wish to feature, after which the zoomed image appears within the callout. If you would rather the callout be a rounded or squared-off rectangle, drag a control at the edge of the callout to change its shape. If you want an arrow between the image and a callout, just click and hold for a second until the cursor turns into a pencil, then drag it to its destination. When you release the mouse button, an arrow appears, with an arrowhead at one (and only one) end. The ends of the arrow are magnetic, so moving the callout automatically adjusts the length and angle of the arrow, making sure it keeps pointing where you want it. Within images and callouts, you can create a redline, a measurement line showing the line’s length in pixels at the midpoint.
You can also create vector shapes, though limited to a circle, rectangle, or rounded rectangle, and always filled with a gradient. You can change the gradient color, but you can’t eliminate it, replace it with a different kind of fill, or adjust the shape’s border width or color. Similarly, you can’t change the style of an arrow (other than its fill color). There are no line, pencil, pen, brush, eyedropper, fill, erase, crop, rotation, or zoom tools. If you want to redact part of an image, you can draw a thick black line, but can’t choose a blur instead. Smart guides, a la Keynote or Pages, are an incredibly useful feature that I find truly puzzling that Napkin lacks. The program supplies Apple’s basic unenhanced Fonts and Colors palettes. In keeping with its focus on simplicity, Napkin has no Preferences dialog.
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