Adam Mazurkiewicz's List: Android

You don't need to be a bona-fide artist to enjoy doodling and painting. While there are Web apps such as Canvastic and Windows apps such as the wonderful Artweaver, there is something different about painting with a touchscreen. It requires less eye-hand coordination than painting with a mouse or a pen tablet, because you can see exactly what you're doing - a bit like painting on a real canvas, especially if you have a stylus.

In this space, Sketchbook is one of the best-known application, but it's getting quite a bit of competition. Today I'd like to show you Infinite Painter Free, a surprisingly powerful and intuitive painting app for Android.

Feels Like a Leatherman Multi-Tool



4.3-inch is considered large when it comes to smartphones, but when compared to a real canvas, or even just a piece of paper, it is positively tiny. This size constraint makes life hard for designers of painting apps. On the one hand, a powerful drawing app has many options and features. On the other hand, they must keep as much of the screen free as possible, so that you have space to see what you're painting. The solution often involves pop-up controls, something Infinite Painter excels in.

For example, check out changing the current hue:



To get this pop-up, you touch the hue circle and swipe away from it. If you keep swiping away, the circle becomes an eyedropper which you can use to sample color from any part of the image. The same mechanism works for changing brush sizes: Swipe away from the brush circle, and you can change its size with a handy visual pop-up.

Sadly, there's only so much you can do with innovative controls like these, so much of the functionality is accessed using a traditional toolbar:



A Rich Selection Of Brushes, & Zooming For Detail Work



Infinite Painter comes with a selection of twenty different natural-media brushes you can pick from to get the look you want. Some, like the crosshatch brush which appears first in the screenshot above, work well for shading or filling in large areas. Other are better for detail work, especially when combined with Infinite Painter's pinch-to-zoom control:



The zoom feature makes it easy to keep your work in context: When you're zoomed in on a particular area of the image, double-tap the screen quickly to zoom out to 100%. Once you see your work in context, you can double-tap again to zoom back in on the same spot as before, and keep working.

Working With Layers



Like most serious painting apps, Infinite Painter features support for layers. Layers are saved within your project, so you can save your work and come back to it later, editable layers and all. As you can see above, it is easy to adjust the opacity of a layer using the slider at the bottom.

I can only wish the other toolbar buttons were as self-explanatory. I had to try some of them just to figure out what they do (the icons for horizontally and vertically flipping the layer are positively cryptic).

Mastering Infinite Painter



As you may be coming to realize, Infinite Painter is brimming with options. To help you start using it, the author created a friendly, handwritten tutorial. It's not a lengthy text you must read through, but instead a sequence of bite-sized steps. You read a step, practice it, and move on to the next one. Infinite Painter tries to detect when you've executed a step and show you the next one, but this did not work very reliably for me. I sometimes had to do a step several times, or simply sit and wait until Infinite Painter popped up the next step.

Bugs and Quirks

I've yet to review a perfect app, especially not one as complex as Infinite Painter. In my testing, one issue kept coming up: I would often lose the content of a layer: For no clear reason, the layer would just disappear, leaving me with nothing. Undoing my last few operations did not help, and neither did redoing them. I worked around this by saving my project and restoring it when needed.

Other than this (admittedly annoying) issue, I was pleasantly surprised by the breadth and quality Infinite Painter Free offers. If you like to doodle, be sure to check it out.

Our Android devices have plenty of information on them that sometimes we'd like to transfer over to our computers so that we can manipulate that information, use it with our computer's programs, or simply save as a backup location for your phone's information.

However, after all these years I've never really heard of any software that can do this. At most, I've heard about Android notifications that can be displayed on your computer, but that's about it.  Thankfully, that is about to change.

About Moborobo

Moborobo is the perfect management companion to Android devices. Virtually all devices are supported, but you can check to make sure by going to this page. Moborobo is an all-in-one solution to manage just about anything on your phone, directly from your computer.

Installation

Installation is pretty easy. Simply head over to this page to download Moborobo for your Windows computer, and run through the setup wizard. Once you launch the application, you'll need to connect your Android device to your computer via USB cable. Make sure that you have "USB debugging enabled" before you plug in your device. Moborobo will then try to download and install an Android driver so that it can communicate your phone.

This may work sometimes, but in case it doesn't (which happened to me), you'll need to install a "Mobo Daemon" onto your Android device (which you can install by following this link on your device) so that the software on your computer can communicate with the device via Wi-Fi. Once the daemon finishes installing, launch it to get your verification code. Enter the code into the software, and the computer and Android device should pair up provided they are connected to the same WiFi network.

Home Tab



Once the pairing is complete, you'll be presented with a lot of statistics and other information about your device. This includes everything from the firmware and battery level to storage space and data statistics. It's very nice to have a well-designed overview of your device's information.

Data Tab



In the next tab, you'll find plenty of data that is stored on your phone and otherwise hard to back up via computer. This includes your text messages, call log data, and contact information. While contacts are backed up to your Google account, it may be helpful to have another copy of that information on your computer for other uses. You can find the backup and restore button for all of these among the top panel.

The great thing about the Data tab is that, for text messages, you can receive notifications, read, and respond to messages directly from Moborobo. At the time of writing there is a bug with the timestamps when sending out messages from Moborobo directly, but I'm sure that it'll get fixed soon, and overall it's a great feature to have.

Apps Tab



In the Apps tab, you can look at all the apps that are currently installed on your device, as well as install a few more if you wish. Moborobo also makes some suggestions of its own, but these apps aren't found in the Google Play Store.

Tunes, Images, & Videos Tabs



In the Tunes, Images, and Videos tabs, you'll be able to look through those respective types of data directly from your computer. You can also play music and videos by simply clicking on them. You can also choose to sync music, images, and videos from your computer to your device if you so desire.

Themes Tab



Last but not least, Moborobo offers some themes that you can apply to your device. Just be aware that these themes are intended for the Mobo Launcher, a replacement to whichever home launcher you currently use. If you would like to try them out, you'll need to click on Mobo Launcher in the left panel to install it to your device.

Conclusion

Moborobo is a fantastic way to get quick and easy access to your Android device's data straight from your computer. Its WiFi connection works astonishingly well, and thanks to the verification code it is also safe, so there aren't any concerns about other people reading the data from your Android device. If you work on your computer a lot and want everything to run through it so you don't have to constantly check your device, give Moborobo a try!

Is an all-in-one management tool for Android devices on a computer necessary in your opinion? What do you do to manage your device? Let us know in the comments!