14 DAY TRIAL // Some time ago I reviewed a little program that let you draw over the screen. That program was ideal for drawing real time and for use as a pointer of sorts, and to highlight or draw attention to certain areas in real time. Ideal for presentations and other such uses. That little program, however, could hardly be called a drawing tool. FlySketch does much of the same, only in a totally different way, combining the best of a drawing program and a full screen overlay doodle tool into one.
What is it, exactly? In a nutshell, FlySketch is a drawing program, whose window is always on top of everything and whose background can be made transparent. This, in effect, means that whatever you draw in it can be dame to look drawn on top of whatever applications are open behind it. This makes it easy to pull out screenshots with highlights and other graphical elements already in them, without having to add them later. Also, because of the way the program was designed, it makes it dead easy to pull out screenshots that always have the exact same size as well as easily frame your selection.
Working with it At the core, FlySketch is a drawing program. It offers the basic tools like circle, rectangle, line and free form line. You can use these to doodle to your heart's desire. Beside these, there is also a marker tool which is the only one in the entire program that can have transparency, and there is no eraser of any kind. If you want to change something you can only delete the object and remake it anew.
As it is a drawing program, it has support for graphic tablets and pressure sensitivity, letting you sketch and highlight with ease. Making anything that looks good with it is a tough job though, because of the lack of any eraser tool. Moreover, the only tool that has opacity, the marker, can only be modified through the preferences, making it awkward to work with if you want to change the color often, to say the least.
As a drawing aid, FlySketch is pretty good, letting you sketch and trace over just about anything that can be displayed on your screen. Since every free hand line is a separate object, you theoretically have a high degree of freedom, despite the lack of an eraser, because you can go back and just delete and redo anything. However, in actual practice, since every stoke is an object, you are going to have a hard time of selecting anything from the hundreds of stokes that tend to accumulate over the course of the drawing.
Every vectorial shape, which is pretty much everything except for the marker and the free form line tool, can be adjusted after creation either changing its color; the thickness of the stroke, and in the case of lines the start and end symbols such as arrow or circle and square; objects can be reordered depth-wise and aligned, they can be given drop shadows; and last but not least, their Compositing Mode can be changed. Compositing Modes are somewhat similar to the Blend Modes in Photoshop, but this is an approximation really, because the names are not illustrative of what the mode does and the documentation is abysmally obscure. The information is pasted right from the Apple Cocoa documentation, giving me that "I have no idea what these modes do but how about we implement them, since they are already there so we can have more entries on the feature list" feeling. While we are on the subject of the documentation, the Introduction window clearly states: "Want more information? Visit our website or look through the manual under the Help menu." I looked through the FlySketch section of the site several times, trying to locate that hidden help section to no avail. This is because the Help section has been renamed to Wiki... no comment.
Overall, FlySketch is not the best vectorial drawing tool you will come across, but you should be able to get what you need out of it, but, as an overlay screen capture tool, it is very well put together. From being able to make consistent, same size grabs, being able to drag any drop to anything that supports it, to one click sending to Mail and other commonly used apps like Preview and iPhoto. It even has little niceties like a customizable grid and a canvas border.
The Good Overall the program is easy to use and intuitive for the most part. It provides a very fast and easy way to grab a part of the screen, or the entire screen, with added highlights or graphical elements of your choosing.
The Bad The vectorial drawing tools are nasty to work with, and the Composition Modes are one big mystery, even after inspecting the documentation.
The Truth It's a OK tool for annotating, highlighting or encircling the important bits of information on your screen, and send them out with just a few clicks.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
