14 DAY TRIAL // Using computers for presentations is pretty much standard these days. However, despite all the benefits to it, there are also some drawbacks. The greatest of these is the fact that, while presentation programs are great for setting up and running a presentation, they often make it very hard to modify something in real time. This, combined with the difficulty of directing attention during a computerized presentation, has given birth to "magic marker" applications that let you draw on top of the screen, thus letting you interact with your presentation and direct attention where it is needed.
There are quite a few such programs out there, and Ultimate Pen is one of them.
What it does In a nutshell, Ultimate Pen creates a full screen, transparent window that can be drawn upon.
The uses for this are varied, but the most common one is being able to highlight information and direct attention in an environment that is limited in this respect. This makes it great for presentations and the such, especially interactive ones, which include a lot of exchanges with the audience and thus require flexibility.
Flexibility One of the better things that Ultimate Pen does is give you options. Other similar applications create a full screen transparent window that is always on top and let you draw in that, this program takes it one step further.
There are three ways you can use this program. The first is the top layer mode, in which what you draw is always on top of everything else. You can use the entire screen as your canvas, but you cannot interact with anything that is below the Ultimate Pen window. The second is the Desktop drawing mode, in which it seems you draw directly on the desktop. In fact, you are drawing on a transparent window that is positioned between the desktop and the actual icons. While in this mode, you can both draw on the desktop, and interact with any of the desktop elements at the same time. The third way is the click through mode. This mode allows you to keep the Ultimate Pen drawing on top of everything else, but still interact with whatever applications are behind the drawing.
You can activate click through at any time using a keyboard shortcut, and can deactivate it just as easily. Furthermore, the application can function perfectly well in a full screen mode, where its menu bar is not visible.
The drawing itself Unfortunately, the drawing itself is the area of Ultimate Pen that I found to be weakest. At first glance everything seemed ok, however, after playing around with the width of the pen tool, it all went horribly wrong. The program does not work the same way a traditional paint program does, instead it seems to use the mouse movements as a curve of sorts on which it plots the line. This gives awful results when using the bigger widths for the pen and trying to make anything that is curved, also very slow mouse moments also produce strange results.
After initially seeing this, I turned the width all the way down to see if it was some sort of bug with the way it handled the larger sizes, but even at the lowest width it manifested the same artifacts, albeit much less noticeable unless you are actively looking for them.
A lot of control Ultimate Pen gives the user a lot of way in which to control it. Beside the user interface itself with the menus and palette, there are a heap of keyboard shortcuts and modifiers. To takes things even further, the application if fully controllable using Apple Script.
You can do almost anything using the scripts, from changing the color and width of the pen, to readjusting the position of the palette and even drawing elements themselves. This is useful above all, because there is no simple way to change the width or opacity of the pen, without having to go to the preferences. Using scripts, you can do all that plus more.
The Good Gives you several ways of using this application and is quite customizable.
The Bad The drawing is awful when using the larger widths for the pen, and at the lowest settings, the line is just too thin. Despite all the good things about this application, it fails at it's main purpose which is to let you actually draw something.
The Truth While much better polished and feature packed than other similar programs, the horrible visual artifacts when using medium to large pen width is unacceptable.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
