2013, Existing package for drawing (painting, brush, lines) in iOS?

Question

I need to add typical finger drawing to an app.

(The usual.... choose colors, erase, thickness - just the usual you see in every app made.)

It's hard to believe I have to program this from scratch, in this day and age?

It's hard to believe there is not a common solution for this?

All I could find is...

https://github.com/levinunnink/Smooth-Line-View

• Review: that is a (beautifully written) example fragment of a few lines of code being how to draw with a path, with a good smooth result. It works perfectly, but it's just for drawing one "path." For example, you can't make a drawing with more than one color. there is no undo or anything like that. (See also note on the fourth review item here regarding path-math.)

https://github.com/sumanthk2006/Smooth-Line-View-1 (variation of above, but does not run under ARC, unfortunately demo does not properly launch etc)

• Review: this is "abandonedware" or maybe "frustrationware" :) It does not run and is not ARC-ready. It is a seemingly well-written class that claims to do undo, colors, erase, etc. It even has a proper delegate to track your button states. But it doesn't work.

• UPDATE Regarding this paackage. As a matter of fact, if you massage it it works well. Suggest (i) throw away the example app files. (ii) using modern Xcode, use the "convert to ARC project" feature on the two main files. There are a coupe little problems like it should use awakeFromNib. If you get it working it actually does everything, really well.

• THERE ARE SERIOUS BUGS in SmoothLineView1. just to be clear, it suffers some serious bugs - you'll see there's a "streaking" effect when you draw.

http://www.cdframeworks.com/product/brushengine

• Review: This commercial package (under $100) is well made and email support is fast. Unfortunately it does not have undo so it's not suitable for many situations. (Also does not have erase.)

Mentioned below is this popular article:
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/ios-sdk_freehand-drawing/

• Review: this is a good article on the actual TECHNOLOGY of drawing curves, on the let's say "path-math". Unfortunately it's no help at all if you need a working, ready to use, drawing package (with the obvious features, undo, erase, colors etc) to use in an iOS app. Thus for example, whatever actual solution you were using, you may, perhaps, want to apply the math concepts in this article.

I appreciate that the basic concepts are very simple, it's easy enough to "start from scratch". But it's just - ridiculous - to have to do from scratch for something so commonplace. Is there a solid package I'm missing?

It's fairly amazing that the four scratchy references above are the only things out there.

Any ideas? What's the best package today (late 2013) for adding drawing to an iOS app? THANKS.

Answer 1

As of 2017, I use https://github.com/acerbetti/ACEDrawingView/.

It can be used through cocoa pods, and provide full functionality over integrating a drawing feature in your app (color, brush, size, eraser, undo/redo/, etc).

Answer 2

http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/ios-sdk_freehand-drawing/ has a good, clear tutorial on smooth freehand drawing on the ios. If you just follow the tutorial, you can implement it easily into whatever app you are trying to make.
It has stuff about increasing line quality and smoothness, and stroke quality.
http://www.raywenderlich.com/18840/ is another tutorial on a simple drawing app, self-contained. You can combine aspects of both to get what you want.
edit: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/GLPaint/Introduction/Intro.html is the GLPaint sample provided by apple, which includes detecting shake. I thought it seemed more official, since it's from apple

to answer your question, there is no package for drawing directly, but there is a UIKit class, UIBezierPath, that lets you draw shapes made of straight lines or some curves.