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Android and Windows Phone Development Community

Pinsy Brings Social Sketching To Your Watch & Phone
3/28/2015 11:45:07 AM

Did you watch Apple’s VP draw on his wrist during the Apple Watch announcement and wonder “why can’t my Wear watch do that?” In typical XDA fashion, one enterprising forum member has brought similar functionality to Android Wear with a twist; it works on phones and watches alike, with other platforms on the way! The app is called Pinsy, and its release debut is a strong proof of concept with plenty of room to grow. You may remember the developer behind this project, XDA Forums Junior Member tyreaz, for his other app taking aim at Apple (Wizz – Vibrations Messenger), but this latest entrant is easily the more ambitious of the two. How do Pinsy and Android Wear fair against the unreleased wearable from Cupertino? Read on for a brief review highlighting the ins and outs of your next wrist-mounted messenger.

What To Expect

Pinsy Brush Size & Color Each contact on your Friends list has two tabs – a blank canvas on which to create & send, and a wall to showcase the most recent incoming sketch. On the creation front, size and color pickers are nestled below the drawing area, with buttons to clear, send, or undo the last brush stroke positioned just above.

The color pallet consists of white, black, blue, red, green yellow, pink, violet, and cyan – about the same as draw something when first starting out – and the dev has confirmed that more colors are on the way. In fact, violet and cyan were added to the full release within the last two days! XDA orange might be the next one up for inclusion, as evidenced by a sketch received directly from the PinsyTeam account, but this could just as easily turn out to be a lighthearted tease.

Brush sizes run from 0 to 100, and while this appears to be an arbitrary scale that skews to the high end, there is plenty of range for expression.

There is no eraser tool to be found, but this is typical of drawing apps. Instead, the easiest way to erase a section back to white is by picking the white color and jumping the size up to 100. Frequent changes between a large erasing brush and a small drawing one can make the tap-and-adjust mechanic tedious, but this is barely an issue on such a fast and fun sketch sender.

Widgets! In case you crave the feel of Wear without the wristband, Pinsy includes resizable 1×1 widgets to showcase the latest sketches from friends. Add as many as you want for a stunning wall of artwork and quick access to each conversation.

Android Wear

Pinsy sketches are received as push notifications to both Android and Android Wear (as one would expect). The current Wear version is still rough around the edges, though, and features like viewing images full screen have not yet hit the public release. Again, expect this to change in the coming days. The rest of the app works as expected, allowing quick message creation in a variety of colors.

Room For Improvement

As with every app that is new to the market, the first few versions are about finding a niche and fleshing out the experience. In light of this, it’s remarkable how useful and polished the Pinsy app is at only two days old. What follows are a few observations about areas for improvement, though none of them are cause to skip downloading as-is.

Conversation switching – the typical setup in messaging apps like Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp involves a single button-press or swipe to return to the conversation view. This pattern is in place by design; switching from chat to chat is a primary mechanic, and needs to be as frictionless as possible. Pinsy adds one additional step to the process: hamburger menu -> Friends, then a switch to the desired contact.

Material Design – the new design language of Matias Duarte is a welcome sight here in the form of a colored status bar and cleanly designed navigation drawer. However, there’s always room for an upgrade (see our earlier piece on inconsistencies in Materialized Apps).

Move the “Add Friend” text to a FAB on the Friends page
Include button-press ripple animation
Streamlined flow when picking brush size and color – maybe drag each color up or down to change size (with corresponding visual cue)? While not strictly “material,” this has the added benefit of dealing with the eraser comment from above.
Materialized friends list on Wear.

OAUTH Login – As it stands, Pinsy uses an in-house sign-in that works well, and is a boon to non-Facebook uses. That said, tyreaz is open to the idea of Facebook and Google accounts in the future, depending on user interest. This sounds like a welcome addition, and an easy way to jump start the social aspect of this sketch-sharing messenger.

Pinsy vs. Apple Watch

Left: Apple Watch with Sketch. Right: Samsung Galaxy Gear Live with Pinsy

Android Wear is far from an open ecosystem, but to say that Apple’s new watch is “exclusive” would be an understatement (and not just because of price). So how do the apps from tyreaz stack up? As it turns out, the two solutions have similar designs, but serve different needs.

The Sketch feature that was showcased by Apple’s VP, Kevin Lynch, is positioned to send quick messages to other Apple Watch owners – a sort of free-form emoji you send from your wrist. Pinsy, in contrast, provides a full art suite for intricate, multi-colored drawings. Yes, you will probably pull out your phone for the more involved doodles, but the fact remains that this is more than a mere vehicle for line art.

Polish and pizzazz – Apple has them. Pinsy messages don’t dissolve in a flourish when you send, and the Wear UI still needs work, but the app is highly functional (and getting better every day).

What are the XDA forums without the fervor of cross-platform tinkering? At the moment, sketching is limited to Android phones and watches, but conversations with the dev indicate that support for other platforms (like Apple Watch and Pebble?) are on the roadmap:

“I have still many plans and ideas of improvement for Pinsy of course, this is just the beginning. Adding features to this version and developing a version for other platforms are parts of them!” – tyreaz

Taps and heartbeats: the other features of Apple Watch. Not every Wear device comes with a heart rate sensor, but most are able to vibrate. This is the starting point for Wizz, the other new app developed by tyreaz. While covering Wizz is beyond the scope of this spotlight, buzzing friends’ wrists and phones with a tap is already in the works. On the subject of unifying the two services:

“I did not plan to allow Wizz and Pinsy users to communicate to each others at the moment, but I have been thinking at including Wizz features into Pinsy maybe some day.” – tyreaz

Concluding Remarks

Pinsy may not replicate the Apple Watch, but replication was not the goal. Instead, we see a rich messaging platform for doodles, both great and small. This app is still a newborn, so a few bugs are to be expected (and forgiven), but the solid core functionality and wear support at launch can not be understated. In the artistic spirit, here is a quick gallery of screenshots and sketches in lieu of a closing – they do Pinsy much more justice than a handful can hope to achieve.

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