Embroidery Design Doodler

The number one thing I noticed right away is the application wasn’t designed with the iPad in mind even thought it’s designed for use on the tablet. You spend $1000 on a tablet with amazing capabilities like the three touch gesture to undo or erase and the zoom in and out feature with the fingers. I can’t do this in my app I can’t even zoom out. Currently the only zoom out feature in the app is 1x1 but it won’t let me zoom out past that and it’s hard for bigger picture thinkers or when adjusting background image size and placement. The next super big dissatisfaction was everytime I save my project or have a project loaded and leave it in my iPad it will erase my background image used and doesn’t save. This was so incredibly frustrating that I spent my entire lunch break adjusting the photo I use for my background because it wasn’t aligning perfectly with my stitches and I couldn’t zoom out I had to use the hand move tool and try each side of the image to resize but with no luck…. And then of course if I spend my entire lunch adding my background photo I will have to do it again next time I open the app or project, so there’s currently no way to store my background images connected to my projects… I would also have liked to see the use of Apple Pencil Pro being used in the app. I would MUCH RATHER squeeze my pen to populate my brushes rather than take up a huge portion of real estate. The pencil can quickly bring up that menu of brushes so I don’t know why the app wasn’t programmed with Apple Pencil features…. Last but not least I can’t make the icons smaller. On desktop they’re big too but at least I can use cntrl + shft and scroll with the mouse to make smaller, however I have to live with the giant icons on the iPad because there is no way to make the layout change or smaller.

I've been using this app now for a couple weeks on a iPad with the latest software and my PC. I have had constant freeze up and shut down problems with this app. It started with just using the reshaping tool so I stopped using it and now it does it using the tapering tool. It’s very frustrating to spend time on a project just to have all of it lost because it freezes up, there definitely needs to be a change in the software. I have been troubleshooting with the representative and neither of us can figure out what is happening. I have uninstalled and reinstalled it several times. It just seems to make it worse. As much as I love the potential for this app, I am at the point of hanging it up. I’m giving it two stars for the potential that it has and in the effort given to try and help figure things out but unless you save repeatedly after a couple of changes to your design, which is unrealistic, you lose everything the minute it shuts down on you.

It’s been 14 months since this program/app has been released and there have been several updates over the past 6-8 months which have greatly enhanced the experience of using the iPad to create embroidery designs with the artistic flair that is hard to achieve elsewhere. By simply choosing your stitch style, fill style, underlay, etc. and using the pencil or even your finger on the screen, you can easily sketch as simple or complex a design. With the new auto-save feature, a whole new stitch engine, and almost limitless choice of stitch and motif stitches including a fully personalized option for creating Appliqué types, you’ll be designing and stitching in no time at all. This Free App is a nice companion to the full featured Windows PC Program allowing you to sit and design anywhere, send your designed file to your PC and convert it to the file type your Embroidery machine or even Long-Arm Quilting machine. Yes, it converts to almost all long arm formats! Within this short amount of time, and with all of the feedback, the developers have been able to get the updates synchronized between both the PC Version as well as the iPad app so that the tools and features stay the same across both platforms. Keep in mind, this is a Companion App for the full Windows Program which is required to be able to actually convert your designs into stitch files for your machine. You cannot just create a machine file with only the iPad app.