Pixely: Pixel Art for Everyone

I’ve used a number of small graphics applications on the iPad (or iPhone), and none of them ever seem to do it all. Most are just easy, obvious clones of each other with the standard functionality, using your photos (camera roll) to (inadequately) do the heavy lifting of managing files, and littering your photos with junk in the process. Real work (even hobby work) requires something more, and Pixely provides just enough interaction with files and iCloud, and copy/paste with other apps, to make it really useful in creating pixel-based art. It has almost all of the tools one needs to create small pixel drawings (I mostly use it for 32 or 64 pixel wide icon-like images for games), including animated sequences. It obviously can’t do everything… I need other tools to migrate my Pixely work into a finished product and refine it further (such as creating crowded sprite sheets, which I could do in Pixely, but it is just more easily done on my Mac). But it lets me comfortably and efficiently generate a pretty refined first step in the process. There’s very little I’d change about Pixely, except perhaps to provide some online documentation, and an ability to move a selection instead of only copy/paste (and maybe a cut in addition to copy)… and maybe an option to export a collection of images into a single sprite sheet. The UI is a little rough around the edges, and not always entirely intuitive, but it’s all there, you can figure it out with practice, it all works, and it gets the job done. Pixely is definitely one of the few apps I rate highly (or at all), and one of the very, very few that I have been using for years and keep going back to.

Update: So, the app still crashes occasionally, but with the auto-save it’s essentially a non-issue. I’m not fairly certain that this is the best app available for pixel art on the iPad- and I definitely appreciate the developer response! Original Review: Overall, this is a nice, simple app that, while it doesn’t have some of the conveniences of a more advanced tool (eg selecting parts of an image, copy/paste, saving, and setting a color are all a little cumbersome) can produce images and animations that are a joy to make. However, the biggest drawback (and it is a large one) is the lack of an auto save combined with frequent crashing. While editing large size canvases (over about 200x200 pixels) or using a large editing tool (the pencil tool on anything but the smallest setting) the app has a tendency to quit frequently and without warning. Since the app does not save work automatically, you will lose work even if you do remember to save frequently. At its worst, it makes work both extremely tense and maddeningly frustrating. Which is a shame, since most of the app is at least serviceable if not polished. I’ll probably continue to use it, as it’s still the best pixel editing app I’ve found for the iPad, but the crashing issue is best to be aware of before you begin.

Regularly updated. Stable. Clean UI. Pixely makes the majority of my art.