Arrette Scale sketch drafting

Rated #1 Technical App for Architects by ArchDaily!

Arrette Scale for iPad is an app for designers who want to draw freehand while maintaining a measurable drawing scale like vector drafting tools. Architects, urban planners, surveyors, home remodelers, field archaeologists and dozens of other kinds of professionals will find this app useful. Unlike some other vector drawing tools, Arrette is simple to use.

Arrette provides the platform to begin design work and generate ideas without moving too quickly to rigid straight lines and curves. We want to help you draw much as you would normally draw on paper, but to give you the extra tools and ways to share your work that make your life easier and make the design process simpler and more productive.

The basic drawing structure is a familiar one - drawing layers which can be overlayed on a base image. The Grid keeps you aware of the size of what you're drawing, and the Edge helps you draw straight lines when you want. When you're ready, you can easily share drawings by email or save them to your device.

We've designed Arrette to be extremely easy to learn. In about five minutes, you'll understand how to zoom and scale your canvas, draw lines, and load base images to work on top of. Our tools will seem familiar from other structured drawing applications, but every tool we've built has been simplified and optimized with scale in mind.

Uses for Arrette:

• An urban designer drafts plans for a new sub-division in a small town
• A real estate agent snaps a photograph of a living space and begins to sketch out ideas for staging
• A new home owner sketches the plan for an elaborate garden in the back yard
• An archaeologist precisely records the provenience of a newly discovered artifact, including its location on an aerial map and the outline of its form
• A construction manager notes progress on a work site, sending annotated precision-scale documents back to the general contractor live from the work site

These are just a few of the ways that we have envisioned Arrette becoming an essential tool for many professionals. Arrette is the ideal tool for sketching because of its ease of use, preservation of scale, and flexibility in working with original source material such as other drawings, photographs, and maps.

Included drawing tools:

• Freehand drawing pens that scale like vector lines but are as easy to use as pencil and paper
• An adjustable grid system that you can easily flip between the metric system and decimal feet
• A straight edge tool for drawing perfectly straight lines or arrays of parallel lines
• A circle edge tool for drawing arcs and circles of arbitrary, but precise radius
• Distance and area measurement tools for measuring the lengths, perimeters and areas of arbitrary pathways in your drawing at precise scale
• A lasso tool to select, move, copy and paste previously drawn lines
• Layers, for separating out parts of composite objects or for adding new ideas to an existing document that overlay earlier designs
• The ability to share Arrette documents with other users or to e-mail documents in PNG or PDF formats
• An eraser tool, for revising your designs or removing objects from previous work
• The ability to adjust the width of all lines globally even after the lines have been drawn
• A color picker to choose from a variety of different pen colors for your drawing

Base image imports:

• The ability to load base images to draw on top of; base images respect their original scale and direction when the document is zoomed or panned
• Import base images from Email, Dropbox, and Adobe Creative Cloud
• Copy and paste from other apps that support JPG, PNG or PDF

Document sharing features:

• Send PDFs with scale and direction information to colleagues, clients, and other parties via email
• Save your work to your Photo Gallery
• Share raster versions of your work with anyone via email, Twitter, or Facebook