If you've ever enjoyed scrawling sequential stick figure doodles in the corner pages of a school notebook and then flipping through it quickly to make the little fellows spring to life, then FlipBook HD may scratch a familiar itch. This drawing and animation app packs a few neat features for crafting clever movie shorts, but an unintuitive interface, stability issues, and a meager selection of drawing tools ultimately make old-school pen and paper a more inviting option.
Though FlipBook HD has a short tutorial and help menu that attempts to explain most of the basic functions, it still takes a lot of fumbling around to get a feel for the various functions and navigating different screens. Once you get accustomed to the confusing interface, it's possible to whip up some entertaining, albeit rudimentary, animations. You can arrange drawings into sequences, even going so far as to layer multiple "tracks" together to string several different individual animation cycles onto the same canvas.
Among the more useful features, onionskin lets you see the previous drawing to help guide your doodles, and keyframes simplify certain aspects of the creative process by letting you select and drag drawings to animate them across multiple frames, rather than penning each frame by hand.
Doodling freehand is pretty straightforward, since all you have to work with is a single brush that can be adjusted for size and softness. It's pressure-sensitive too -- which is cool in theory -- but you have to lift your finger up between strokes to adjust it. Several other tools let you swap colors, add text, draw shapes, drop photos in, and erase your work, but the drawing functions feel pretty weak compared to other art apps available. Importing photos is another neat option, however, stop animation is a chore without a built-in camera feature. I also experienced numerous crashes when working with photos and in several other instances. At least finished movies can be easily exported or uploaded online to share, assuming you have the patience to finish them.
The bottom line. FlipBook HD isn't really that intuitive or fun to work with, but you can still create some cool animations with it.
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