Doodling using an Acer Chromebook Spin 13 and Infinite Painter
I finished doodle 965 last night in my series of daily doodles. And, I’m continuing to try different hardware and software for doodling. I bought an Acer Chromebook Spin 13 on sale on Amazon Prime Day in July. It more-or-less replaced a Samsung Chromebook Plus (a great device and my first Chromebook). The Spin 13 comes with a stylus based on the battery-less Wacom EMR technology. Since my favorite app for doodling, Procreate, is not available for Android or Chrome OS, I bought Infinite Painter for $8. Infinite Painter is available for free for a trial period. But, the trial expired before I got around to testing it.
The Acer EMR stylus feels better for doodling that Samsung because it is slightly longer (though not as long as the Apple Pencil). Neither has the smooth feel of the Apple Pencil. But, then again, neither one costs an additional $100 like the Apple Pencil. I got some spurious marks in Infinite Painter because, I think, the stylus-touchscreen is a bit too aggressive in detecting a touch point. That said, the overall experience is pretty good. Having a display larger than the 10.5-inch iPad Pro I normally use for my 20 to 30 minute per day doodling exercise is nice. It is hard to explain the qualitative difference. But, having a slightly larger canvas feels different.
It would be unfair to “review” Infinite Painter after using it just once. That said, lacking Procreate for the Chromebook or Android, Infinite Painter was a good app to use to test doodling. There was one oddity that stood out: When I exported the test doodle to a PNG file, the neutral-gray background layer was lost somehow. It looks like what was left was an empty alpha-layer resulting in a black background when viewed in Google Photos (see above).
