Wreck This App review

Wreck This App is a universal app for iPad and iPhone from Penguin Group USA. Sure, there are a lot of drawing apps out on the App Store, but most give you no guidance, or no freedom to express your creative side. Wreck This App is completely different, allowing you to be as creative as you wish with the prompts given by the app. How you follow those prompts is completely up to you. There’s no right or wrong way to Wreck This App!

The spiritual app successor to Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith, Wreck This App encourages users to put their own personal flair on pages by drawing, scribbling, poking, dripping, cutting, smudging, and virtually anything else. You can change line widths, import photos or take pictures directly from the app, and even mix your own colors to personalize every “page” of the app. Each page presents a fresh suggestion, and you can zoom in to be super precise, or stay at a full page view and just eyeball your designs.

“Wreck This App” is good, clean, fun for adults and kids alike. Children will love the ease of creating their designs and not being constrained to coloring within the lines, and adults will love reverting to their inner child as they scratch away their frustrations at the office or fight through a particularly difficult bout of writer’s block. That’s not to say that all the suggestions are entirely tame (“Write down all the four letter words you can think of” is a page of mine I won’t be posting anytime soon), but they’re only as “naughty” as you want to make them.

Speaking of posting your pages, “Wreck This App” lets you post your favorite creations to Facebook, Flickr, in addition to emailing them out to the world. Sadly, the Twitter addict in me wishes there was an option to tweet my creations directly from the app, but I suppose I can always take an extra minute to tweet a link to the supported social sites.

One disappointing aspect of the app is the lack of any sounds. I never mind an absence of generic looping background music, but I would’ve loved an addition of scribbling sounds or the sound of paper cutting when performing those actions to make this feel even more like you’re using the book version. It’s not a huge detraction, but while everything else feels so natural and fun, silent scribbling seems a bit odd.

With more than 50 pages, this app is a prime example of what an iPad or iPhone book should be. It’s more interactive than an e-book, and never “full” of your drawings and creations like a print book. If you’ve ever wanted to take out your frustrations without putting down your iDevice, this is a great app to pick up. “Wreck This App” is available on the App Store at their “introductory price” of $4.99 through August 16th.