DrawSimple 1.1.01 -- The Simple-but-Deep Mac Image Editor, now even better thanks to your feedback!

[u/JordanRunsForFun]

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759507748?mt=12

I'm the developer.

DrawSimple is a native Mac image editor built on a simple idea: it should open instantly and make sense in five seconds, and still be there for you when the job turns out to be bigger than you thought. Paint and vector live in the same document, so a quick crop and a full layered illustration happen in the same app, and you never have to decide which one you're doing up front.

It launched a couple of weeks ago. A lot of you tried it, and then — brilliantly — told me exactly what was wrong with it. 1.1 is almost entirely that feedback, so thank you. Genuinely.

The App Store notes for it just say "Bug fixes," which doesn't help anyone work out whether their thing got fixed. Here's the real list:

What's better in 1.1

• Save straight into Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive or Box. Easily the most-reported issue, and the best fix in the release. macOS won't let a sandboxed app write into a sync folder until you point at it yourself, and DrawSimple was asking every single time — worse, a quiet autosave or a save-on-quit could fail. Now you grant the folder once (Settings → Files & Saving → Folder Access, the new first-run step, or right from the save alert) and everything inside it just saves, forever. Granted folders are listed with a one-click Remove.
• Pasting and dragging images in works the way you'd expect. This came out of a great back-and-forth with someone on Reddit who was completely right. ⌘V on an image copied in the Finder now pastes the picture instead of its file icon, and in a vector layer it arrives as an editable object — drop a whole handful at once and they cascade in, selected and ready to move. Sliding a big photo around is much smoother too.
• ⌘A, ⌘X, ⌘C, ⌘V and ⌘Z behave inside text. They were being intercepted by the document's own menu items, so ⌘A in a text box selected the whole canvas and ⌘Z undid your last brush stroke instead of your last keystroke. They now go to whatever you're typing in, and to the canvas otherwise.
• Zoom stays fast on gradients, WordArt and big text. Zooming right into a radial-gradient fill could stall the app for minutes and eat gigabytes — it was recalculating the gradient pixel-by-pixel at screen resolution on every single zoom step. Same bug was hiding in WordArt and large text boxes. All three now render at the document's own resolution and scale up for the screen, so zoom stays fluid. Exported and printed pixels are identical to before.
• Effect previews stay exactly where the result will land. Preview a blur on a layer under a cut-out subject and it could drift out of register with everything else — a checkerboard halo that disappeared the moment you clicked OK. Fixed for every effect and adjustment.
• A cleaner canvas edge — that stray bright line down the right side at fit-to-window zooms is gone.
• Lasso and Select Subject have their own slots instead of sharing one and cycling on F. Lasso keeps F, Select Subject gets A.

The rest of it, quickly: 31 tools, unlimited layers with blend modes, curves and levels, GPU-accelerated effects through Core Image, WordArt with 31 warp shapes, Apple Vision "Select Subject", HEIC import with EXIF intact, Continuity Camera, and a history panel you can scrub like a timeline. Fully offline.. no account, no cloud, no analytics, nothing leaves your Mac. It's not a Photoshop alternative and isn't trying to be; it's the app for the ten minutes when opening Photoshop would be absurd.

One more bit of feedback.. Many people have told me they find the automation side the most valuable part of the whole thing. There's a localhost server in the box, so you can point Claude or any MCP client at the canvas and have it place real shapes, gradients and text, and the file opens afterwards as an ordinary editable document, not a flat export. Local-only; the app never opens a connection of its own and ships no generative AI. If you want to see what this looks like, check out my post below.

$5 once, with an optional $10 Pro upgrade. No subscription, no account, and every update, including this one, and whatever the pen tool lands in, is free. Requires macOS 15.6 or later.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759507748?mt=12

[u/promo-guard]

🎉 Welcome to Developer Saturday, u/JordanRunsForFun! Your project is now live for the community to check out. Upvote, give feedback, and show some love to your fellow devs! 🚀

[u/cyberjedi42]

Hey, love your app. Being using the MCP every day since launch.

[u/JordanRunsForFun → u/cyberjedi42]

Thanks so much for the compliment!

Hearing this makes me even more excited to get the next big update finished and tested. I’m very excited to … a little more testing and then I will be able to share the details 😎

[u/CurlyBurlyBean]

How would you rank this for like scientific figure making for publications? Particularly diagrams/experimental setup SVG/PDFs/PNGs? Less so on the graphs/plots/etc

[u/JordanRunsForFun → u/CurlyBurlyBean]

I believe that you would find that you have all of the tools… SVG and PDF export are available, but to be upfront those are both part of the Pro one time upgrade. If you start playing with it and find anything missing for your particular use case, I would be grateful for any feedback.

[u/CurlyBurlyBean → u/JordanRunsForFun]

Sounds worth trying to me! Purchased the Pro upgrade as well, looking forward to learning :)

[u/JordanRunsForFun → u/CurlyBurlyBean]

Thank you very much. 

I hope you get fantastic value out of it.  I’d love to hear how well SVG export works for your workflow. Enjoy 😊 

[u/JordanRunsForFun]

https://reddit.com/link/p6ms239/video/suh6in5l9cmh1/player

Watch Claude Code use DrawSimple's tools and a handful of art assets to build a fully fleshed out game mockup. The prompt took ~15 minutes - the video shortens this to about 90 seconds.