The app is available exclusively through the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store. The two stores handle testing differently.

Unfortunately, the Mac App Store doesn't offer a way to test one-time purchase apps for the macOS version. Some developers work around this by offering their app for free and dividing the features into free, time-limited, and unlimited with in-app purchases. Square Sketch, however, is intended to be a classic app where the costs are fixed upon download and the interface is free of any indications of potentially paid features during use.

Occasionally, there are beta tests for the macOS version available through TestFlight, which you’re welcome to join. According to the TestFlight Terms of Service, these beta tests are primarily intended to provide feedback to the developer, not to serve as a basis for making a purchase decision.

The Microsoft Store offers the option to test the Windows version of the app for 30 days.

For optimal integration into the respective operating system, the native development tools and app stores of Apple and Microsoft are used. Unfortunately, there is no way to share licenses between the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store.

Since Apple uses Swift and Microsoft uses C#, different native programming languages, development effort increases because there is no shared source code. The advantage is that the platform can be better supported and its potential fully utilized. macOS users, in particular, place great value on a fully native app.

If you wish to use the app on both platforms, please consider purchasing a separate license from the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store. This will support the additional development effort required for optimal operating system integration.

There are currently no concrete plans for implementation, as it is not yet clear whether the operation will still work as well.

Handwriting: The current user interface is optimized for mouse/trackpad and keyboard. Switching between these input devices is intuitive, depending on whether you want to add a geometric shape or text. However, with a pen, you would naturally want to write text by hand. Handwriting is intentionally not supported in Square Sketch, as drafts created with the app are intended to be more professional and less personal.

One-handed operation: The current interface is designed for two-handed use, where holding down keys switches to the select, move, and delete tools. However, an iPad version would also need to support one-handed operation, as one hand is often required to hold the device.

Touch operation: An iPad version should also support situations where no keyboard or pen is available. The user interface would then need to function even with relatively imprecise touch input on the drawing surface.

A version that also runs on Linux is planned. However, there are currently no concrete plans regarding when and with which technology this will be implemented.

A simple port is not possible, as previous versions rely on native frameworks for optimal platform integration, which do not support Linux.

These limitations are deliberately chosen and are something of a trademark of the app. Square Sketch is meant to remain minimalist at all times.

Minimalist style: The options are comparable to graph paper, as it is commonly used in practice. One to two pens and a single font size are ideal for drafts and their content, without drifting into graphic design and becoming distracted by styling questions.

Tradition: Despite the limited possibilities, it should still be possible to visualize all ideas with them. In many traditional media such as books or blueprints, for example, a second color was not available for technical or economic reasons, which was usually not a problem. This limitation can even foster creativity.

Combination: Even in drafts, a certain amount of styling is sometimes necessary to create a visual hierarchy. This is possible even with only a few options, since they can be combined in different ways, resulting in many variations.

Headings: Instead of making a heading larger, you can make it bold, highlight it with color, or underline or frame it using the draw tool. When the draft is inserted into a document, larger headings can also be set within the document itself.

Stroke widths: Square Sketch aligns the two stroke widths with those of regular and bold text, creating a harmonious appearance. However, this is only technically easy to implement when limited to one font size and two stroke widths. If two stroke widths are not sufficient, you can combine them with other options (highlighting, dashed lines) to create greater variety.

Colors: Many professional designs limit themselves to a small number of colors in order not to distract the viewer too much from the content. A foreground color with an additional highlight color can still be intuitively perceived. With a further highlight color, an interpretive ambiguity already arises that can be distracting.

Dotted lines are not planned, as they would compete with dashed lines.

At low zoom levels, the two would be difficult to distinguish. If they are distinguishable and both variants appear simultaneously, this could lead the viewer to wonder what their different meanings are. If only one variant appears, the question arises when drawing which of the two variants is being used.

A minimalist style aims to avoid such competing options, as they can be distracting when viewing or creating content.

If you need different dashed lines, you can combine them with other options, for example by additionally highlighting them or making them bold.

On traditional paper, hatching is a simple way to suggest a surface with a pen without having to laboriously fill it in. On early plotters, it was often the only practical method for representing filled areas.

In digital sketches, by contrast, an area can easily be filled completely, which often results in a calmer and more harmonious appearance. For this reason, it was not an easy decision whether the app should support hatching at all in keeping with its minimalist design principles. However, since hatching is a characteristic and defining element of sketching, it was ultimately included as a fill style.

Different hatching styles are not planned, as additional styling options would contradict the app's design philosophy. In technical drawings, two different hatch patterns are often used to distinguish adjacent areas. In the app, this can instead be achieved by using two different fill styles (hatched and translucent) or colors (normal and highlighted).

The app replicates drawing with pen and paper, with a ruler and compass available as tools. The advantage is that arbitrarily complex geometric shapes can be constructed using only these, without having to use a large number of different tools. In addition to its simplicity, the app also follows this principle because drawing lines and circles can be well represented through pointer gestures.

As with pen and paper, a rectangle is therefore composed of four lines. Rounded corners are also constructed individually. If the rectangle is needed multiple times, it can be duplicated using copy & paste. It may also be useful to store frequently used shapes in a separate file for later reuse.

Unlike CAD software, which is designed for scaled technical drawings, Square Sketch is primarily intended for non-scaled sketches.

A sketch should primarily represent the idea, such as the number, arrangement, rough proportions, and labeling of the parts of an object. A sketch is not limited to objects, but can also include diagrams, for example.

Square Sketch does not use physical units of measurement when drawing. Instead, lengths are based on the number of grid squares. However, if you wish, you can mentally assign a specific physical size to a grid square and thus emulate drawing to scale. When exporting or printing, the physical size of a grid square can also be set.

This question is closely related to the previous question about drawing to scale and the difference between technical drawings and sketches.

Unlike technical drawings, which are to scale, sketches usually have no exact relationship between the depicted and the intended size. The size of the drawing is guided more by the coarse grid and the space needed for labeling. The intended size can then be indicated in the label.

Since the app is designed for sketches, it relies on manually drawn dimension lines with manual labeling.

Text creation should be as simple as possible, since sketches often contain many labels. Therefore, you can click anywhere and then start writing.

As expected, a single click deselects everything in this implementation, but it also sets the cursor. This corresponds to the familiar behavior in a text editor. However, a text object is only created after the first character is typed. This prevents the unintentional creation of empty text objects.

To deselect all objects without placing the cursor, press Esc.

Double-clicking to create text is not used because it is a more complex operation and the action Set Cursor would then vary depending on the context: single click inside text and double click outside.

Yes, that would be a toggle behavior. However, if within a selection the styling option is applied to some objects and not to others, the behavior is no longer so clear. Many apps behave in this case in such a way that on the first press of the shortcut, the option is initially applied to all objects in the selection, bringing them to the same state. After that, the shortcut must be pressed again to ultimately remove the option. In larger sketches, it is often not immediately apparent whether a selection is in a mixed state, and the user would have to monitor the process step by step to avoid pressing the shortcut too few or too many times.

Square Sketch handles it so that the same shortcut together with Shift is used to remove a styling option. This has the advantage that it directly leads to the desired result in all cases. Removing an option can be done almost “blindly,” and the shortcut can also be pressed multiple times without the meaning switching back and forth between applying and removing the option.

The keyboard shortcuts for adding a fill or an arrowhead are designed so that, when pressed repeatedly, they increase the opacity of the fill in three levels or the number of arrowheads in two levels, respectively. It would be unintuitive if the fill or the arrowheads disappeared again after the highest level. The behavior is similar to working with pen and paper, where coloring in an area gradually increases the opacity and then reaches a limit, but does not become transparent again. It would also be impractical if, for example, to remove the lowest opacity level one first had to switch through the higher levels, thereby initially doing the opposite of removing.

Instead, Shift can be used in conjunction with the key to add a fill or arrowhead to achieve the opposite effect. Fills or arrowheads can also be removed with the delete tool.