If You Prefer Drawing Instead Of Typing, This iPhone Keyboard Is For You

DrawType Keyboard is a new keyboard for iOS 8 with a very simple premise: like Draw Something meets Swype, it turns the bottom half of your screen into a virtual whiteboard. Anything you can draw, you can then send over iMessage to a friend. And the $1 DrawType keyboard is a treat. Instead of hunting and pecking across rows of QWERTY keys, all you do is start drawing with your finger. There aren’t a ton of options—a handful of colors, three different pen widths, and a single undo button—but once you’re done, you can tap a button to either save your drawing to the camera roll, or copy it to your clipboard to paste into a message as a JPEG.

If that sounds inelegant, it actually isn’t. In fact, it’s easy to use, and a lot of fun. Using DrawType, I sent my wife a number of custom drawings ranging from the adorable (a grinning ladybug, a fluffy budgie) to the explicitly pornographic (a grinning %$@&#!, a fluffy ******). DrawType has some issues, certainly. It could use more colors to choose from (especially white, the lack of which is a strange oversight) and an eraser tool. But those are options that can all easily be addressed in a future update. And even if they aren’t, I suspect the option to just pull open a whiteboard and draw something quickly in a message is useful enough to make this a keyboard I’ll keep around. You can download DrawType Keyboard from the App Store here.