Grafiti: compose drawings within the Messages app and send to friends

There are a few qualities that can make a jailbreak tweak great: Originality, function, and usefulness. Grafiti [sic] is a jailbreak tweak that features all three of these qualities, and it’s inexpensive to boot.

Grafiti allows you to draw pictures inside the stock Messages app, and send those pictures to your friends. Check inside to see how it works…

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxC4jzmH3UM[/tube]

To enable Grafiti, you must have a second keyboard enabled on your iPhone; the emoji keyboard works well. To enable a secondary keyboard go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards > Add New Keyboard… There you can select an emoji, or any other secondary keyboard available.

The only reason you need to add the secondary keyboard is to enable the world icon on the keyboard. This icon allows you to switch to alternate keyboards, but more importantly, it allows you to enable the whiteboard necessary to use Grafiti.

Once the secondary keyboard is enabled, open your Messages app, and tap and hold on the world icon. This will present a popup menu, which allows you to select the whiteboard.

The whiteboard’s interface is simple and easy to use, but very effective for creating brief drawings to send to your friends via MMS or iMessage. The options include clear, undo, and redo, along with RGB sliders to create colors, and a slider to adjust the size of your composition tool.

If patient and a bit skilled, I could easily see someone creating a highly detailed drawing utilizing the few settings that are available. The point adjustment allows you to use a pen that’s anywhere from 1pt to 20pt, and the undo and redo options lend plenty of leeway when it comes to correcting mistakes.

After your composition is finished, simply press the Done button, and your picture will be placed into a new message. There, you can add accompanying text if you wish to do so prior to sending.

Sending your message results in the drawing being converted into a full fledged photo that can be saved by both the sender and recipient to their respective camera rolls. This also means that your recipient does not have to be jailbroken and/or have the tweak installed for them to receive your drawing.

If you can’t tell from the video embedded above, I’m excited about Grafiti. It’s highly likely that I’ll use this tweak to bang out funny pictures quickly from the Messages app. The thing that makes this tweak so intriguing is that it doesn’t rely on any other outside apps or settings. Everything can be drawn, and sent directly from an interface that you’re already intimately familiar with.

But even more exciting than that, is the fact that this tweak is extremely original. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lately there seems to be some drought with regards to innovation on Cydia. Therefore, it’s good to see tweaks that push the envelope, even if you don’t have a personal reason to use them.

The icing on the cake is that the developer — IanP — isn’t trying to break our wallets. The thoughtfulness of the tweak, its stability, and its $0.99 asking price is proof that he wasn’t just looking for a quick payday.

Needless to say, I highly recommend Grafiti. You can get it right now from Cydia’s BigBoss repo.

What do you think?