Hi Xavier,
Thanks for your interest in PikoPixel! Hope your installation went
OK and your nephews enjoyed using it!
Unfortunately, the full documentation still isn't written, so I
don't have a list of the complete set of features. Most of the
important ones were shown in the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3KYYLK0ZC0
), and almost all of the rest can be found through the main menu &
submenus.
One of the more useful and unique features are the popup panels
(shown in the video at 2:08): By pressing an easy-to-reach hotkey
along the lower corners of the keyboard (on either side, to
accommodate right- and left-handed users), a popup panel that controls
tools, colors, layer controls, or navigation appears under the current
mouse location. This speeds up the drawing process because the user
doesn't have to spend time navigating the mouse to an external panel
off the side of the document window (& then back).
For best results with popup panels, I recommend setting the
correct keyboard language-locale in PikoPixel's hotkey settings (on
Mac, it's set automatically, but on GNUstep, it has to be done
manually - this is a Cocoa limitation, not a GS one, as there's no
Cocoa API for reading the keyboard locale; the Mac version accesses it
using the Carbon framework): From the main menu, select Info > Hotkey
Settings, and choose your keyboard's locale from the popup menu in the
bottom left of the Hotkey Settings window, then click the "Load
Defaults For:" button immediately to its left, & click "OK" to save.
(This is due to the different key layouts in different locales - for
example, on US-locale keyboards, the keys at the lower left are Z, X,
C; on French-locale keyboards, the keys are W, X, C - there's also
further differences in French-Canadian & French-Swiss locales).
One of the interesting features not shown in the video is the
"Blink Layers" hotkey ('B' on most keyboard locales): When you hold
down the hotkey, it temporarily hides your image, displaying only the
canvas background. This is useful when tracing a higher-resolution
photo (you can set a photo to be the canvas background in 'Background
Settings', found in the 'Canvas' menu), because quickly switching in-
place between your drawing & the reference photo makes it easy to find
the parts where your drawing doesn't quite match. Here are some photo-
tracings made with PikoPixel (Mac) that used this technique:
https://instagram.com/pikopixeleditor/ (the blurry tv-scanlines effect
was from post-processing in another image-editor)
Regarding similar software, there's several pixel-art editors
listed here:
http://www.slant.co/topics/1547/~what-are-the-best-pixel-art-sprite-
editors
I wrote PikoPixel because it was the pixel-art editor I wanted to
use, and hopefully it's something others find useful too. Thanks to
the GNUstep frameworks and everyone who's volunteered their time
working on them, PP can reach a wider audience beyond Mac; I hope your
article can also discuss GNUstep, because my Mac pixel-editor now
compiles & runs on a $40 Raspberry Pi 2, which is quite amazing!
Please let me know if you have other questions. (And I'd be happy
to take this off-list if this was too off-topic for discuss-gnustep).
Cheers,
Josh
On Sep 20, 2015, at 3:24 PM, Xavier Brochard wrote:
Hi
Thank you for this software!
Your demo video is so good and convincing that my two nephew (10 years
old) asked me to install it !
I would like to write a short paper about PikoPixel on linuxfr.org
(slashdot for french speaking people). Do you have a list of features
or should I extract it from the video ? Do you know a similar
software ?
What were your motivations for writing it ?
Xavier Brochard
Le Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:57:08 -0400,
Josh Freeman <[email protected]> a écrit :
PikoPixel is a free Mac OS X pixel-art editor that's currently
in beta for its initial 1.0 release.
The latest beta version, 1.0 BETA5, is the first source-code
release (AGPL v3), and the first version that also runs on GNUstep.
PikoPixel GNUstep binaries aren't available yet (haven't gotten
around to figuring out GS standalone application packaging), so for
the moment, PikoPixel must be built from source.
Requirements for compiling PikoPixel are a recent version of the
GNUstep development environment (June 2015 or later) and the
libobjc2 runtime. Also, PP's only been tested so far under Clang, and
on Debian- based Linux distros (Ubuntu & Mint), so there may be
issues with other configurations.
PikoPixel's source code archive is linked at the bottom of the
webpage (not the green "Download" arrow, which downloads the
Mac-only binary):
http://twilightedge.com/mac/pikopixel/
Please send questions, comments, or issues to pikopixel (at)
twilightedge (dot) com.
Cheers,
Josh Freeman
Twilight Edge Software
http://twilightedge.com
_______________________________________________
Discuss-gnustep mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
