Re: ANN: PikoPixel pixel-art editor

[Josh Freeman]

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 <gnustep_lists@twilightedge.com> 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