AntiPaint

Once upon a time, I was drawing something with the gimp. I got extremely irritated about the fact that gimp could not draw lines, or about the fact that the right mouse button didn't draw anything at all. On top of that, Gimp crashed. That was the point where I said: enough is enough. Alternatives to the gimp also did not really seem to do what i wanted. So i tought: let's make our own paint program. Fldraw was born

Though the program as yet is quite simple, it has a number of advanced features. Unfortunately, they are not visible at first sight. Because of that, people kept asking me why i was re-creating the MS windows paint program. Well, i wasn't. Because of that, the program renamed to AntiPaint. And that's what we're now looking at.

The program as yet is quite stable. Much time was spent testing and torturing the program. But it was developped on a Debian Linux, and a quick copy to Mandrake Linux showed that there are differences between linux headers: It didn't even compile. So that's why the version number is 0.95 : We're not at 1.0 yet, but it looks promising. Bugs will kreep up, but at least, the program is stable enough to work with it. Most of the icons in the program were created with antipaint, so real-life testing was also done

Screenshots

The main window. Fot the sake of demonstration, i have drawn a gradient ellipse. Change it's shape by dragging the 3 control points, or by entering new values. Oh yes, most of the painst can get some parameter from the screen by pressing SHIFT.

An easy to use file open dialog and fimage browser. Anything that's mountable is auto-mounted when you enter a directory. It's also unmounted when you leave that directory. With the right mouse button, you can add speedbuttons to go to directories you use much.

Hate those stupid trivial yes/no question-dialogs, or those I-think-the-user-is-stupid warning boxes? Well, you can shut them down (or is it: up ?). Every question box can be told not to appear again in this session, or not to appear ever again.

Other highlights

The program is user-friendly, but not luser-friendly. I wanted a program that's nice for techies and reasonably advanced users. This means lots of handy features. Also, I wanted a program that was usable and light-weight. Do not expect a luser-friendly paperclip that tries to convince you you're writing a letter. (The day i'll add that one, i'll add a shotgun-likish mouse cursor too. I swear.)
Can work with xpm, bmp,png and jpeg files.
Everything works in true color RGBA. Shades of transparant are colors like any other.
Different pens are availeble. Choose a shape, a size, a pressure and a fallof.
Different paints are availeble. Any tool (pen/line/box/ellipse/fill) can work with a normal color, a gradient, a stipple pattern, a copy from this or another image, or a color conversion.
Great zoom in/out feature: a scrollbar in the status bar. Dragging left or right zooms (continuously) in or out.
For ease of use, as much icons as possible are used. Not that the program is really big. A bit below 400k (when fltk is a shared library).

Needed

This program needs some extra librarys to work, or even to compile. As there is no configure script, you'll just need them installed rightly, or the install will fail. We are talking about are:

libpng
libjpeg.
fltk 1.1 - Most 1.1rcX should work. Let me know if any other version works.

Installation

Well, that's an easy one. For any reasonably recent Linux, you install the libs, untar the downloaded file, and then type make. 2 executables will be created: antipaint and mubrowser. copy them both to /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin or whatever you want. BTW, mubrowser is a mini HTML doc reader. Well, it's actually just an FLTK Help Browser, adapted to read any file. It might be handy to have anyhow.

The future

Well, apart from the end of the world, there are some things the future may hold. For this program, we are talking about:

We can't cut'n paste. We can't render text. We can't handle DPI and such. All of these are needed desperately.
More file formats. BTW, if you know a legal way to handle GIF, you can make me very happy.
The pen / paint dialog needs a redesign. It's ugly as hell.