PolarPaint Small

PolarPaint v1.0 (r55) by Anbjørn Myren (anbjorn.myren()gmail.com)

This is an experimental Paint program made with Hollywood.

Requirements:
A fast computer with RTG, minimum 1440x900x16 (Program window is 1400x820)
Minimum 40MB of free ram, 64MB or more recommended
More memory or disk space might be desirable (read below for memory notes)
codesets.library 6.22+ and reqtools.library v39+

Versions for Amiga 68k Amiga PPC (WarpOS), AmigaOS4, MorphOS and AROS x86
available

Changes v1.0
r55:
Transparent mix now can set transparency for both workspaces seperately
r54:
Fix: Drawing Rectangles, Ellipses and Lines when foreground and background color
is the same was not working.
Fix: Removed duplicate undos'
White CLS, If pen is White, then change pen to Black.
Drawing coordinates adjusted (near edges)
Deselect active brush capture when click to the left of the drawing area
r53:
Dedicated settings icons removed, now use RMB to enter settings.
Tool icons with settings are marked '!'
Gradient fill available for Rectangles and Ellipses, and also an option to 
draw filled shapes.
ReplaceColor - Replaces all instances of the selected color 
Text tool, with various options and effects
Minor adjustment to transparency settings
RMB can now draw with transparency 
Multi Pen, draw with 2 or 4 pens to create syncronized pattern 
Black CLS, If pen is Black, then change pen to White.
Changed how the FloodFill with threshold is processed. If threshold is set
below 30 it will process the whole image while updating it. If threshold is
30 or higher, a user selectable max area will be processed for each operation
This due to speed and memory concerns.
-Probably other minor changes I forgot.

Functions in brief
The painting area is 1280x720. Up to 8 Workspaces can be used for separate
drawings.
There is an Undo/Redo funtion. By default this is set to maximum 10 levels, but
can be set as high as 100. Each Workspace have its own Undo buffer, in theory
there might up to 800 undo's.
At program start Workplace 1 will be active. Click on one of the numbered 
Workspace Tab's to use another workspace.

Memory notes
Each brush initiated will take about 4MB of memory. Opening a new workspace
consumes 4 MB per Workspace (unless diskbuffer is used).
The Undo / Redo system will also require memory since each Undo is a full brush
stored in memory. 
If you set the Undo buffer to max (100) and use all 8 Workspaces you will in
theory have 800 undo operations available. Needless to say this will require
massive amounts of RAM available.

Diskbuffering
As a workaround for the memory issues mentioned above I made an optional setting
that allows you to enable DiskBuffering. This means that all Undo buffering goes
to your hardrive instead of using RAM. Also when opening a new workspace the
previous workspace is saved to disk and freed from memory.
By default these files are stored as PNG images which means they only take a
fraction of the space compared to the memory they would need.
The downside is that the undo/redo will be slower, because it needs to load the
files from disk and convert the png files into brush data.
If you suspect you might get short on memory, run the program first time and
press the Quit button, at the requester select to Enable DiskBuffer before
quitting. Next time you launch the program diskbuffer will be enabled.
When DiskBuffer is active you will be asked on Exit if you want to keep the
buffer files. If you do so, they will be loaded automatically on next start and
you can keep on working where you left off.

Help
There is an Information icon that will display some basic information about
the program, and while the icon is highlighted (info mode) the user can click
any icon to get some pop-up information about each button. 
Click the info icon again to exit information mode.

Flood Fill
Regular floodfill is an in-built Hollywood command that works well in most
cases. But if you want to floodfill an area that has gradients of colors you
might experience that not all areas are filled as expected. An image saved with
JPEG compression will most likely have this issue. 
To overcome this there is a custom fill command that uses a threshold setting
to determine how colors are filled. By default threshold is set to 0 and then
the in-built fill command us used. Setting threshold above 0 will make use of
the custom fill operation. The setting is quite sensitive so depending on your
image there could be a huge difference between 0 and 1. 
You can use decimal values, eg. 0.01 or 0.5 so just try until satisfied.
The custom fill operation is much slower than the regular fill, specially on low
end computers. The way it works it will read the color form pixel by pixel and
create a table of pixels to fill.
For lower Threshold values it will process up to 1% of the image area before
filling, then process the next bacth until done. 
For Threshold values 30% and higher the processing is much slower, so it will
then process only a user selectable area size all in one go. 
Processing with high threshold will also consume memory. 
As a general rule you need a system with 64MB RAM to process sizes up to 5%,
128MB up to 50% and so on.
Use ESC to interrupt an ongoing floodfill operation.

Transparency
There are two modes for transparency available. Default and Instant. The default
mode with process your whole line before applying transparency, making it more
smooth. The line will appear solid while the mouse is pressed. 
The Instant mode will apply transparence as you draw, but will leave "dots"
along the line. This is because you really is drawing many short connecting
lines and the "dots" appear where these lines overlap.
For Lines, Boxes and Circles transparency is only available in Default mode. 

Notes:
The icon is from the aminet archive pix/gicon/glowcollection.lha