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TealPaint 6.62 Review
The ultimate paint and sketch program on Palm OS handhelds. Features
include color and grayscale support, text, magnified draw, 16
drawing tools, 16 patterns, 12 brushes, horizontal and vertical
scrolling, animation, programmable buttons, image compression, grid
snap, image templates, background locking, screen-grab tool, and
more. Also included is a desktop image import, export, and printing
utility.
Drawing Page
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At the bottom of the display are the drawing tools and options. To the far left are two special mode selections: grid snap, which constrains applicable drawing tools to snap their endpoints onto an vertices of an invisible graph paper-like grid, and the background-lock button, which protects the current background so that drawing operations can be erased back to the saved background. Both are described in further detail below.
On the middle left are three selection buttons, all of which show the current item and bring up a popup window of choices when pressed.
The first of these is the tool button, which allows selection of the current drawing tool. These include various line, freeform, and shape tools, along with a text tool, selector tool, magnify tool, and paint can tool.
The second button is the pattern/quick-color selector,
which selects the current pattern or drawing pen (foreground or
background) used by the current tool. On a pre-OS 3.5 Palm, the
foreground pen is always black and the background pen white, while
on a newer Palms, any two colors or gray shades may be used for a
the two pens. Patterns are either all-foreground, all-background,
or a pattern consisting of both foreground and background pens.
Under Palm OS 3.5 or higher, the pattern/color selector also offers a list of color entries used to quickly select a current foreground pen color. Monochrome Palms show a scale of gray colors, while Color Palms show both a list of gray colors and a list of the eight last-used colors.
The last button is the brush selector, which determines the
pen tip shape used by drawing tools which draw lines or dots. This
includes the line, curve, freehand, rectangle, circle, and oval
tools.
Under Palm OS 3.5+, two overlapped squares appear to the right of
the three buttons at the bottom of the screen. This is the
full-color selector. The squares represent your current
foreground and background pen colors. Click on either one to bring
up a color picking palette to change the current drawing
colors or shades of gray.
Two final buttons appear on the drawing screen: Undo and Done. The Undo button reverts the image back to before its last change. Pressing it twice undoes the last Undo, reinstating the image to the way it was before. The Done button saves all changes and returns to the index page.
Special Drawing Tools
Magnifying Glass
The magnifying glass operates in two modes, viewing and editing. The
viewing mode allows you to preview the magnified area in normal size
and drag the around the box defining the magnified area. In edit
mode, the magnified area can be drawn on using the pen tool, but
appears at 4x size. All patterns and brushes operate in magnified
mode too. When the magnifying tool is active, it can be switched
from one mode to the other using the eye button, which
appears in the lower right hand corner of the drawing area. To erase
in magnify mode, simply draw with the white drawing pattern
Polygon/Free Shape Tool
The Polygon/Free Shape Tool (resembling Pac-Man) has two
modes of operation. You can tap points on the screen to define a
straight-edged polygonal region to fill. Each tap creates a new
corner (vertex) for the polygon. The polygon is closed when you tap
once again on the first vertex.
To define a freehand filled shape using the same tool, simply hold down the pen as you draw the outline of the shape to be filled. The shape will fill in when you raise the pen.
Smoothed line (curve) tool
The Smoothed Line Tool (shaped like a sideways 'S') differs
from the pen tool slightly in that it averages your pen movements to
give you a smoother line. This is particularly useful for Palms with
shaky pen digitizer hardware or perhaps shaky operator hands.
Color Picking Tool
Shaped like an eyedropper, the Color-Picking Tool works only
on a device running OS 3.5. It allows you tap on the screen to
change the current foreground color to match the tapped area. On
earlier versions of the OS, grayscale and color are not supported,
so this tool has no effect.
Text Tool
The Text Tool allows entry of text onto an image. To use it,
select the text item ('T') using the popup tool button, click on the
display area at the location to type text, and enter text and
numbers using Graffiti. To change fonts, use the Set Text Font
item from the Options menu. Here you can also select white
text on black instead of the default black on white.
Background Lock
The Background-Lock Selector provides a way to “fix” the current image, protecting it from modification. Subsequent drawing operations are done on top of this protected background. When results from a new drawing operation are erased using the erase tool or Clear Screen menu, the erased region is restored to the locked background image rather than being set to the current background color.
Locking the background is a powerful way to modify an existing image, trying new changes without committing to any changes until you’re ready. Lock the background by tapping on the padlock-shaped button in the toolbar. The current screen contents will be saved off and protected. To commit to changes and unlock the background, simply tap on the button again. If you wish to once again protect the background, you can reselect the button. You will then be given an option to return to continue where you left off, so that the erase tool returns to the image saved when first locked the background, or committing to subsequent changes and locking the image as it currently appears.
Note that a locked background only saves the current screen-sized image, and that scrolling or panning the screen will automatically turn off background-locking mode and free the current locked background. If you manually re-lock the background, it will incorporate the current contents of the screen, including any changes you may have made.
Image templates use the background-lock mechanism automatically. When an image is created from a template, a link in stored pointing back to the original image number in the Templates database. When you open the new image for editing, the template image it was created from is preloaded into the background and locked. Unlike manually-locked backgrounds, the original image is always available, so the locked background stays persistent even if you scroll around the screen.
Grid Snap
The Grid-Snap Selector, present in the lower left corner of
the drawing screen, constrains the tools to starting and ending on
points of an invisible graph paper grid. It allows easy lining-up of
shapes drawn on the drawing surface. It has not effect on freehand,
curve, or fill tools, or when drawing in magnified mode.
To change the coarseness of the grid-snap size,
select the Grid Snap Dist item from the Special menu.
Selector Tool
To use the Selector Tool, shaped like a four-corner target
sight, activate it and drag the pen diagonally across the drawing
surface to highlight a rectangular region. Then, click and drag
within the highlighted region to copy the selected pixels to another
location on the screen. To move the region and delete the area
below, use the Cut menu item after selecting a region
followed by the Paste menu before dragging the selected image
area. You can also use either the Cut or Copy menu
items to copy the selected pixels to the image clipboard, where they
can later be Pasted into another selected region.
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