Handpainter Pro

Posted on August 17, 2007 in Palm and Software. - Comments [1]

Pixelling take a lot of time and sometimes finding the opportunity to sit down and start painting can be difficult. Recently I came across Handpainter Pro by Soft Away who I must say have one of the worst websites that I’ve seen for some time.

My first impression of Handpainter was good and it looked as if it might be just the job for the odd spot of covert pixelling.

Strengths

Handpainter supports hi-resolution displays with a full palette of 256 colours. To get round the lack of a left and right mouse button often used in pixelling to select the foreground and background colours, Handpainter has an on-screen palette of 16 colours that can be customised as you work. Each of these colours can be chosen from the full 256 colour palette which is also directly accessible from a button on the lower tool-bar.

All the tools that you’d normally be looking for are there. It’s nice to have a spline tool in addition to the normal pen and line tools. There are the usual, fill, select area, text, spay-can and colour picker. There’s also an undo, but this is limited to just one undo level.

There’s a couple of unusual tools that aren’t normally found in light-weight editors such as the blur and sharpen tools. Sometimes it’s hard to see how you’d use tools like this, but it’s nice to have options.

It’s a relief to see a good zoom option that provides 2x, 4x, 6x and 10x zoom.

Weaknesses

It’s a shame that the paper space is limited to 320 × 256. It would be nice to be able to pan around a large workspace or even better if it supported the larger displays but it doesn’t. On the TX I can’t hide the graffiti area or put the screen into landscape. I somehow feel cheated when applications don’t let me do this!

I would also like to see a grid when in zoom mode, but this maybe more of a personal preference than anything. Due to the nature of my pixelling, I’m normally trying to work out the limitations of the Commodore 64’s display where it’s important to know which pixels make up each 8×8 pixel “character”.

There appears to be a couple of bugs, at least on my Palm TX. Some how the pop-up palette toolbar managed to copy itself onto my image which while not only destroying the image, caused some confusion when I found I couldn’t select any buttons.

Despite what it says in the documentation, the Zoom mode does not make use of the 5-way navigation button on the Palm TX. While this can be used to scroll up and down, scrolling left and right has to be achieved by resorting to using the Calendar and Contacts buttons. You can also drag the screen around using a the stylus so all is not lost.

Summary

Handpainter is the best graphics tool I’ve found so far, but it’s not perfect. At $14.95 I’m not sure I’ll be registering it yet, but it shows a lot of promise and I’ll be giving it a good go during the evaluation period.

Of course, if anyone can recommend anything better then I’d really like to know.

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