Photoshop Knock-off

[bayowar]

This is the long(ish) backstory, scroll down for visuals.

I was fooling around yesterday with VNC. Connected with my N810
to my Desktop, fired up Photoshop, disabled all the unnecessary
panels & toolbars and just started drawing with pen and brush.

I dare anyone with a PS licence or Gimp to do the same. Even with
the small form factor of the tablet and the dodgy VNC speed it was
suprisingly fun to use. Mypaint later left me feeling unwanted with
it's early stages of hildonisation and the design in general (it's all
about the drawing/toolbars are for suckers). Please don't get me
wrong, I realize that it is a fundamentally different App with a different
goal, but it's the closest to a graphics editor on the tablet, as far
as I know.

Now, I know that no one will ever get a full GIMP or, God help us,
even Photoshop on a tablet in the near future, but I decided to
waste my precious semester break anyway and create a GUI mockup
of what I think would be a good theme for this sort of program.

This is a 3-hour Photoshop mockup with custom icons (and I suck at
those), it is really nothing more than a sketch.

http://aycu01.webshots.com/image/48440/2003400071969742672_rs.jpg
Background is the picture to edit, obviously. Toolbars can be activated
by pressing one of the hardware buttons and disappear by default.

http://aycu11.webshots.com/image/47770/2003452934436872502_rs.jpg
Text tool in use.
Double tap any of the icons, and it'll show you a menu with options.

http://aycu11.webshots.com/image/47770/2003404206100510834_rs.jpg
Tapping the color selectors in the bottom left shows this color
wheel dialog.

http://aycu06.webshots.com/image/49485/2003436287613245314_rs.jpg
Another color dialog, could pull colors from any old color schemes
website, extract and display colors from the current image or show
your preference in colors. Or all of the above.

http://aycu19.webshots.com/image/47938/2003468079278281450_rs.jpg
Shows a smaller image with the pen tool (vector drawing) in action.
Also has labels, for the uninitiated ;)


The UI is designed for stylus use and tries to be unintrusive. I was
a bit inspired by Canola, too. The photos were taken from flickr, the
bird icon from (the wonderful) J3cons.


Is anyone intrigued by the concept and could help out with development?
I know there are apps that one could abuse for this purpose, like
Gimp or Krita, I just don't have the Know-How to pull it off.

[iamthewalrus]

Great concept. It looks very usable. Too bad we're forced to either use Hildon, or go the Canola way and create an application specific gui.

[Jaffa]

Great concept. It looks very usable. Too bad we're forced to either use Hildon, or go the Canola way and create an application specific gui.

*Forced* to use Hildon is a bit strong. I'm still strongly of the opinion it's the best Linux GUI for a mobile interface - it's just a long way short of the ideal mobile UI; whatever that is (not sure it exists TBH).

[BillC]

I would guess you're familiar with the Wacom Cintiq products? These are tools for photographers, designers, etc to draw directly on an LCD using touch sensitive pens? If not, you should look into them if you like working this way. These are tablet PCs so not open source, they're big, bulky, etc. But as hardware gets faster, smaller this may approach Nokia Tablet size.

(FWIW, I've never uses the Cintiqs. I used to be a pro photog and used the Intuos tablets. Once you get used to it I prefered drawing on the desktop and looking at the monitor - that way my hand was never in the way of the picture :-) )

[iamthewalrus]

*Forced* to use Hildon is a bit strong. I'm still strongly of the opinion it's the best Linux GUI for a mobile interface - it's just a long way short of the ideal mobile UI; whatever that is (not sure it exists TBH).

Sorry, I meant to say that the gui ideas here, like the semi transparent buttons/widgets are not possible with Hildon. Or am I mistaken?

[Bundyo]

Great concept... Maybe mtpaint is a good candidate for the task since it is fast and already supports alpha and pressure sensitivity? Gimp and Krita are out of the question - Gimp is too big and Krita is KDE/not mature. Mypaint seemed slow when i last tried it, maybe it is getting better?

Link to mtpaint:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17712

[m_stolle]

Hmm... Gimp used to work fine on My P-II 300MHz with 128MB of RAM... I don't think it's TOO far fetched to have it working on the Nokias.

[Bundyo]

@m_stolle: Which year? Gimp is constantly developed you know. Of course i never tried to compile it for maemo, but i rather think it will not work good.

[bayowar]

Thanks for the interest, everyone. Seems like this isn't too specific
after all ;)


Great concept. It looks very usable. Too bad we're forced to either use Hildon, or go the Canola way and create an application specific gui.

I hadn't thought about Hildon too much. It shouldn't need to run in
windowed mode and the dialogs are largely custom, because of size
and such. I generally dislike custom approaches in linux (and windows)
apps, but in this case I would suggest to go down the same road
as Canola and leave hildon out of the equation.

I would guess you're familiar with the Wacom Cintiq products?
Not with the particular brand, I've heard of and briefly tested a similar
LCD but as I hinted, I'm just doing this as a sideshow. Most of the
time I try to not fail college tests ;)

Great concept... Maybe mtpaint is a good candidate for the task since it is fast and already supports alpha and pressure sensitivity?
Oh boy, I hadn't seen the latest progress of it. Certainly looks much
better than what I have on my tablet now. Thanks for the heads-up,
I'll take it for a spin tonight :)

[unique311]

best, paint app for the tablet would be mypaint.
mtpaint is great, but the source is written in such a way that hildonizing it is a challenge that i failed at many of times.
mypaint might be easier to get hildon.
and it offers a gread deal of brushes...
and pressure sensitivity seems to work.

http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~mrenold/mypaint/
for those who want to compile and take a look at it.

[Bundyo]

@unique311: I didn't mean exactly hildonizing it. Since we are talking about a fullscreen app, SDL can do wonders (if that can be done of course :)

[bayowar]

mypaint might be easier to get hildon.
and it offers a gread deal of brushes...
and pressure sensitivity seems to work.
But that's really all that's to it. The official website calls it a "painting
application". Taking that and transforming it into a graphics editor
with layers, vector & font support and some of the tools you see in
my mockups would require a lot of spare time.

[Jaffa]

Sorry, I meant to say that the gui ideas here, like the semi transparent buttons/widgets are not possible with Hildon. Or am I mistaken?

Gtk+ - underlying Hildon - is perfectly capable of doing semi-transparent buttons/widgets. See, for example, the home applets, status bar area and task navigator in OS2008.

Cheers,

Andrew

[wazd]

It's for 100% unable to do this interface on n810 with appropriate speed. So much alpha blending will eat cpu power like a hippo, as i think. Just try to scroll Canola2 album cover list and you'll see what i'm talking bout. But it's still very pretty looking though =)

[Jaffa]

It's for 100% unable to do this interface on n810 with appropriate speed. So much alpha blending will eat cpu power like a hippo, as i think. Just try to scroll Canola2 album cover list and you'll see what i'm talking bout. But it's still very pretty looking though =)

I dunno; the bit behind the widgets will be relatively static and not high-speed scrolling with little latency and high refresh speed (the requirements of Canola's album cover list). Also, it would almost certainly have to implemented in C, C++ or Vala to get the necessary speed - so wouldn't suffer Canola's problems with running in Python.

OS2008's using alpha-blended semi-transparency out-of-the-box, it'd be nice for more apps to use similar (and the mockup above is really nice).

[Bundyo]

Canola is using Enlightment Edje for drawing and python for control, so that's not related to the GTK widgets in any way :)

[Jaffa]

Good point, brain fart: it is Sunday afternoon after all ;-)

[scumgrief]

I saw a youtube of gimp on a n800, it works fine as far as the paintbrush goes. I think it was vecktor drawing not sure.

Search it and watch yourself :)

[mwiktowy]

I saw a youtube of gimp on a n800, it works fine as far as the paintbrush goes. I think it was vecktor drawing not sure.

Search it and watch yourself :)

There used to be a program called Horizon (that was Gimp-based AFAIK) for the 770. I don't think anyone ported it forward but it was a pretty functional graphical editor with an "infinte" canvas.

Website here:
http://pippin.gimp.org/horizon/

The basic editing tools from that combined with the semi transparent UI mocked up here would be a pretty sweet deal.

[Karel Jansens]

There used to be a program called Horizon (that was Gimp-based AFAIK) for the 770. I don't think anyone ported it forward but it was a pretty functional graphical editor with an "infinte" canvas.

Website here:
http://pippin.gimp.org/horizon/

The basic editing tools from that combined with the semi transparent UI mocked up here would be a pretty sweet deal.

I have Horizon running on my ITOS2007 N800.

Or I should say: I have it installed. The UI is a bit too freaky for me, so I haven't fired it up in some time. I do my drawing in MaemoPad+. It's limited in functionality, but it supports pressure sensitivity very nicely and even does some minor colour-washing (just try a grey-ish colour with a 10-point or above stylus and repeatedly colour over the same area. It's wery cool)

Man, I could kill for a port of ArtRage...

[bayowar]

It's for 100% unable to do this interface on n810 with appropriate speed. So much alpha blending will eat cpu power like a hippo, as i think.
It occured to me, that alpha blending might lower performance.
However, by design the toolbars were meant to be hidden when
you don't use them (toggled by the back button, for example).
One could also switch to non-transparent buttons whenever the
canvas is moved on the screen.

I saw a youtube of gimp on a n800, it works fine as far as the paintbrush goes. I think it was vecktor drawing not sure.
I just watched that. To quote the author:
actually gimp for the N800 not a good idea...

Gimp's problem seems to be, that it is too feature rich and has too
many dependencies .. that wouldn't matter if it were modular enough.
Is there someone here who can judge that? I skipped through the
blog of one of the Gimp developers, he mentioned his interest in
maemo. I might ask him for some advice.

There used to be a program called Horizon (that was Gimp-based AFAIK) for the 770. I don't think anyone ported it forward but it was a pretty functional graphical editor with an "infinte" canvas.
Hard to judge it by the single screenshot ;)
I will try compiling it on os2008, maybe I'll get it to work.

[tabletrat]

I would guess you're familiar with the Wacom Cintiq products? These are tools for photographers, designers, etc to draw directly on an LCD using touch sensitive pens? If not, you should look into them if you like working this way. These are tablet PCs so not open source, they're big, bulky, etc. But as hardware gets faster, smaller this may approach Nokia Tablet size.

Not really. Partly they are not tablet PCS, in fact they are not computers at all, they are combined monitors/graphics tablets, so they are an interface to your mac or PC or whatever, and partly they won't get smaller, as the size is the bonus, that is why the 20" one costs over double what the 15" costs!

[Jaffa]

There used to be a program called Horizon (that was Gimp-based AFAIK) for the 770. I don't think anyone ported it forward but it was a pretty functional graphical editor with an "infinte" canvas.

It was quite cool, but as Karel says - a bit freaky.

It wasn't based on Gimp in any way, AIUI.

[anders_gud]

Horizon for chinook (http://gudmundson.se/anders_gud/index.php?s=file_download&id=7)
Nice app (Reminds me of a strange drawing app on Opie and Zaurus "Petitepeinture" qt-based..) Crashes on exit though.

[wazd]

Well, I've come to some idea. Though actual graphic edit is not serious on the Tablet, but ->Photo<- editing (RAW import, correction, preview) is much more realistic and appreciated. In fact, with USB Host and much space to handle, Tablet can be transformed into great photobank with absolutely no competitors. Just a thought :)

[unique311]

Graphic edit is not serious on the tablet.
for you only I'm assuming?


Well, I've come to some idea. Though actual graphic edit is not serious on the Tablet, but ->Photo<- editing (RAW import, correction, preview) is much more realistic and appreciated. In fact, with USB Host and much space to handle, Tablet can be transformed into great photobank with absolutely no competitors. Just a thought :)

[wizink]

What about a InDesign kind of editing program? That would be very, very neat. Especially with a touchscreen, it would be quite usable, if it could work anyways...

[GeneralAntilles]

Alright, who's going to implement this badass shtick in Clutter? :D

[qole]

Now, I know that no one will ever get a full GIMP or, God help us, even Photoshop on a tablet in the near future...

Well, since Gimp runs OK (http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24272) on the current tablet, I'm willing to bet it will run very nicely on the new device. The question then will be skinning Gimp (via GTK?) to look like the first post...

The Gimp editing a 4 megapixel digital photo:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3058/2932595619_e0dcdcb4dd.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/qole2/2932595619/)