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.


Background is the picture to edit, obviously. Toolbars can be activated
by pressing one of the hardware buttons and disappear by default.


Text tool in use.
Double tap any of the icons, and it'll show you a menu with options.


Tapping the color selectors in the bottom left shows this color
wheel dialog.


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.


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.

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).

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 :-) )

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?

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/fo...ad.php?t=17712

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.

@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.

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


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.

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

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

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.