CanvasPaint 1.1

Author: Dan Vanderkam Price: <free> Download: cafe.realbasic.com (Hotline), Dan's site

  CanvasPaint is an easy-to-use canvas subclass for RB2. At first glance, CanvasPaint is a fairly powerful way to use painting controls within REALbasic projects. It features a selection tool; a pencil; line, oval, and rectangle tools; as well as an eraser, eyedropper, and spray can. It supports zooming, scrolling, and changing bit depths and the pen width and height.

  However, a person’s first glance is about as long as this powerful image of CanvasPaint holds true. Like any other RB class, CanvasPaint has its share of bugs, oddities, and inconsistencies.

  First, the selection tool does not work as it should. If you make a selection starting at the bottom-right corner and draw up and to the left, when you make another selection, it will draw the selected picture into the wrong place. Clearing the selection also clears the region under the selection, which should not happen. Select All tends to draw the selection into the wrong region of the screen if a selection is already made.

  Other features, such as zooming and setting the bit depth are also inconsistent. The user can draw in as many colors as he or she likes no matter what the set bit depth is, and CanvasPaint will not limit drawings to the selected color range until the canvas is refreshed. Zooming out to anything less than 100% produces some very strange results. Scrolling in CanvasPaint when zoomed to anything that is not an even hundred percent (150%, for example) makes the picture twitch somewhat.

  This is not to say that CanvasPaint is a bad product, because it is not. It has various drawing tools available, although I would like to see polygon and round-rectangle tools in the future. The spray can especially has plenty of nice options (the fire in the above picture was made with it).

  CanvasPaint 1.1 is an extremely promising start to a fairly solid canvas subclass, and it is powerful enough for the average user. For someone who wants more powerful painting power, with polygons, built-in selection flipping and scaling and the like, I would suggest waiting for an upcoming version. With a few more tools and perhaps a handful of effects, CanvasPaint could be a great way to incorporate bitmap graphic editing into a REALbasic project.