Cool Mac Gear

There are not a whole lot of image editing applications available for OS X. There is of course Photoshop and its lighter featured stablemate, Photoshop Elements; the freeware (but humongous) GIMP, the venerable but very popular shareware
GraphicConverter, and a few others like the amazingly polished freeware ToyViewer. However, there's plenty of room for more entries in this category.

Teal is a little OS X painting application released last week as a preview. The developer expalins that: "following the demise of PhotoNick, there is a need for a free entry level image retouching package for Mac OS X."

The current roadmap for Teal is to make a program with a feature set roughly analogous to Paint Shop Pro 4. Once this has been reached, further features will be added on a priority basis (eg, layers, etc.) "Teal won't be DPaint, and will most likely never be Photoshop. Most importantly, Teal is not intended as a replacement for GraphicConverter. It is my intention that Teal complement rather than compete with GraphicConverter, and, beyond the basic essential features, priority will be given to features currently missing from GraphicConverter over features that it already implements well."

New ion this version:
Colour grabber
Convolution matrix effects
Effect Brush
Threshold added to fill
Magic selection
Realtime visual feedback added for selection brushes
JPEG options dialogue

Brush tools in Teal include:

Point Brush
A single pixel wide brush that draws a continuous line between mouse samples.

Circle Brush
Draws an optionally feathered circle of the selected radius at mouse sample points.

Fill
A flood fill that is stopped by pixels of a different colour to the colour of the pixel first clicked on. The tolerance can be adjusted using the threshold slider.

Clone Brush
Reads a circular area located at an offset from mouse sample points, and prints it at the mouse sample points. The source is set by the first click, then the offset is determined by the second click. Cloning begins immediately on the second click. The source and offset can be cleared by pressing the reset button.

Smudge Brush
Records a circular area around the first mouse down, then prints this record at subsequent mouse sample points until the mouse button is released. Produces an effect like smearing wet paint with your finger.

Effect Brush
Applies an effect to a feathered circular area at sample points. The effect is cumulative between brush strokes.

Undo Brush
Undoes the last action that modified the image. Circular areas of the image before the last action are revealed at mouse sample points.

Paste Brush
Used when pasting an image from the pasteboard. When pasting, this brush will be selected automatically. Click to begin pasting. A translucent image of the pasted picture will indicate where the pasting will occur. Release the mouse button when you are satisfied with the location.

Rectangular Selection
Adds a rectangle to, or subtracts from the currently selected area. When an area is selected, brushes that modify the image will only be of effect within the selected area. In the absence of a selection, copying will copy the whole image to the pasteboard. When an area is selected, only that area will be copied.

Selection brushes can be switched from additive to subtractive mode by pressing the selection button, and the selection can be reset to none by pressing the reset button, choosing Selection -> Reset from the menu, or pressing Shift-Cmd-R.

Circular Selection
As with before, except with a circular area. The centre is defined by where the mouse button is depressed, then the radius is defined by where it is released.

Lasso Selection
As with before, except with an arbitrary closed area. The area is defined by drawing it in a single mouse stroke. When the mouse is released, the area is closed, and added to or subtracted from the current selection.

Magic Selection
Selects the area adjacent to the selected point where the colour of that area differs from the colour of the selected point by less than the specified threshold.

Colour Grabber
Sets the current colour to the colour of the pixel at the mouse sample.

Effects:

Emboss
Produces a textured effect dependant on the image intensity using a convolution matrix.

Gaussian Blur
A 9 x 9 Gaussian blur (looks prettier than median) implemented using a convolution matrix. Blur size will be variable, pending the addition of effect options dialogues.

Median
A 3 x 3 median (average) implemented using a convolution matrix. This effect was implemented primarily to test convolution. Median size will be variable, pending the addition of effect options dialogues.

Pixelate
Gives the effect of viewing the image on a low resolution display. Pixel size will be variable, pending the addition of effect options dialogues.

Scan Lines
Gives the effect of viewing the image on a television, by alternatively darkening and lightening scan lines. This effect was implemented primarily for testing purposes. Options are planned, though not presently implemented.

File Formats supported:
• Currently, only 24-bit RGB PNG and JPEG files are supported.

Future Plans

It is hoped that eventually, a plug-in API will be available so people can write their own Teal plug-ins.

Other features planned for future versions:
Enlarge canvas
Flip and mirror
Rotate
Resample
New image from pasteboard
Rectangular and circular shape brushes.
Alpha channel support
Feathered selection
Mask effects (shadow, glow, etc)
Averaging colour dropper
Options dialogues for effects
More image wide effects (suggestions welcome)

One that I would suggest is that the "Cut" command in the File menu be activated, especially pertaining to selected portions of an image. When you paint and draw as badly as I do, this is very important. ;-)

In general, Teal is a cool little program that has lots of potential.

System requirements:
Mac OS X version 10.2

Teal will continue to be freeware, and most likely open source.

For more information, visit:
http://www.unspacy.demon.co.uk/software/

Color It! For OS X Now In Beta Testing

And speaking of OS X image editing applications, MicroFrontier has announced that:

"We are in the beta testing process for a 'Carbonized' version of Color It! to run native under Mac OS X, an enormous effort that has taken over a year. At this time, a date has not been set as to when the OS X version will be available."

In the meantime, all MicroFrontier products work in Mac OS X (including 10.2.8), although they run in the Classic mode.

Color It! 4.1 is my favorite Mac image editor by a wide margin, and it's the one I use 95% of the time. It's lightining fast in Classic Mode (as you might expect for an application that supports Macs as old as the 68020 machines of the early '90s), supports Photoshop plugins, and offers virtually all of Photoshop's functionality *that I would ever use* without Photoshop and Photoshop Elements' bulk and ponderous slowness.

News that the long-awaited OS X port of Color It! is exciting, at least to me.

To receive an e-mail notification when the OS X version of Color It! will be available, send an e-mail message to x@microfrontier.com

For more information about Color It!, visit:
http://www.microfrontier.com/products/index.html

Panther Quick Takes

From David Chilstrom

I've been happily running Panther since its release without incident. Here are a few off the cuff observations, particularly relative to speed.

On a 600 Mhz Non-Quartz Extreme iBook, everything is noticeably faster. Specific things like starting Help; System Preferences, Preview and doing quick searches in the Finder are much faster. One of my particular peeves in Jaguar (besides the glacial performance of Help) was the turgid response of popup menus from folders or drives placed in the Dock. This feature was barely usable for me in Jaguar. It's quite adequate in Panther, easily on par with OS 9's Apple menu and navigating hierarchical directories there. Also, the 5 levels deep limitation that existed in the old Apple menu and in Jaguar is gone. You can now go as deep as you want.

Further on speed, is the utility of fast user switching (even without the cool rotating cube effect.) I was just running Adobe GoLive in my "Web Geek" account and I noticed from the one I'm in now, "Surfer Dude" that GoLive had run amok and was gobbling up memory like there's no tomorrow. I was able to logout that account while remaining undisturbed in finishing this e-mail in this account.

There's a definite value in being able to isolate problem applications like GoLive as well as having a customized workspace for a particular task, like web editing. Another benefit is that your primary account doesn't get trashed with the detritus that inevitably builds up over time. For instance, I've set up a purgatory account for putting any software under review through its trials before purchasing and installing in my applications folder. And I have a "Fort Knox" account with FileVault enabled for those few items on my Mac that I'd rather have under lock and key. Fast user switching makes utilizing multiple accounts for a single user a workable proposition. A facility for managing multiple workspaces (each with its own Desktop, Dock and running applications) within a single user account would probably be more efficient, but there is something about working in a hermetically sealed space that is comforting. If I trash my "Xperimental" account by doing something stupid, I can be fairly certain that accounts I need for real work have been unharmed.

File dialogs are well served by the immediacy of the places sidebar and it's really great to have list view as an option there. The sidebar has replaced Jaguar's favorites, but one feature missing is a way to add items to the sidebar while in a file dialog. In Jag there is an "Add to Favorites" button available when in a file dialog.

I read Chris Long's bad experience with Font Book. I installed 1500 fonts with it the other night without incident, but I did that from a non-admin account. Andras Puiz gives a scathing but fair review of Font Book on AppleLust. I agree with Andras that Font Book is not a triumph of great user interface design, but I think it's salvageable once Apple gets enough feedback on how horrid 1.0 is.

Font Book is clearly unrefined, but once you accept its quirks and annoyances (like wholly unnecessary dialogs reminding you for the umpteenth time that disabling a font collection will disable all the fonts therein) it does seem to work OK. I may change my mind after more experience with it, but for now its adequate for the modest font management demands I presently have. Other improvements in type handling in Panther are very impressive, overshadowing the clunkiness of Font Book.

The good thing about Font Book is that professional font utility vendors have nothing to worry about. The bad thing is that Font Book's simple approach to font management could be less obtuse and do a better job of protecting the user without driving him crazy with stupid nagging dialog boxes. I look forward to Font Book 2.0.

I mentioned Help before as being faster. It's not instantaneous, but it is much improved in performance over Jaguar. One great improvement is that doing a search in a particular application's Help doesn't return results for other applications as well. Perhaps somebody at Apple thought that was a cool feature, returning all instances of a query in the help files of all applications, but nine times out of ten it just slowed down the search and aggravated the user by giving a long list of useless hits.

Regards,
David Chilstrom

Thanks for the interesting report, David. I'm looking forward to that Panther speed boost.

Charles

Re: OS X: Too fuzzy for me

From Jonathan Tyzack

Hi Charles,

Assuming Chris Ellens is running 10.2.x or later, there are two things that can be done to try and improve the apparent fuzziness of text:

1) under the "General" system preferences, try altering the Font smoothing style - note that logging out and back in is required to see the effect of the change. I assume that Chris would prefer the "Strong" setting.

2) More importantly - be sure that the monitor has been calibrated correctly. If the calibration settings are off, it can have quite a large impact on the appearance of the screen (System Preferences>Displays>Colour>Calibrate). There is also a shareware app called SuperCal that gives you more control over your calibration than Apple's built-in tools. It is available from here:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8142

Obviously, the second item above can apply to whatever version of OS X you are running.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Thanks, Jonathan.

Charles

GlobalFax software (OS X Odyssey 434)

From Andrew Main

Charles,

You wrote "I've been booting back into OS 9 to use the wonderful old GlobalFax software that supports the modems in my PowerBooks but not the software modem in the iBook, alas."

GlobalFax seems to work fine in a 500MHz iBook, but when I tried to install it in a 700MHz model I couldn't get it to work. The Compatibility Checker said it would work, and it installed all right, but when I restarted the startup process took an unusually long time, then the GlobalFax Toolbox was corrupted. Tried it a half-dozen times, always same result. Tried reinstalling the System (9.2.2) a couple of times, still couldn't get GlobalFax to work. I thought it was something wrong with the computer, which also showed some weird behavior, intermittent crashes, buzzing noise near the modem, etc.

Did you try the GlobalFax Compatibility Checker? What was your experience?

Andrew Main

Hi Andrew.

Compatibility Checker? I wasn't aware of that feature. However, I have tried multi-times to install GlobalFax on the iBook with no success.

The explanation is probably that the 500 MHz iBook shipped with a hardware modem, while the later iBooks have software modems that GF won't support. I have no documented confirmation of this from Apple, but it is a deductive surmise.

GlobalFax works famously well on my WallStreet and Pismo PowerBooks.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear