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• Netscape 6 PR3 Browser • Rainbow Painter 1.9.3 Image Editing Program • Pepper 3.5 Text Editor
Rainbow Painter 1.9.3 Norbyte's Rainbow Painter 1.9.3 is a quirky little Mac-only program for painting and photo retouching that features layers, masks, more than 60 effects and tools. Rainbow Painter not really like anything else I know of on the Mac platform. In fact, I will state up front that I don't feel especially well qualified to properly evaluate it.  Graphics are not my specialty, and my experience with graphics programs is not extensive. I developed some proficiency with one-bit line art using the paint tools in HyperCard way back when, but in recent years my actual working with graphics has been pretty much limited to touching up downloaded GIFs and JPEGs or screenshots for column illustrations, and fooling around a bit with digitalized copies of snapshots I take with my film camera. For these chores, my tool of choice is Micro Frontier's Color It! 4.1, which works a lot like PhotoShop, but at a fraction of the Adobe behemoth's size and price, as well as being faster. Color It! Is of course a lot less powerful than PhotoShop, and is overdue for an upgrade, but it suits my tastes and needs in graphics editing well. Anyway, the foregoing will give you an idea of where I'm coming from in my comments about Rainbow Painter. The first thing you notice about Rainbow Painter, and indeed its overall most distinctive characteristic, is its radically nonstandard interface. There is no Mac OS menu bar, and File, Edit, navigation etc., functions are all implemented differently than one is accustomed to in programs like PhotoShop and Color It! There are no standard Open and Save dialogues, and to import a file (JPEGs, PICTs, and several other formats are supported) you must quit the program and manually copy the file or files you wish to open into the program's import folder. This seems to be a gratuitously clumsy way of doing things, but at least the program starts up and quits with satisfying speed.  The Rainbow Painter user interface certainly lives up to the program's name. It is a color extravaganza. Whether one likes this or not will be a matter of taste. I personally prefer standard Mac windows, but I suppose I would get used to Rainbow Painter's motif. I was not favorably impressed by the small, and not especially attractive fonts this program uses for buttons and dialogs. Indeed, the whole user interface is busy and peppered with a bewildering assortment of different and non-Mac-like buttons. The desktop you see when you start the program is called a Studio. You can travel between three different studios by clicking on the numbers 1-3 in the Quick Menu (or by pressing F5-F7 on the keyboard). You may rearrange the studios to meet specific needs. For example: You can have one studio designed for editing tall images, one studio optimized for painting and one studio for layer editing. Any changes you do to the studios (i.e. if you close a window) will be saved when you quit the program, which is done by clicking on the Q button in the Quick Menu (or by pressing Command-q on your keyboard).  Every window in Rainbow Painter has three different window contents. You can think of it as three different windows on top of each other, where you click on a button to alternate among them. The number (1-3) underneath that button displays the number of the current window content. You can blow the window up to full screen mode with a click. Rainbow Painter Features:
Frankly, I did not get very far with editing images in Rainbow Painter, but I did enough to establish that this program has a wide assortment of editing and pixel manipulation features, filters, layers, and who knows what? -- which is my point. This program fairly screams for a manual -- a nice print one would be ideal, but I would settle for even some good on-line help. The on-line help files included are sketchy and minimalist, and I found them -- as someone who is not all that familiar with graphics programs, especially unorthodox ones -- to be not a whole lot of help. I recommend checking out the bare bones tutorial on the Rainbow Painter website:
To be fair, I think that someone who already knew their way around graphics programs -- Fractal Design's Painter in particular -- would be able to make Rainbow Painter do some interesting stuff, but the thing is that at its very modest shareware price of $20, Rainbow Painter is targeted more at beginners or people with only casual graphics needs. The program also seemed quite stable and non-buggy the in my limited experimentation with it. It is a bit of a memory hog, with a minimum memory partition requirement of 8192 k, and a preferred size of 22528 k. Of course, the cool thing about shareware, is that you can check it out with no up-front cash commitment, and being as Rainbow Painter is a very small download at 341 kB (it expands to 1.7 Kb, plus picture archives), you can give it a test drive without much time commitment either. If your interested in graphics programs, it's worth downloading this one just to experience the psychedelic interface. It is an interesting little application. System Requirements:
Rainbow Painter is $20 shareware. The unregistered version lets you try all features, with the exception of some effects and the export function. Any pictures you produce in the unregistered version are saved internally, and can be exported when you have registered. For more information or to download, visit:
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Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
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