Windows CE Graphics Packages

Gadgeteer Hands On Review by Julie

April 10, 2000

Are you a Picasso or a Van Gogh wannabe? Or maybe you're into drawing cartoons like the late great Charles Shultz. If you enjoy doodling, drawing or image editing and you also have a WindowsCE device, then you have to check out the following graphics packages. This is a 5 part review with new package reviews being added often.

Pocket Artist v1.14
One Cat Doodler v3.0
Microsoft Pocket Paint
nsCanvas
nsPencil
Image Expert CE

 

Pocket Artist

Supports:
Palm-size PCs, Handheld PCs, and Handheld PC Professionals running CE 2.11 or higher
SH3 version is ~500K executable size
MIPS version is ~650K executable size
Memory used is the executable size + 600K for a Palm-size PC, and ~3MB for a HPC Pro.

Pocket Artist by Conduits Technologies Inc. is a 24 bit graphics editor / drawing application that is very full featured. It reminds me more of a desktop PC program like Adobe Photoshop than a typical WindowsCE application.

With Pocket Artist, you can open existing images in BMP, GIF, JPEG, and 2BP formats. Work can then be saved in BMP or JPEG formats. You also have the ability to adjust the JPEG quality which makes the saved files smaller or larger depending on the setting. New images can be created of any size that you wish. There are also preset image sizes that you can choose from such as 240 x 320, 480 x 240, 640 x 240, 640 x 480, and 800 x 600. I did find that if you try to create a huge image like 10,000 x 10,000 it will pretty much crash the program. So don't do that. :-) This software has so many features/tools that going into detail about each of them would make for a huge review. So, I'm going to try to go over the features that I think are the most important or unique. For a detailed explanation of every feature, be sure and check out the great online documentation at the Conduits site.

There are quite a few different brush sizes and styles available. These brushes are used when drawing with the pencil tool or paintbrush tool. The difference between the pencil and the paintbrush tools are that the pencil draws with sharp distinct edges where the paintbrush draws with a softer edge.

Drawing with the stylus on the screen is easy. All of the brush styles work well except the very large ones. When you try to draw with the largest sizes, there's a noticeable lag from the time you tap on the screen, draw a line and see the line that you just drew. The other brush styles allow you to see what you are drawing as you are drawing it. If you want to paint/draw with other brush styles you can make your own from .bmp 48x48 pixel images and save them to the \Brushes directory under the Pocket Artist installation. You can also simulate sketching on paper with a pencil by checking the sketch box. When you do this, each subsequent stroke gets darker as a pencil does. Another way that you can draw is with a texture brush. There are 8 different textures that you can use such as brick, canvas, and marble. Very cool effects can be achieved using textures. For example if you check the sketch box, it looks like you are drawing on rough paper or canvas. If you want to paint with other textures you can make your own textures from .jpg images and save them to the \Textures directory under the Pocket Artist installation.

Pocket Artist has the normal drawing tools such as filled and unfilled rectangles, ellipses, polygons and lines. But those tools are just a few of what is available to you. Check out the menu images below...

Other features not shown above include color blending, a screen capture tool, a feature that lets you take what is on the screen and make it your desktop background (tiled or untiled), image resizer, and an image cropping tool. There are also different filters that you can apply to the image such as blur, emboss, sharpen and more.

My exciting work of art!

Drawing on a small screen like the Casio E-100 using Pocket Artist is surprisingly easy and comfortable. If you need to work on an image that is larger that the display, you can easily resize the canvas size. You can even anchor your work and grow the screen in one of 8 directions. This is a really  nice feature.

I also really like the image resizer in this program. It gives better results than the one I'm using on my desktop PC! The resize tool gives you three choices for the resizing algorithm. You can use Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear interpolation or Bicubic. The first one is the fastest and as a result does give you some jaggy lines with the finished image. I use the bicubic option and although it takes a few seconds more, it does a great job. Check out the images below.

The big picture on the left is the original. The next one is resized using Nearest Neighbor. The next uses Bilinear Interpolation and the last one uses Bicubic. You can see some jaggies on the first resized pic.

Although Pocket Artist has tons of features, there are a few that I would love to see added. Multiple undo, rotate by a user defined degree, a sizable selection tool that has handles so that you can enlarge the currently selected area, grid display and snap to grid. I've confirmed that some (if not all of these) features will be included in upcoming versions.

This software is fun and pretty easy to use. There are a few features that require some explanation which you can find thru the detailed online documentation. This is a must for people that want an extremely portable image editor and full featured drawing package. At $50, it is expensive, but it really is worth it. There is also a 30 day demo so that you can try it before you buy. Buyers of  version 1.1 will get free 1.X upgrades.

Conduits will also be releasing a Pocket Artist Lite which will be stripped in features a bit, but will allow for casual doodling / digicam stuff, and will be $19.95.

Price: $49.95

Pros:
It's like Photoshop for your Palm!
Features galore.

Cons:
Price.

 

One Cat Doodler

Supports:
Palm-size PCs, Handheld PCs, and Handheld PC Professionals running CE 2.0 or higher
~350K - 500K executable size (depending on processor)
Memory used is executable size + ~400K - 550K when running.

One Cat Doodler from One Man And A Cat Software (love that name!) is a drawing and slideshow package that is suited more for a person that wants to make complex illustrations instead of edit images. The program is a vector based drawing program which allows you to individually select and modify every "object" in your drawing. One Cat Doodler can load and save .BMP images as well as its own proprietary format.

This program has the standard drawing toolset such as line, rectangle, circle and polygon. A small floating toolbox on the screen can be expanded and collapsed as well as deactivated.

You draw with a pencil tool. There are 6 different line thicknesses that you can use from a dotted line to a thick bar. You can choose the line color and fill color for any object that you create.  An object is at least two points on the screen. If you tap on the screen and drag your stylus a few pixels and then let up, that's an object. Or, if you tap and draw a freehand circle and end up at the first point and then raise your stylus, that whole circle will be an object.

This is the most powerful feature of One Cat Doodler. You can do all types of things to the objects that you draw. You can rotate them, stretch, shrink, change color, line thickness etc. If you draw objects on top of each other, you can also pop those objects to the top or bottom of the stack. Objects can also be grouped, ungrouped and aligned. Getting used to working with objects takes awhile, but once you do it is hard to go back to a regular paint program. You know how hard it is to erase a portion of a drawing in typical paint programs? Well there isn't an eraser in this program at all. That's because you can just click on the object that you want to get rid of and delete it. It's quick and easy.

The only thing that took awhile to get used to with this program was the lack of a FILL tool. I'm used to doodling around and then selecting a color for a fill. With this program, you select the color first and draw the object. When you are finished drawing the closed in object, it will automatically fill with the color you chose.

One Cat Doodler will also smooth your drawings to help get rid of the jaggies when you draw freehand. You have the ability to set how much smoothing that you want the program to do.  You can also enter a rotation degree which is great.

Another thing you can do is put a grid on the screen which is very helpful when trying to draw things like maps and floor plans.  You can set the grid so that your objects will snap to it if you wish. Speaking of maps and floor plans, I see One Cat Doodler as a good choice for people that need to draw line type drawings like that. Using another great feature of this program, you can create libraries of frequently used objects. For example, you could create a library of furniture and use this program to draw house layouts.

This program will also allow you to create slide shows of your images. You can arrange the images in an order you prefer and then let the program display these images one after the other. This feature makes this program good for doing small presentations. Sort of like a baby PowerPoint type application. You can also add bulleted text to the images easily.

There are a few features that I wish this program had that it doesn't. I'd like to see a multiple UNDO, fill patterns instead of just fill colors and save to .jpg format.

I wish that there was a program that included the powerful object features of this program and the image editing / painting features of Pocket Artist. If you need to create complex drawings and don't need to edit digital images, then One Cat Doodler might be the program for you. There is a trial version available, so check it out.

Price: $34.95

Pros:
Library Parts.
Object oriented.
Slideshow features.

Cons:
Can't load or save as JPEG.
Small learning curve.

 

Microsoft Pocket Paint

Supports:
Palm-size PCs
~110K

Pocket Paint is a free paint program from Microsoft that is contained in their PowerToys for the P/PC. This is a free download that contains other useful utilities for your Palm-size PC.

Pocket Paint is a simple to use paint program that saves and loads pictures in .BMP format. With this program you get the usual set of basic drawing tools such as a magnifying glass, eye dropper, fill bucket, eraser, pencil, line, rectangle, and circle. You also can add text with 4 size choices (no font choice though). One tool that I noticed was missing was a polygon drawing tool. You draw with the pencil tool and have access to only 4 brush sizes. There is also only one brush style which is square shaped. Drawing is pretty responsive even when using the largest brush size. But, when you do draw with the largest brush size, the lines you draw are not smooth but are broken edges (see face picture below). Rectangle and circle shapes can be drawn in 4 styles: dotted outline, solid online, filled and filled with outline. Lines can be drawn in 4 thicknesses.

If you draw a closed shape, you can easily fill it with the color of your choice using the fill bucket. It would have been better if it included a few fill patterns as well. Pocket Paint only gives you a 16 color palette to choose from. The program would be much nicer if they would update it to allow for use of a device's entire color palette. I think one of the best features of Pocket Paint is the Select feature. You get the typical tap and drag rubber band Select tool, but once an area is selected, you can move it, stretch it, or shrink it. Pocket Paint is a small and easy to use little paint program. It doesn't contain any fancy features but if all you need is a quick way to doodle a simple drawing, this package might be for you. If you want to edit images, look at one of the other high end programs. Since Pocket Paint is a free download so you don't have anything to lose by trying it though.

 

Price: FREE

Pros:
Free.
Select grow and shrink feature.

Cons:
Can't load or save as JPEG or .GIF.
No polygon drawing tool.
Limited to 16 color palette.