.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Paint the way with TealPaint
.AUTHOR David Silver
.SUMMARY When handheld computers came into being, a new medium for digital art presented itself. The choices range from simple applications made to write freehand notes, such as the Notepad program included in many newer devices, to feature-packed programs nearly rivaling many desktop ones. One of the leaders in the later category is TealPoint’s TealPaint for the Palm OS. How does it stack up? To find the answer, read this review by David Silver.
.OTHER
People like to draw. Some might use a pencil and the margins of their math textbook, while others prefer the feel of a paintbrush and easel. In modern times, computers have become another alternative, using programs such as Adobe Photoshop (at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html).
When handheld computers came into being, another medium presented itself. The choices range from simple applications made to write freehand notes, such as the Notepad program included in many newer devices, to feature-packed programs nearly rivaling many desktop ones. One of the leaders in the later category is TealPoint’s TealPaint for the Palm OS (at http://www.tealpoint.com/softpnt.htm). How does it stack up? To find the answer, keep reading.
.H1 Painting
TealPaint is, feature-wise, pretty much a handheld version of Adobe Photoshop. It supports layers, a wide variety of brushes, and over 16 million colors (don’t let the name fool you; it offers more then just teal). The "canvas" view is shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A All painting is done from the canvas view.
.BREAK_EMAIL You can do a lot with this handheld painting program. Tap here to learn more.
Starting from the left, the first button is used to select the paint tool. You can choose from all the standard goodies: pencil, fill bucket, lines, rectangles, text, circles, and more. The next button sets the width of the tool selected. The third one is for color selection. You can select both a foreground and background color, either from 16 preset ones or by using a slider to set the amount of red, green, and blue used, as shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B The RGB sliders allow you to create more then 16 million colors.
In addition to colors, you can select a variety of patterns, like bricks, dots and waves. Next along the panel is the layer selection button. You can create different layers for different parts of the drawing, and then combine them to view a single, unified piece of art. This way, you can erase, alter or fill a part of the drawing without any risk to the rest of it. Anyone who has ever used Photoshop or a similar program will know how invaluable layers are. The final three buttons are for zooming, undo and close, respectively.
The menus hold further options, allowing you to flip, nudge and rotate the drawing, in addition to converting it to and from bitmap format.
Overall, the drawing screen works wonderfully. It manages to fit all the features the average user would need while remaining simple and easy to use. While it gets cumbersome when dealing with larger pictures, that is more the fault of the size of the small screen itself.
.H1 Other features
In addition to creating and editing pictures, TealPaint has a few other fun tricks to fill your time, one of which is the Grab Screen feature. To use Grab Screen, you select a time in seconds, and then launch whatever application you want. A few seconds later, a screenshot will be grabbed. This process is shown in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C TealPaint’s Grab Screen feature allows you to take screenshots.
After the time passes, TealPaint will automatically take a screenshot of whatever you’re looking at. When you return to the program, you are asked to name and categorize the screen. The screenshot is now identical to every other drawing, so you can edit it as you please. Interestingly enough, TealPaint’s Grab Screen does not allow you to take screenshots of TealPaint itself. If you’re writing a review of the program, this can get annoying (yep, it did, too!), but the majority of users won’t be bothered by it.
In addition to Grab Screen and the basics (beam, delete, etc.), TealPaint offers animate and slideshow features. When your drawing is animated, it will rotate through its layers at an adjustable rate (changed in the preferences). Slideshow flips through every image in a given database, similar to the slideshow feature in many desktop image programs. Both of these features work quite well and allow for cartooning and presentations.
To round off its feature set, TealPaint has a template feature. To make a template, create a database called, surprisingly, "Templates" and add pictures like normal. In the future when you go to create a new picture, hit the "New from template" button and select a template. The template will be imported into the drawing, and you can edit it at will. This works well, and makes it easy to make similar drawings multiple times.
.H1 Desktop integration
Being able to draw is fine, but the real test of usefulness is what you can do with the drawing when you’re finished. You can send, beam or even print your drawings using TealPoint’s TealPrint program, but eventually you’re going to want the thing on your desktop.
Fortunately, TealPaint makes this easy. When you HotSync, each database is backed up and stored as a .pdb file in your backup folder, just like any other file. The "PaintMgr" desktop application included with the program allows you to open those databases on the PC. From there, it’s easy to save some or all of the pictures to your computer or add additional ones to the database. The PaintMgr application is shown in Figure D.
.FIGPAIR D Use the PaintMgr application to move pictures to and from your desktop.
The manual import/export used by the application is effective, but can be time consuming if you move pictures back and forth with any regularity. The lack of an automatic file mover is a downside, but not an overly large one.
If moving files back and forth using your backup folders isn’t your thing, you can also save your drawings as bitmaps and move them to your PC with an expansion card and vice-versa.
.BEGIN_KEEP
.H1 Conclusion
TealPaint is a phenomenal program. It feature an extensive feature set, more than the majority of users will need, and has near-perfect stability. No matter what capability you’re looking for, from drawing a quick sketch to creating the next Mona Lisa, TealPaint will have it. If it doesn’t, you’ll be hard-pressed to find another Palm OS drawing program that does.
.RATING 5
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Photoshop, visit http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html.
For more information on TealPaint, visit http://www.tealpoint.com/softpnt.htm.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.END_KEEP
