By David Silver
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.
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.
FIGURE A
All painting is done from the canvas view. (click for larger image)
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.
FIGURE B
The RGB sliders allow you to create more then 16 million colors. (click for larger image)
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.
