Art Programs

So here I am, with a new computer set up, with great stats, running a flavor of Unix. Naturally, one of the first things I do is grab me one of them high-end new-fangled graphics programs. The kind that has all those cool features that have come out in the uh... tenyearsorsoit'sbeensinceI'vetriedanewartprogram. Ahem. So anyway, there's a lot of cool things this program can do. Layers are the biggie. Layers rule. Then I have all these variations on the old pencil tool, where I can draw my lines with anti-aliasing, and I guess uh... variable thickness and darkness if I have a drawing tablet. Smudging, blurring, sharpening tools... spiffy stuff.

There's a problem though. This is the tool bar in my new program. There's a lot of things missing from it. I realize some of you may have actually been raised on that tool bar, so here's my old art program's tool bar. See that line? And those various shapes under it? Those are my bread and butter. I take the line tool, I click at one point, drag to another, and I have a nice straight line between them. Even anti-aliased if I want. I can just as easily do a rectangle or ellipse with the others. I once made a picture of a herd of sheep stampeding through a bunch of slimes using the ellipse tool exclusively I like it so much. Some of the fancier art programs from the era had tools for variable sided polygons, or curved lines, but my program of choice is slightly newer, and dropped those in favor of saving as any file type, and doing those things that need doing to gifs some times.

This is pretty much my point. Whenever someone adds a spiffy new feature to a graphics program. It seems to come at the expense of a spiffy old feature. Back around the time the mouse was first invented, we had a limited selection of colors. To make up for this, we had a little palette of patterns. In some art programs, this has actually survived to this day... but way back when, we had a lot more of them, and the ability to edit them, using all 16 of the colors we had to chose from. If we still had access to this today, there's some really amazing things you could do with textures.

The best features I've ever seen in an art program however go back even farther than that. To before the invention of the mouse. Yes, I realize how old I must sound being familiar with ANY software that predates the mouse, but there you have it. Anyway, there was this old program back in the day called Logo Writer. This was an art program with a command line interface. I repeat. An art program with a command line interface. You had this little cursor called the turtle, since, well, that's what it had to look like for the facing to be obvious. The main commands used were the hopefully obvious PenUp and PenDown, for all intents and purposes toggling whether the mouse button was clicked, Move X, which advanced the turtle X pixels, and Rotate X, which rotated the turtle X degrees. Then there was also a command to change colors, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

That right there is enough for me to want access to this stuff still. There's some serious precision involved in this sort of setup. It's like drawing with a ruler protractor and compass, without ever having to switch tools. The real selling point of Logo Writer though was the fact that it also incorporated a complete scripting language. If I want to draw a circle of a given size, I'd just write a little command to the program along the lines of
circle x: {for y=0 y=359 y++ (move 1; turn x;}
Tada. New feature added to my program that will draw a circle for me no problem. This is a cool thing to be able to do. This is a very cool thing to be able to do. If I had an art program incorporating every feature ever included in any art program, especially if they were all integrated into a scripting bit like that, I would be in heaven.

So, the question is, why DON'T I have such a program? This stuff doesn't stop being useful people!

Oh, and for those who don't come here often, don't forget that this bit of the site is now updated far far less than this.