Artpaint
January 29th, 2008So here comes my first review investigating open source applications and their usage for Haiku.
About Artpaint
Artpaint is a graphical paint program. It has drawing tools as well as image manipulation tools. It also supports a range of filters and allows for addons.
History
Artpaint has been around on BeOS for a long time. It started as a shareware program written by Heikki Suhonen. The original website is still online, last modified in 1999. However, Heikki released the latest and currently last version 2.0 in 2003 as public domain with sources. It is now hosted at OSDrawer without anyone contributing currently.
Comparable Programs
Refraction and Pixel are both commercial products available mainly for ZETA. Both are more feature-complete than Artpaint, however, it is unclear whether they will ever be available for Haiku in the future. Wonderbrush is another commercial program that shows a cleaner interface than Artpaint but is more focussed on drawing. BePhotoMagic is an open source graphics program with a similar focus as Artpaint. However, it feels less mature and still needs much more development to become useful.
Code Base
- well structured and commented code
- about 50,000 lines of code in total!
- makefile and BeIDE project are available
- runs in Haiku (see image below) with some glitches though
What to Do Next…
- all graphics and icons desperately need a redesign
- support the new Haiku layout managers for a fully resizeable GUI
- fix the small graphical glitches in some controls
- recheck the addon framework as it seems to have problems on the current Haiku builds
- make the tool windows dockable to the main window, this avoids the current cluttered interface
Problems when scaling the system font on Haiku
Cluttered interface and minor display glitches on Haiku
Conclusion
Artpaint deserves to be continued on Haiku. It is not a substitution for your full-blown Gimp or Photoshop, but it feels fast and lightweight. It is useful for the quick photo editing or drawing job. The above mentioned changes are not too difficult and if you have some moderate experience with the Be API and enough time then just take the jump and get involved…
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