The Colors! Java Application/Applet
Colors! is a superb painting
application, developed by Jens Andersson, for the Nintendo DS, the iPhone and iPod Touch. It has inspired many (and
sold a number of DSs apparently). You can see examples of what people have created over
on the public Colors! Gallery.
One of the joys of Colors! is that the brush strokes used to form the image are saved along
with the resulting image. These brush strokes can then be played back showing the
process of forming the image.
This aspect fascinated me as much as, if not more than, the quality of the resulting art work (again see the
Colors! Gallery).
Therefore I decided to create a Java application/applet that can render the .drw files (the
recorded brush strokes) allowing the .drw files to be replayed on the desktop or through a
website. This, running as an applet, is now part of the
Colors! Gallery.
Where to get Colors!
You can download the Nintendo DS version from the Colors! Website
Download the full iPhone version from the App Store.
Download a free lite iPhone version from the App Store.
How to use ColorsDraw
See here.
If you are trying to produce larger images (by increasing the Size scaling factor) you may
have to increase the amount of memory available to the Java runtime environment. You can do
this using the -Xmx option. For example:
java -Xmx256M -jar ColorsDraw_1_2.jar
The bigger the scaling factor the more memory is needed. To generate images with 20.0 times
scaling (10240 by 7680 pixels) I need to give the runtime 2000MiB of memory.
java -Xmx2000M -jar ColorsDraw_1_2.jar
If there is not enough memory for the requested scaling the application will attempt to
reduce the scaling so that it fits within the available memory. This does not always work.
Can I use the applet on my website?
Yes you can and you do not need to ask my permission. It would be nice if you credit me
(Ben Jaques) and/or provide a link to this site but you do not have to.
Releases
- Export drawing sequence as a series of PNG files.
- Able to generate AVI files larger than 2GiB.
- Fix for wrong aspect on some iPhone .drw files.
- Support for .drw files created with an iPhone or iPod Touch.
- Changed scaling limit from 4.0 to 100.0.
- Fixed brush scaling bug - some strokes appeared thinner than expected when
the image is scaled up.
Credits
Many thanks to Jens Andersson for developing of Colors!
Source Code
The application was developed using Netbeans 6.7.
The Java source code is available through SVN. You will require both ColorsDraw and
AviBuilder in order to build the application.
http://masscat.afraid.org/svn/ColorsDraw/
http://masscat.afraid.org/svn/AviBuilder/
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