2.1 Main view

A design goal when creating Pixy was to maximize the use of the small screen, hence several parts of the UI (User Interface) is customizable. But first of all let's take a look at the main view:

The biggest area (in the center) is the zoomed in view. You probably will do all the drawing there. You can change the zoom level from 1:1 to 1:32. It has optional pixel grid (ie. a grid with 1 pixel distance) and an alternative (customizable) grid.

In the top-left corner is the preview area, which is fixed to 1:1 zoom ratio. You can draw the image there as well. The preview area might be used by plugins to display other information. For example the tile-tester module will fill the preview image with the selected tile.

In the top right corner are the different bars. The first is the tool bar, which has a series of tool buttons. You can assign any command to any of the buttons. You can change the size of the toolbar area: both the number of rows and the number of tools in a row. Additionally, you have 4 tool sets, from which you can choose. Ie. you can have the first toolset filled with file and misc commands (like new, open, save, save as, exit, etc), the second one with the operations (ie. the drawing utilities), like pen, eraser, rect, oval. The third one can contain the inks. And you can choose which one to see. You can even select a command for one of the tools which switches between the toolsets.

Below the toolbar is the palette bar. It shows one of the 4 palette sets. Palette set means: it's a subset of the palette. Ie. you don't see the full palette with the colors in order, but a subset of it, which you can select yourself. For example if you are drawing a human figure, you can setup your first toolset to contain the skin tones, the second toolset to contain the colors used in clothing and in the third toolset the colors used for the background. Of course you can share colors, ie select a color in more then one toolsets. Also note that the number of rows of the toolbar can be changed.

Below it is the layerbar, which can be turned on or off. From the layer bar you can change the layer, toggle visibility of layers and edit the layer's name.

The leftmost button changes to the layer below, the rightmost changes to the layer above. The eye button toggles the current layer's visibility. The rest of the layerbar shows the current layer's name. You can change it by simply clicking on it:

Below the layerbar is the infobar. It shows various information about the image, or messages from the program. It's customizable also: you can change the format of the messages, you can create even more then one message (like the default one). To switch to the next message, just click on the infobar. For example the first message/info can show the current color, the second one the image, the third one the currently opened file name, the fourth one the memory used by the undo stack, and so on. You can turn the infobar on or off (if you like more drawing space).

On softkey based devices (eg. SonyEricsson M600) the menu is located in the bottom of the screen. You can access the full menu from there. If your device is not a softkey based one (eg. SonyEricsson P990), then on the screen there will be a floating menu controll. You can drag it anywhere on the screen. Clicking on it will pop up the menu.

This document was generated on December, 7 2006 using texi2html 1.76.