Software
Ahead of the Windows 8 release, Ratio Interactive, a design agency in Seattle, WA launched a design contest for Windows 8 apps. It gave me the perfect excuse to begin exploring the design possibilities of the new operating system. For my entry, I chose to design an app for Digital Art Academy.
While looking for a replacement for Adobe AIR, Directory was one of my first experiments with AppJS, one of the first available platforms merging Webkit and Node.js into an app development platform.
AppJS is still available for download, but it is no longer maintained. If starting your own project, try Electron or NW.js instead.
The app was meant to be a simple contacts widget, replacing PDF contact lists. The views were modeled after a mobile contacts application with two main views for everyday use — a scrolling list of contacts and a contact detail view. Thanks to AngularJS, the contact list could be filtered live by any of the contact’s properties.
The icons used in this project are Entypo by Daniel Bruce — CC BY-SA 4.0.
Painter has a few ways of creating color palettes from images whether it be through color sets, the Match Color command or the stylistic coloring achieved through automatic processes such as in the Underpainting panel. Now, add one more: the Mixer panel. With MXSMaker, it is very easy to convert any JPG, PNG or GIF file, with transparency preserved, into a Mixer Pad file that can be loaded directly into the Mixer panel of Painter 8.1 through Painter 12.
