[IAEP] Coloring books on the XO?

[Albert Cahalan]

C. Scott Ananian writes:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Samuel Klein <sj at laptop.org> wrote:

>> Coloring something certainly helps remember it.  And changing the
>> colors of shapes/objects in a drawing or scene or skin is one of
>> the simple pleasures in life.  A simple implementation of coloring
>> would let you pick the colors of your own sugar skin and icon.
>>
>> I dreamed the other day about those pattern-coloring books that introduce
>> you to unusual but beautiful tilings; when I was a kid we used to make
>> copies of them or trace them on onionskin and color separately, later
>> comparing the results for elegant patterns.
>
> Colors! might be a nice base for this activity.
>
> In general, we should think hard about how to best distribute 'example
> content', which you can open and remix on your XO.  From a UI
> perspective, I've suggested previously that these be presented as
> 'friends' in the UI, who have files you can share.  The Red Cross
> might be a friend who has some coloring books available you can open
> in Colors! (or your choice of Paint programs).

Tux Paint has this functionality. I was thinking of ripping it out
to save a bit of space. I guess it's more valuable than I thought?

Press the button the create a new image. You'll see a set of images
to start with. The ones at the top are solid color, but scroll down
and you'll find the starter images.

Starter images have both foreground and background. The foreground
is always shown on top, and thus obviously needs an alpha channel.
For a traditional coloring book page, the foreground is all black
and has line art in the alpha channel. The background would be all
white in that case. Full color is possible. You could have a forest,
with some of the trees in the foreground. Erasing restores background.
Starter image properties survive save/quit/restart/load.

The full set of tools is available, including stuff like flipping
and mirroring the image. The stamp and flood-fill tools are most
useful, though cheating I suppose. (BTW, flood-fill is fast)

We have:

jigsaw puzzles
grids
chess board
chicken
airplane
ocean reef
rocket
shipwreck
diploma-style frame
skyline
farmer
maps (US, Japan, each continent, world, canada)
castle
nagasaki