[Etoys] A low floor "Paint" door into eToys

[Jerome Peace]

[Etoys] A low floor "Paint" door into eToys


***
>K. K. Subramaniam subbukk at gmail.com 
>Mon Nov 24 07:10:48 EST 2008 
>
>
>On Saturday 22 Nov 2008 12:48:36 am Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>>   I haven't forgotten your suggestion, but it still doesn't have the
>> thing unfortunately.  But, I can show how you would do.  I made a
>> little Etoys project.  Download this:
>>
>>   http://dev.laptop.org/~yoshiki/etoys/SimplePaint.005.pr
>This is still modal. I found young children (non-English) have trouble
>dealing 
>with such modal painting environments without "training". The paint tools are 
>not child-friendly. The tool cursors has no visual feedback of the picked 
>color. The circle cursor even has its hot spot at 10 O'clock instead of the 
>center. The auto popup color panel is a major irritant. Just move the cursor 
>from the upper part of onion skin towards "clear" or "toss" to see what I 
>mean. Whatever happened to the principle of least astonishment?
>
>Children learn to compensate for these irritants over time but is a modal 
>paint tool really necessary? Many of the paint tool functions can be achieved 
>if we allow children to "embed" or "stamp" by a press-n-hold or lay pen 
>trails using hold-n-drag. A child can spend more time "thinking" than 
>worrying about missteps.
>
>Subbu
***
+1

Squeak instead of having a paint "program", 
 could take a snapshot of any assembled morph.
The snapshot could be shrunk or enlarged
 while maintaining its aspect ratio.

By making a background, embeding some morphs,
 then moving the embedded morphs around
between snapshots you could create a stop action sequence. 
Suitable for putting in a holder. 

The snapshots themselves shrunken or enlarged
 could become part of the next snapshot.
There is a lot of expressive power in this.

Especially when you have MixedCurveMorphs
 (Subbu's daughter's putty) to work with. :)

Something like this exists on 3.9 and 3.10.  
I hooked the snapshot up to the halos via shift-viewer halo button.
My holding object was a thumbnail image morph. 
This could easily be modifed to be a sketch instead. 
(Someone told me that image morphs should be prefered over sketches. 
 I was foolish enough to believe them.)

One of my problems was that there was no easy way to free hand paint. 
 My run at solving that was to extract Takashi's great HDLT-Draw 
 from an experimental tweak image and get it working in 3.9.  
I got it working well enough to prove proof of concept. 

That project is on the shelf right now. 
It uses some Flash drawing objects that were removed from 3.10.

I don't know if there is any other interest in this approach. 
But code is available in 3.9 and 3.10 to play with or adapt for etoys.

Yours in service and curiosity, --Jerome Peace