PixelEditor (WIP)

[BeyondCloister]

I have just started work on a simple pixel image editor that I intend to include with my forthcoming book. The idea is to also release the editor for free.

Bearing in mind that it is only intended to be a simple editor, what kind of features would you like to see in it?

As usual, all feedback is greatly appreciated.

[FCCovett]

Have you tried using Pixen? It's free.

[NCarter]

Here are a few of my unused ideas... some of them may be a bit ambitious for what you're describing, but I thought I'd mention them anyway:

A palette of recently chosen colours, or maybe a palette of colours which already exist in the sprite.
Alpha channel support, or at least some form of transparency.
Some animation features. At least the ability to step forwards and backwards one frame by pressing a single key (not a menu command-key-chord or a GUI button). A window showing every frame in the animation sequence would be helpful, of course.
The ability to automatically save animations in various useful formats (i.e. not GIF!): uncompressed QuickTime movie, multipage TIFF, or a single image with the animation frames laid out in an array (see my Yoink sprite textures to see what I mean).
Some kind of indication of where the next mark I draw will go. You know how Photoshop shows an outline of the current brush instead of a mouse pointer so that you can see how big a mark you're going to make? Like that, but snapped to pixel coordinates instead of floating around freely.
With regards to that last point, I liked the way Deluxe Paint on the Amiga handled this. Instead of showing an outline of the current brush, it showed the actual brush attached to the mouse point, colour, shape and everything, as if you had already clicked the button. That meant that you could just point (and not click) the mouse at the position you wanted to draw at to see how it looked. It sounds stupid, but when you're doing pixel art, every pixel counts and it's helpful to be able to see where you should put that one extra black pixel on your sprite's face without having to click and undo in several different places.

[BeyondCloister]

Have you tried using Pixen? It's free.

Thanks, but I am wanting to write my own app.

Some may I think I'm mad reinventing the wheel, but I do have my reasons. Having my own app means no rights when including it with my book. Secondly, a graphics editor is a fun way to experiment with various Cocoa stuff.

[Bachus]

There's really only two features that I find truly necessary. 1) An easy to use palette. If I click on a color I want a color picker to come up and any changes I make will change that color in the sprite in real time. 2) Onion skinning for animation. IE, easy to use layer-based animation. Like NCarter said, I want to jump from one frame to the next with the keyboard. Say the arrow keys. No switching and hiding layers in Photoshop. No clicking frames in a window in Image Ready. And I need a command to automatically space the separate images apart in user-definable increments for easy saving for use in a game.

Anything over that is gravy.