CompuServe Messages

Ben, some ideas/bugs re: Imagemaster. -IDEA: Sometimes one has to try several values for a parameter slider before the effect is satisfactory. This usually involves clicking "Replace primary" to see the result, then pressing "u" or clicking "undo" to delete the undesirable result and return to the original. You then have to click your way through a few layers of menus to get back to, say, the Radial Wave panel. How about using the "a" key to bring up the control panel for whatever operation was last selected? This would emulate the well-engrained Deluxe Paint keystroke, and make it much easier to try variations on the same function. Pressing "a" <"again"> would bring up the Radial Wave controls directly. -BUG: if you go back to the "Select rectangle by coordinates" requester, you'll find values slightly different from those you entered the last time. -BUG: when you release the mouse after dragging a control point in the Morph screen, the point end up one pixel northwest of where you released the mouse. -BUG: the line draw routine should work like the one in other paint programs: if I drag out a line 100 pixels to the right and 1 pixel up, DPaint will draw the "break" at the halfway point. This looks natural. Imagemaster, however, waits until the last column before it moves up one pixel, giving the impression of a purely horizontal line… except for that lonely little pixel at the end. This is not what an almost-horizontal line should look like; the breaks should be equally distributed between the endpoints. -IDEA: well, since my mention during Sunday night's CO seemed to come out of the blue, here it is again, as an official suggestion: how about a modifier key (like Shift) to be used when you're painting (after the paint panel has disappeared and you're expected to draw a solid or dotted freehand line); the key would serve as a "pen up/pen down" modifier. This would allow someone to draw several brushstrokes in one shot, without having to endure screen redraws. "You can turn off auto-redraw", you say, and I agree. But even without that annoyance, I still drop out of freehand mode, back into the paint panel, as soon as I release the mouse button. I then have to click on the Paint button in order to get back to my drawing and trace the second brushstroke. Being able to draw several brushstrokes without interruption would be helpful to those who try to treat Imagemaster like a paint program.