Pixen is poised to become the reigning champ of OS X pixel editors. It supports layers, tablet pressure, and animation. But Pixen has a bug that interrupts my creative flow — if I tap a palette color using my Wacom tablet, it always highlights the color, but usually fails to apply the color. What the…?!
Fortunately, the developers made the source code available. I had almost zero Cocoa experience before opening the source, yet the code was well-organized, and I was able to fix the bug!
Download Pixen v3.1b with the palette fix.
The issue involved mouse events. If the mouse moved even one pixel between mouseDown and mouseUp, Pixen would attempt to reorder the palette colors, and fail to activate the chosen color. As an input device, the tablet is fairly jittery, so the bug was only visible on the tablet.
Xcode “just works”, as they say. The project compiled without any issues, and used incremental compilation. It was a snap to use the breakpoints. Friggin’ great stuff. The Cocoa UI has a madness that is comparable with Actionscript 3 — you must design bulletproof mouse events, and use keyDown and keyUp mindfully… You know the drill.
I wrote to the development team, and got a nice response thanking me for patching this hole. (I should be thanking them for all their hard work! I’m using Pixen daily.) They alluded that Pixen v4 is in the works… I might get a chance to test and/or help develop it. Sweeeeeeeeeeet.
Nice. Is v3.1b Leopard compatible?
Any word on v4?
mutantvisions: v3.1b works for me under Leopard. I’m in the dark as to v4, sorry…
Cool. Is your palette fix included in the 3.1b version downloadable from the Pixen website?
Pretty sure it’s not integrated into the official release, yet… My fix was kinda hacky!
any current news on pixen v.4?
@harrio: I’ll make a big scene when I hear anything! However, I’m not working it at this time. I only know what’s in the comments on this page: http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2006/06/19/pixen-postmortem/
Pixen do not work at all on Snow Leopard… Please HELP!
@avv3lenato: Ack!!! That sucks. :( I’m busy with other work and may not get a chance to look at it…
Again, I’m not an official Pixen developer, I’m not responsible for anything the dev team does (or doesn’t) do.
SOLUTION!!!
Version 3.1b2 is now compatible with Snow Leopard…
A BIG THX!
DL Link:
http://opensword.org/Unstable/Pixen/Pixen 3.1b2.zip
Woo hooooooo! Thank you sir :D
The last update make Pixen Snow Leopard compatible but remove the ability to move/copy/drag the cel from the upper film strip.
Now it is impossible to do even the simplest operation… as drag a cel back and forward.
I found three more bugs… Just for your information: Hi CPU usage when idle, “Export to image sequence…” not working anymore (ex. BMP export) and “Save as Gif” export only one layer of a layered animation sequence (it’s an old bug; you have to manually merge all layers and then export)
Hope this will help you guys ;-)