• Rainbox is a "psychedelic" paint program. It uses palette animation to make your drawings appear as if they're moving.
• To run Rainbox you must have a monitor capable of displaying 256 colors.
• Rainbox is free. Legal stuff below.
• Send bugs, suggestions, and comments to arose@athena.mit.edu.
The program is mostly self-explanatory. Choose a shape; click and drag it around the screen. Choose a toy, and click to place it. For lines and spirals, click and drag to size the toy.
The Line and Spiral1 toys use the current shape and effect. For example,
selecting the star shape and then drawing a Spiral1 will draw a spirally star.
The other toys are unaffected.
Hold down shift to constrain movement to 45° angles. Hold down
command while clicking in the lower right-hand corner to resize the window.
(Clicking without the command key will just draw.)
Hit Command-period at any time to cancel drawing if it's taking too long.
It's best to run Rainbox with no other applications open. First of all, if another program is calculating something, Rainbox's color animation may look slow or jerky. This is true with some programs (e.g. Microsoft Word) even if they're not calculating anything. Also, because redrawing is slow, I have set Rainbox so it does not redraw when it's in the background. So if you switch to another application and then later switch back, Rainbox's display may be messed up. If this happens, choose "Redraw" from the Options menu.
The first 6 shapes (circle through star) are drawn differently from the
rest. This allows them to look good at any size. The others are icons, which will
look blocky at large sizes. Also, currently the icons cannot be transparent, and
are not drawn in mirror image in kaleidoscope mode.
There is a limit to the number of picture objects you can add to each
picture. If you exceed this number, you will be alerted. After that, for every
picture element you add, an element from the beginning will be removed.
Pictures drawn with Splotchy, Swirly, or Wiggly shapes may not redraw correctly in the current version of Rainbox.
If you know how to use ResEdit, you can add icons and color schemes to
Rainbox. Just add a new 'ICON' or 'clut' resource. Please don't distribute a
modified version.
Make it so icons and text can be transparent and kaleidoscopic.
Eliminate the picture object limit by using smarter memory allocation.
Make a screensaver.
Add font and style menus, and generally improve text input and drawing.
Add animation speed controls.
Rainbox is free but copyright 1993 Alex Rosen. Don't sell it or include it on any compilation without my written permission. Don't distribute a modified version. Always include this readme file when you distribute it. Use Rainbox at your own risk; I'm not responsible for anything bad that happens if you use it.
