The Palette Manager

The Palette Manager, shown here, appears in the lower-left corner of the monitor when in design mode.  It allows you access to other palettes and dialogs, which you may or may not need.  Rather than cluttering the screen with palettes and options, four features are packed neatly away on this palette, and you may access them at any time (as long as you're in design mode).

The color palette is a palette to choose foreground/background fill colors and foreground/background line colors.  The palette, if selected, will open at the center of the screen.  (It is, of course, movable.)  It contains the current clut, which is the system clut.  (A clut is a color look-up table, sometimes referred to as a color map.  It contains 256 colors, which you may use.)  Although a future version of Media Player may allow the changing of cluts to pre-defined or user-defined cluts, Media Player 2.0 does not support this feature.  So, you're stuck with the 256 system colors for now.

The pattern palette, which appears at the bottom of The Animator, allows you to pick a pattern.  When used with the color palette, you can achive some very interesting blends of color.  Choosing the “grayish” pattern from the pattern palette, a yellow as a foreground color, and a green as a background color, you get a mixture of yellow and green-colored pixels.

The line dialog appears in the center of the screen, and is a small, skinny dialog box that allows you to pick a line width.  Click on a width, and the dialog box will close.

The brush shape dialog allows you to select a brush shape from forty different ones.  This is very similar to the MacPaint brush shape dialog box, in that you click a brush size, and the dialog box gets out of your way.  This dialog box is located at the center of the monitor as well.