Ñ Rainbox is a "psychedelic" paint program. It uses palette animation to make your drawings appear as if they're moving.
Ñ To run Rainbox you must have a monitor capable of displaying 256 colors.
Ñ Rainbox is free. Legal stuff below.
Ñ Send bugs, suggestions, and comments to axlrosen@tiac.net.
Ñ Visit the Rainbox Home Page at "http://www.tiac.net/users/axlrosen" for the latest version of Rainbox, and other programs I'm working on.
The program is mostly self-explanatory. Choose a shape from the Shape menu; click and drag it around the screen. Choose a toy from the Toy menu, and click to place it. For lines and spirals, click and drag to indicate the size you want.
The Line and Spiral1 toys use the current settings from the Shape and Effect menus. For example, selecting the star shape and then drawing a Spiral1 will draw a spirally star. The other toys are unaffected by these settings.
Hold down shift to constrain movement to 45í 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.
Choosing a background from the Clear menu will clear your picture. This will erase your picture, but you can get it back if you "undo" it immediately.
You can now save a Rainbox picture as a PICT, so you can open it with other applications. Of course, it won't move if you save it as a PICT, and you can't load PICTs into Rainbox. If you want to be able to see your picture in Rainbox again, be sure to save it normally as well. Note that unlike Rainbox documents, PICTs often look better at a monitor setting of thousands or millions of colors, instead of 256 colors.
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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.
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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.
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As you can probably tell, updates will not arrive very often, but here's what I'd like to add, eventually:
Give icons and text the ability to be transparent and kaleidoscopic.
Add font and style menus, and generally improve text input and drawing.
Add animation speed controls.
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Version 1.2
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Ñ Added "Save As PICT"
Ñ Added "Hide Menu Bar"
Ñ Added 3 new color schemes (Laser, Kozik, and Day-Glo)
Ñ Included Rainbox Fader screensaver, for use with "DarkSide of the Mac" (see "Rainbox Fader Readme" for more info)
Version 1.1
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Ñ Added Undo
Ñ Smarter memory allocation - There's no longer any preset limit to the size of a picture. The size is limited only by Rainbox's available memory.
Ñ Improved redraw accuracy
Ñ Improved two-tone drawing
Ñ Added Delete key support in text drawing
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Rainbox is free but copyright 1993-1996 by Alex Rosen. Don't sell it or include it on any for-profit compilation without my permission. Don't distribute a modified version. Always include this readme file when you distribute it. There is no warranty of any kind for Rainbox, so use it at your own risk; I'm not responsible if anything bad happens when you use it.
