Thursday, 30 June 2016

New Gradient Engine for Omber





Thursday, 2 June 2016

Omber now available for Android

Omber is now available for Android!

From the beginning, I designed Omber for use with touch. That explains its strange looking interface with its large buttons, large shape handles, and strange navigation elements right on the front screen. Unfortunately, once its performance was always a little too slow to use on tablets, so it was never too useful. Omber sometimes chugs a bit even on my desktop machine, let alone an underpowered tablet. It can be used on touch-screen Windows machines but those never really took off.

After I made Omber multithreaded a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that Omber now had reasonable performance on Android tablets. There are still places where it's slow, notably when loading images, but during normal vector drawing, it's fairly responsive. That was great because I already had a touch-interface ready to go. So I've now been tweaking the touch interface to behave even better on tablets, and the result it pretty good now.

Omber is especially good for doing vector work with your fingers. A lot of other tablet vector tools like Adobe Illustrator Draw, seem pretty clumsy if you don't use a stylus. People's fingers are so fat that they keep blocking out the part of the screen that you're working on and it's hard to do precise work. Omber uses slightly different conventions to get around this problem.
  1. Handles are always placed below the thing you are trying to manipulate. That means you can use your finger to drag your handle without having to put your finger on the thing you're trying to modify. This means that you can actually see what you're modifying as your change it. 
  2. Putting your finger on the screen previews the action, lifting your finger performs the action. When you're drawing shapes, you want to position your points precisely, but when you put your finger down, it's hard to know where the point will appear exactly. With a mouse, this isn't a problem because you can see your mouse pointer, but that isn't the case with a finger. In Omber, when you put your finger down on the screen, Omber will show you where the point will appear. That means you can move your finger around to adjust the position of the point to be exactly where you want. The point will only be placed when you find the right spot and lift your finger. 
  3. In art, multi-touch actions can sometimes cause confusion because the programs have a hard time interpreting certain gestures. When you're making art, you want your program to behave consistently. You don't want it to be confused as to whether you're scrolling the screen or dragging an object. In Omber, zooming and scrolling have their own buttons, so there's no issues of you making one gesture and the computer doing the wrong thing.