Persistent Knitter

I am still working on Knit Visualizer 2.0. I’m making sure the color stuff is really solid, and that it’s easy to pick and use colors in your chart. I’ve been messing around with how the toolbar is arranged. I never did like it; but had learned to live with the way I set it up at first. Well, I added in a color picker - so that you can use an eyedropper tool to select either the symbol color or the background color of any cell on the chart; and it just got all stupid looking. I believe I’ve got a good much better solution now. Behold, the before & after shots.

In the before, the tools are shown in this order:

• Select (highlighted)
• Paint symbol tool
• Change Symbol Color (currently black)
• Paint Background
• Change Background Color (purple)
• Eyedropper tool
• Paint Selection With Background tool

And the after:

Tools shown in this order now:

• Select tool (highlighted)
• Paint Symbol tool
• Paint Background tool
• Eyedropper tool
• Change Background Color (purple)
• Change Foreground Color (blue)
• Paint Selection with Background tool

I think the 2nd screenshot works much better. All of the four tools are mutually exclusive, meaning you can only have one active at a time so it makes sense to group them. The way the foreground/background color swatches are drawn now mimics what most people are using to seeing in popular paint programs.

There’s some hot keys you can use to switch between the Modes - (S to flip between select and paint symbol; B to flip between Select and Paint background color). Also, the eyedropper tool will let you select the foreground color (click on chart, foreground color is changed to the cell you were over, or Right click and it’ll suck up the background color), then it automatically flips back to the “Select” mode. I can’t decide if I like this or not. I suppose you might want to select both the foreground AND the background color before proceeding. I’m also going to add a hotkey of “c” to switch to the eyedropper. When you’re in the chart you can just hit “c” and it’ll flip to eyedropper mode and voila - pick a color.

You’ll also notice the border color swatch over there on the right of each toolbar. This is the color to be used when painting borders. I just realized I didn’t give you a way to ’suck’ the border color off the chart… I’m already using Click, Right Click for foreground and background respectively. I suppose I can add in Control-Click to suck the border color. Does that seem too onerous?

You can also click on the color swatch to change the color and pick any color of the rainbow using this window:

It’s a very mac-like color chooser, but really one I had to design from scratch because the damn color choosers available out of the box all sucked big you-know-whats. You can click anywhere in the color wheel (the large swatch across the top changes to show the color you’re going to pick if you click “OK”), you can move the slider up and down to change the bright/darkness of the color. It’ll remember the last 10 colors you picked using this method so you can easily select them again. The top two boxes on the right will always be white and black, allowing you to easily switch back to the defaults.