Between the harry potter book arriving on Saturday (and me spending the next 24 hours reading it); and working on Knit Visualizer 2.0; there hasn’t been much knitting going on around here! Here’s a sneak peek at the toolbar. I’ve changed up the mode icons a bit to match more what they do. I know I said I was done before; but this time I think I am done with this particular bit.

There is also an option to let you choose to paint color (or not) when you’re in PAINT mode (that’s the pencil), and you can easily paint symbol or background color in COLOR mode (the three paintbrushes all in a row). Default is you’ll paint color in PAINT mode unless you change it.

I just today wrote a widget to show you a font and let you pick symbols out of it to create your own stitches. And such is the excitement here in the house of the 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.

I’d like to point you to a totally impartial review of Knit Visualizer up against two other programs that also will let you create charts:

http://www.knittingcurmudgeon.com/2007/01/best-quote-i-heard-all-day-in-order-to.html

To skip to the relevant part:
“Knit Visualiz[er], with the addition of color functionality, is a
professional-grade knitter’s charting program. The high-quality
graphics, the ease of charting and the incredible stitch symbol
palette, along with the parsing, make this my choice.”

Note that color is not available in the current release, but will be available in version 2.0 when it is released.

Knitting? What’s that?

I have had a serious lack of knitting time these days.  One of the main reasons is that I’ve been spending most of my free time on Knit Visualizer 2.0.  Specifically adding color to Knit Visualizer.  (I did also manage to spin 2 yards of yarn today., cook a fabulous prime rib, made-from-scratch dinner rolls, pumpkin pie and a few other dinner items for the holiday)

Here’s a sample of what a color Knit Visualizer chart could look like:

Now this is a silly chart. But it shows you several things. Color borders! (you can have many different color borders in the same chart. not shown here). You can have color on both the foreground (text, aka symbols), and/or the background of cells.  When you generate the Legend, you have options to include Colors into the legend.

When you tell KV that color should be included in the legend (which it is by default), it then thinks that each combintation of symbol + text color + background color are separate symbols.  If you only want to see symbol colors in the legend, it will only find unique instances of symbol + text color.  (So in the above example, the second bobble with the purple background wouldn’t be included).

Why would you want to do this? Imagine if you used the diamond symbol in blue and green. you might want to indicate to your knitters that the blue one is different than the red one.  In theory (and probably reality) all diamonds would be one color in the foreground. If you accidentaly had a blue one, then a look at the legend would immmiately show you something was out of whack.

The legend will ignore background color if you want it to because some people want to stripe the background of every other row a different color. That doesn’t have any meaning in how you knit the stithces, it’s just good for keeping track of where you are (of course everyone should have Highlighter Tape!)

So I’m mostly done with color.  There are some minor things to do, like finish the ability to paint JUST the background color onto the chart (leaving symbol, symbol color, borders and border color all alone).  I’m leaning towards doing symbol color at the same time you paint a symbol. If you wanted to change the color associated with a symbol, you’d basically have to repaint the symbol with the new color chosen.  This strikes me as a sort of pain in the butt; but now that the display and storage of color options is set, I can play around with how the tools behave a little bit easier.

Other stuff: being able to select a color already in use on a border, symbol or background so you can continue using it.  Changing the selection so that you can still see the colors in use, but also tell that you’ve got a selection.   I haven’t even started on the code to define your own symbols (unless you count adding a few menus that don’t do anything), although I’ve worked through a lot of use cases, postulating and bugging my friends  & about how they think it should work.

Some other stuff I’ve added  along the way – all your selections in the preview window are now saved even when you quit Knit Visualizer. If you turn off the Pattern text, it will still be turned off the next time you run Knit Visualizer, until you click the radio button to show it again.

I’ve been in a symbol-adding mode with Knit Visualizer.  First there’s the nupp (an eight laying down), then k7tog (see pattern that uses a k7tog here  – Maple Leaf Socks).  Then I just got goofy adding ‘extra’ symbols for color knitting.  Ya gotta have some choices you know?  Here’s one that should make you happy:

Bonus points* to anyone who actually knits something with this chart :) 

There are now 18 different color symbols; and I think I need to just stop for now.  The Stitch Palette is getting so huge I might need to redesign it! I don’t have time for that I want to add color; and being able to create your own stitches from the symbols included; and a cheese grater, and a kitchen sink!

* Double double bonus points to anyone who can tell me what OS this chart was generated on