Notes and tips

Repeating patterns

Using the repeat section function in the edit menu is a powerful tool to get background textures. repeating an area as small as a square of 4 pixels can create a very interesting background.

Drawing shapes

To draw irregular shapes such as a question mark, one of the best techniques is to use the polygon option in the toolbar. Each point in the polygon is indicated by a mouse click and there is no limit on the number or points in the polygon. If the polygon is outlined only, then the polygon will not be closed by IconPainter. Something like a question-mark could perhaps best be drawn by making the line thickness 2 or 3 pixels and outlining the shape with mouse clicks (a double click to finish).

Rotation and antialiasing

When something is drawn with antialiasing, rotation through less than 90 degrees can mean the antialiasing doesn't seem to work anymore. There's not a lot that can be done about that except not to antialias. Similarly antialiasing in IconPainter at the moment works by assuming the object drawn is drawn over the background color when infact it may be drawn over some other object. A solution to this is to change the background color to reflect the color of the object over which you are actually drawing.

JIT compiling on slower computers

On a older, slower computer (eg. P166 or less) with limited resources using Just-In-Time Java compiling can actually slow IconPainter down because of all the extra IO so it may be better to switch it off. On faster computers this problem doesn't exist.