SketchBlock Pro Installation Video And Icon Editing Demo

This week I was pleased to be able to release the first version of SketchBlock Professional Edition on AmiStore.

I made a video on the installation and theme setup process.


https://youtu.be/BpYtAlTtPSA

I'll be following up with one on a few of the new features.


and here it is:

https://youtu.be/xXoKL1saoN8

@broadblues
A few months ago, I asked you what you can do with Sketchblock.
I read your site and there are some new things in the last version of SB.
But are there functions to manipulate two or more images? Merge them, composite them, use image alpha...
In photogenics, there are tools like smudge and smear. Do they exist in SB?
I saw an interesting video on youtube about photoshop.
In it, the author removed an object like a car from the scene. Could I do this in SB?
Last question, I suppose that a paint tablet (not sure for the name) is not mandatory.

Thanks for reading. I was supposed to ask only one question and there are more!
YesCop

@yescop

The answer to all your questions is simply....

YES




Sketchblock supports layers, compositing of layers with different functions (add / subtrct / multiply / divide/ desaturate et al) There is a smudge and smooth tool. There are selection tools to create masks etc.

Tablet is not compulsory, but it really helps if you have one.

@broadblues

it would be great to have skin for the interface
SketchBlock would look really pro

Thank you for your work

@sinisrus

The interface is themable, you can setup which images are used for which gadgets background textures for windows etc.

Currently two themes are provided the AISSTheme using Mason's AISS image set, and the KSTheme created by Kevin Saunders. I explain how to best set that up in the video.

SketchBlock uses reaction, and a fully skinned reaction GUI is not possible, and TBH would take away from genuine feature development.

@broadblues

Which tablets work with Sketchblock/AmigaOS4?

Do the phrase "If it has USB, it will work!" fit when it comes to tablets?

@Raziel

1. Any tablet that works with AmigaOS 4 works with SketchBlock. It uses the stanard API.

2. UCLogic tablets work with my uclogic usb driver available from os4depot.

http://os4depot.net/index.php?functio ... r/input/uclogictablet.lha

3. Many Wacon tablets work with the wocam driver by Alexandra Balaban

http://os4depot.net/index.php?functio ... ver/input/wacomtablet.lha

The amiga parts of wacom one are based on my UCLogic driver, but include info and elements from the linux wacom prject so it's GPL.

There are list of supported tablets in the readmes of both the above.

Quote:

Not really, the above drivers get a large percentage of the ones available but there are a few other chipsets that would need different drives.

@broadblues
Thanks for your work and your simple and efficiency answer.
I saw your video and i don't understand why you created a screen and palette. In the prefs menu of sb, there isn't an option to choose "open sb on a screen"?
It is the choice of the palette which disturbs me. Does sb not choose the palette by default?

It seems that I choose my gift for christmas...

@broadblues

Thanks

This looks like a great, professional package. Thanks Andy for all your hard work!

I'll check it out this weekend. I'm a terrible artist, but I often do a bit of image manipulation in ArtEffect; it will be great to have modern PPC native software to work with.

Does it use the full amount of memory from the GFX card, as per the updated drivers? Apologies if you answer this in the narration, I'm watching the video at work with the sound off.

@yescop

SketchBlock makes use of the advance screen handling of AmigaOS 4. In the prefs you can specify the name of public screen to open on.  This is SketchBlock by default, but you can open on any screen you like.

The screen I created is themed in exactly the same way as you might theme the workbench, to give a better look with the KSThemes icon set. You don't need to do this if you don't want to. The palette is not used by SketchBlock itself.

@daveyw

Quote:

No it does use much GFX card memory at all actually. The images buffers are held in main memory on the preview goes into the gfx mem.

However it can nake use of ExtendedMemory if you have more than 2Gb of memory installed. On an X1000 with 4Gb you can now get access to that mysterious 500Mb of memory the B says you have but you can never access without crashing (CAVEAT: you need to disable the cfeide.device as of FE Update 1 due to a memeory space clash, will be fixed in afuture IS reveiosn (can't guess when).

Eventually you should be able to access all of het 4Gb (also needs further OS update).

For really big images the option of pageing to disk is available.


Apologies if you answer this in the narration, I'm watching the video at work with the sound off.

Here is the icon editing and feature demo.


https://youtu.be/xXoKL1saoN8

@broadblues
Thanks for the last vieo. I saw some demonstration of what I asked for.
Keep doing tutorials as I love them.

@broadblues

When I try to use the gui.prefs, I get a requestor asking for Programming: .

I think there is an absolute file path in there that it can'd find on my system.

@daveyw

Yep here too (Programing:Projects/SketchBlock/SketchBlock/distribution/Themes/KS/Presets/Bitmaps/)

Just load such file (gui.prefs) on GUI Prefs go to Styles and "fix" path to suit your Sketchblock path. Then use save as and point to sketchblock's gui.prefs file

@daveyw

hmm jabirulo's fix is the correct thing to do to fix the instalation.

I'm not completely sure how to fix the distribution. I could use the SketchPath: assign but that only exists when SketchBlock is running, if you needed to open the screen an some other time, the bitmaps ismages would be unavailabe, so it would revert to default I guess. But you might get a insert SketchPath: requester.

@broadblues

Maybe you have to resort to (yuk ...) making a permanent assign to the SketchBlock installation?

Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

Quote:

Yeah, the dynamic SketchPath: assign was created to avoid the need for permanant assign.

Though you can add it in advance if needed. SketchBlock only adds the assign if itls not present and will only remove it if it added itself, so it could be a solution for those that want the fulle theme.

@broadblues

yeah... just don't do what I've done...
...put the assign in user-startup...
...set GUI preferences to look at Sketchblock:...
...now...

...my machine won't boot.

iPrefs is looking for a volume that doesn't exist yet because Sketchblock: isn't assigned at that point.

So iPrefs hangs on boot, and there's no way to boot into OS4 from there. Even if I click on Assign, Mount, or Cancel, it just dumps to a screen but no Workbench.

...and my emergency disks don't boot either. I suspect that my Workbench partition has a boot priority of 0, so uboot can boot off them, but then they switch to my internal drive as soon as kicklayout loads. (and the os4_bootdevice that Tony recently revealed doesn't work because of the priority).

Sigh.

And hyperion is down so I can't ask for help there.

:(

Tried a bunch of things last night, but only succeeded in making my emergency flash drive unbootable.

Tonight I'll try attaching my internal drive to the 3112 sata, and hopefully boot off CD. But I have a nasty feeling I'll get the saem result: as soon as kicklayout loads

Does anyone know if its possible to boot OS4 without startup-sequence?