I've just submitted my next update of SketchBlock Pro and it is now available to download.



Here is a quick preview of the new features.


Dynamic loading of brush data. The full set of brushes can use up to 100Mb of memory when loaded on startup, so now brushes are loaded on demand. This can be helpful on machines with more limited resources but gives a bit more head room even on more powerful setups. Another option is ofcourse to remove brushes you never use from the brush directory, but this way gives you the brush previews allowing you to choose less often used brushes without restarting the software.

Erase filter. This allows eraseing selected areas of layers to the background colour / transparent. Also aded some standard menu items using this function ie Cut Copy Paste regions.... This required some redesign of the filter system as prevsiously they were applied via a alpha blend but an alpha blend operation can not make an area transparent, the code updates also found an fixed an edge case bug that resulted in invalid floating pont numbers in certain colours.

And the biggy....

Textures. Drawing operations can now be modified by a texture. Any layer can be used as a texture, but a custom list of dedicated texture layers is also maintained at the application level. Some example textures can be loaded via the new textures menu. Currently only the paint tool supports the texture operation, and this can be enabled via two new switches at the bottom of it's settings. In future filters will also support textures. And possibly path filling.

Read more here:

http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/amiga/sketchblock/index.html

The update will be free to existing ownesr of SketchBlock Pro and discounted for owners of SketchBlock Lite (there still a few of you who haven't upgraded it's worth it honest!)