27 April 2008

NokoShop Released to public!
The Joy of Motion Based Painting

In answer to your request and impressed with reaction after the yesterdays article, Luis Figueiredo has just released the very first public version of his innovative Motion Based Painting application over at our forum section.

First of all this is not final product and Nokoshop is not an official name, but everyone starting to know it by this name, so author will keep it for now. Just released version of the NokoShop is more like a demo application, a test for a bigger complex development of the completely new S60 photo editing painting concept.

As I said yesterday, current version features just a basic functionality and is more like a game for my 5 years old niece than the real and useful application but from other hand it definitely worth downloading and testing.

Also it is important to say that he is planning not to make a simple toy, but to create a complex and powerful image editor for Symbian phones, with layers support, brush options, filters and effects. He is trying to create the software which can be useful to snap a picture, edit it straight on the phone, and send it, publish it immediately!

Since unfortunately S60 platform lacks the touch screen funtionality at the moment and joypad is tricky to use for painting, he’ll try to implement a virtual cursor pointer that will be controlled both by joypad or accelerometer (which improves pointer movement a lot). Actually he just started to work on his own GUI library, that will feature mentioned virtual cursor and which can be used for upcoming projects.

Actually the main question is h ow much time have you wasted in your life on Microsoft Paint? If you one of those people who love sketching and painting in the digital medium than this little software could be interesting for you but otherwise it is pretty pointless because possibilities of the motion based controlled brush on the QVGA screens are very limited unfortunately.

Of course, the idea itself is great but instead of painting over the crappy QVGA screen I'll rather use the phone's accelerometer to control the brush in the Photoshop, but actually it is already possible by the NiiMe Mouse application?!

From other hand, this cute accelerometer based application could allow S60 phones to tap into an arty space, creative segment that strongly business oriented phones tend to miss.

An image that pops into my head when writing this is the drawing lines or maybe even figures on the huge plasma screen using the N95 and its motion based sensor for controlling the brush. Actually, in my personal opinion there is something very playful about picturing something in 3D motion based technique?!?

Try to imagine using the phone to mix up oil or water-based paints to the right shade and consistency, then slop them around the screen with a huge .. . . . . . .oh I'm just dreaming, will stop here :)