Pixie for UIQ3 – Concept & design

Well, it’s about another new UIQ3 prgogram… Well, not quite new, I want to rewrite PIXIE for UIQ3, but with a better design.

Since I don’t have too much time for coding, I want to do the design part well. So, let’s take it step by step

Step 1) What will be Pixie?

Pixie will be a pixel-art oriented image editor. Ie. you will be able to create and edit indexed/palettized raster images (mainly PNG format). So it should support at least load/save, zoom, paint tool and palette editing. Optionally it should support copy/paste with different selection shapes, fill/line/circle/ellips tool, palette loading/saving, layers, etc.

Step 2) How would it look like?

Well, I made a quick concept image:

Some explanations:

• Top status bar should remain, it occupies really small place and it’s good if people can see the battery state, can switch tasks easily, etc.
• The bottom softkey bar is also need to access the menu. The “UNDO” function should be at a very easily accessible place
• The application title area is removed, no need for that, occupies too much space
• In the top left is the 1:1 zoom area
• Next to it (to the right) are the customizable controlls: the toolbar, the palette bar and info bar.
• The rest is the X:1 zoom area (with optional grid)

I was thinking that the 1:1 zoom area should be resizable, the right edge should be able to moved left/right, the controll area will be resized as well. So users can choose between more controlls or bigger preview area. Also it should be resized vertically, by turning the infobar off, or increasing the number of lines of the palettebar.

The toolbuttons should be totally customizable: a long press of them would allow the user to change them (ie. to select from the full list, or to select an empty tool). In fact they would be allowed to select one of the tool_commands.

The keys should be remapped as well, to any key any command could be mapped. Commands are tool_commands + some additional command. Ie users could map to any key any tool command or some special commands, like: select next tool, select previous tool, select next color, select previous color. For example if somebody uses most often the pen and pick tool, he sets as his first (maybe only) tools in the toolbar these tools, and assigns the jog up/down to next/previous tool. Thus he can change quikly to pick and pen by the jog dial.

The palette bar should be customized. It doesn’t neccessarily match the image palette. It could be a sub region or a totally random subset. Ie. it can be for example colors “0 to 10”, or “12 to 23”, or colors “1, 34, 2, 5, …”.

One click selects the color, double click changes the color to another one from the palette. Long press changes the color’s RGB components.

Well, that’s if for today, more ideas will follow soon