So I was working on some pixel art a while back, and ended up getting pretty frustrated with the palette. From this frustration, a weekend's worth of coding, and a zealous desire to get something done for once, came a handy little applet to help me choose better colours.

I named it Pal.

Give Pal a curve through an HSV colour cylinder, and it gives you a nice smooth palette from that curve. Plain and simple. Export it as a bitmap in one of several sizes and start pixeling, or save the curve for later tweaking.

The palette is more of a guideline than a finished product, but it's a very good start, and, I think, a good teaching tool. It's not perfect, but, then again, no software ever is. Consider this more a request for comments, critique, and suggestions than an actual release.

You can visit the home page for more information on what it is and how to use it, or go for the gusto and just download version 1.0 for Windows.

Happy pixeling, and a belated happy new year!

Thanks! Starting things can be easy, but getting them done sure can be hard.

As for the source code, just look at the home page:

"Best of all, Pal is free as in freedom and free as in beer: you can use the program and the palettes it generates for whatever purposes you like, and once I get around to cleaning up the source code a little, those interested will be able to download it and abuse it to their hearts' content."

So what did you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Would you recommend it to others? Should I bother continuing to develop it?

I'm trying to drum up some hype here. Tell your friends, enemies, neighbours, and random people on the street! :D

Anyway, when it comes to porting, there's only one non-cross-platform thing in there: the calls to the system load and save dialogs. Everything else is done with SDL, which works on just about everything these days. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an easy way to port to the Mac, because of how picky Apple is about their toolkits. Ugh. If anybody has any pointers on that issue, I'd be glad to hear them.

Hah, no problem. I look forward to hearing your thoughts later on.

WxWidgets could be a good idea. I haven't used it, being more of a GTK+ user. I hear SDL and GTK+ play well together, so I can use the GTK+ dialogs.

I can't believe I didn't think to support palette files! I know Photoshop's ACT and Microsoft's PAL, and as far as I know these are both pretty common. I intend to support other image formats (esp. PNG and GIF) and allow a curve to be computed from a source image.

Thanks for the tips. Peculiar, though, since I often use the GIMP on OSX, and I don't think I've ever had to launch the X11 server separately. I'll look into Wx, anyway.

What do you mean by "splines"? You were a bit vague on that point. Pal does use Bezier splines. You might be thinking of Catmull-Rom splines, a special case of cubic Hermite splines, which have the friendly property that they pass through all of their control points.

I stand by my decision to use Bezier splines, anyway, because most digital artists have at least a passing familiarity with them, from working with vector illustration software such as Inkscape. That's not to say that I won't include other interpolation types in the future. All bets are on at this point.

And I know I was a bad little programmer and didn't follow conventional UI design practices when it came to the buttons. Text for me means translations, translations mean text rendering, and I was quite simply too lazy to link with SDL_ttf in addition to plain old SDL. Long story short, that one was gonna get fixed anyway.

Also, your suggestion of a collapsible panel for help has given me some deliciously evil ideas for a slick modular interface. Trying not to get ahead of myself on that one. The trouble is that I know how to pull it off in GTK+, but with your recommendation against it...you see my point.

You've been so helpful! Now if only there were like four or five more of you.