Well, what we really did was design Color MacCheese so that a manual wouldn’t be necessary. If you’ve painted with MacPaint, Hypercard, or something similar, you’ll be able to pick up on how to use Color MacCheese very easily.
The first part of this manual is an introduction to our philosophy, and basic propaganda. It is extremely irrelevant but interesting and memorable. Skip it for starters. Read it later.
The part you want to read first is called “Using Color MacCheese.” It gives a very basic explanation of most of the tools and features, and should get you well on your way to being a master of the application. A guru, if you will.
After that comes in-depth explanations of everything, like how to customize the tools, save your preferences, and lots of little tips and tricks that we’ve invented.
Foreword
Color MacCheese is the essential color paint application for Macintosh. We at Delta Tao (pronounced DELTA DOW) are filling a growing need for powerful, affordable, and fun tools for everyone.
From the beginning, we loved the Mac. Neutered though it may have been in comparison to today’s machines, the 128K Mac was wonderful. MacWrite and MacPaint were the most amazing programs we had seen. Even with their glaring problems, they were years ahead of anything on the IBM PC.
We who owned Macs could not only brag to our blue blooded buddies about how much better our toys were, we could also point out how cost effective they were. Word processors on the IBM were hundreds of dollars. MacWrite was free. Graphics on the IBM was almost nonexistent. MacPaint was free. Even good commercial applications for the Mac rarely cost more than fifty dollars, while inferior IBM programs cost hundreds.
Since that time, the Macintosh has evolved from the elegant toy for the rest of us into a full fledged solution for businesses of all shapes and sizes. This means a wide and powerful array of applications and accessories now exist. This is good. Unfortunately, a lot of these new, powerful programs are aimed at corporations, with big software budgets, and priced beyond the reach of “the rest of us.”
One place where this has been most noticeable is in the color paint arena. The Mac II line is full of wonderful machines capable of astounding color graphics. We who own one are proud to have one of the most powerful graphics computers in existence. We like to point out to our friends how great our computer is. Gorgeous, easy color pictures are always an impressive show of force to true-blue comrades.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to justify paying hundreds of dollars for a quality paint application. Heck, the cheapest color paint application we could round up was something like $395. We couldn’t justify paying that much. On the other hand, we couldn’t bear to not be able to show off our color computer to its fullest. Color MacCheese to the rescue.
We said, “Shoot, we can make something with all the functionality necessary to allow people to draw great color pictures. And, if we work at it, we can sell it for a very reasonable price.” So we did.
Does that mean PixelPaint Professional is overpriced? Not necessarily. It’s a large, complex program with incredible power. I think it probably gives professional graphic artists great tools to make their jobs a lot easier. (I couldn’t say for sure; I could never figure out what most of the features really were.) Furthermore, it has a well designed user interface which allows most anyone who can use MacPaint to puzzle their way to a nice color picture. Its main problem is that it has more features than we really need to just whip out a pretty picture. And, of course, its price.
Is Color MacCheese better than PixelPaint? Probably. Of course, we have to say that. Still, in order to charge so much less than they do, we did have to cut a few corners. We did our very best to cut the right corners, and we believe we did a darn good job.
We refused to cut any corners in the human interface. Poorly planned user interfaces really bug us. We use Color MacCheese ourselves, so we made it the right way. Everything is intuitive, so even complex tasks become simple.
We give full functionality. Anything you can do in your black and white paint applications, you can do with Color MacCheese in color. In fact, Color MacCheese is a pretty good black and white application. Not really any better than anybody else, but as good as most. Since we use Color Quickdraw we’re compatible with most everything that has Color Quickdraw, including the SE/030, Mac IIfx, and future machines.
One of the corners we did cut was the big fancy manual. All of the paint programs have huge manuals carefully explaining all of their complex and obscure features. We don’t have any complex and obscure features, so they’re easy to explain. We did our darnedest to not need a manual at all. With luck, you should be able to just play with Color MacCheese and discover all of the features by yourself. A manual should be fun and quick, not a cumbersome reference guide.
Our packaging may be a little underdone. Do you know how much a good full color box for software costs? Enough to make it one of the corners we cut. We figure everybody just throws that part away anyway.
Look at our menus. Not too hard, there are only five, counting the Apple menu. And they’re all short. And simple. If you’re looking for an obscure special effect, like wrapping a picture around the outside of a cone, you’re out of luck. We recommend you purchase Electronic Arts’ Studio 8 if you have a strong urge to do this, or Adobe Photoshop if you’re working with 32-Bit color. For us it was a corner.
Want to save your file in a wide variety of formats? Sorry. We just use the Apple standard PICT files. Everybody can read and write them, so they were enough for us. Anything else ended up being a corner.
Want to see big, fancy advertising campaigns reassuring you that you were right in buying Color MacCheese? Tough. That is our biggest corner. We are going to do our very best to avoid advertising. Against everyone’s recommendation. Urgent recommendation. Why? Ads cost big bucks. That means big expenses, and pretty soon we would have to pass those expenses on to our users. This is against our whole philosophy. We really want to provide great products (like Color MacCheese) at as low a price as we can.
Naturally, we want to have an effect on the industry, too. We want to start a trend toward small, efficient, inexpensive applications. To do that, we’ll have to get the idea out to a lot of people. To do that, we’ll have to sell a lot of copies of Color MacCheese. Marketing people tell us it’s impossible. “To sell big, you’ve got to advertise big.” We don’t buy it.
Of course, to prove them wrong, we’ll need publicity. Since we’re justifiably too cheap to pay for it, we’ll need free publicity. That means word of mouth. Recommendations at user groups. Great reviews. We hope to get all of these things, because we’ve got a great product, at the most reasonable price we’ve seen in a long time.
If Color MacCheese is a hit, we plan to release a line of inexpensive products with the same philosophy, like Edit MacCheap and Answer MacSheen; fun and useful utilities, like Polly MacBeep; and maybe a couple of games, like Network MacTag and Poker MacDitch. If we lose our booties, we’ll quietly apologize to everyone who told us we were doomed, crawl away, and go back to our real jobs. Humbly.
We’d rather not do that. We’d rather become an influence in the software industry whose voice resonates with authority. We’d rather single handedly put Microsoft and IBM out of business. We’d rather live in a world without war and famine, where the space program got as big a budget as it needed.
This may seem like a lot, but you’ve got to start somewhere. We’re going to start with Color MacCheese.
About Delta Tao
Delta Tao is dedicated to developing amazingly great software for the Macintosh. We believe that the Mac is the greatest thing since the telephone, and we are out to prove it.
Many people ask us why we chose the name “Delta Tao.” (For that matter, people ask us why we choose every name.) I’ll now set the record straight. “Delta” is the symbol used by engineers around the world to signify change. One would refer to “Delta V” to mean “change in velocity.” I admit, this is engineerspeak, but forgive me for a minute. We’re mostly engineers (if bit nerds pass for engineers), so this made sense.
“Tao” means “the Path,” or “the Way.” It is the big concept behind Taoism. We’re mostly Taoists around here, so this made sense too.
Now, when you put these together, “Delta Tao” means “The Changing Path,” or “The Change in the Path.” We thought that this was almost a profound statement of direction, so we adopted it as a name. Okay?
I want to stifle all rumors right now that this name may have evolved in any way from the name of our college fraternity, Delta Tau Sigma (at Caltech, if you must know). All such statements are completely unfounded, and any similarity in the names is entirely coincidental. Any references to a Mr. Dan Schwartz are also hereby disavowed.
The Story of Color MacCheese
Back in May of 1989, we were sitting around lamenting the high cost of Macintosh software. A prime offender, as we pointed out before, was color graphics software. Somebody said, “Hey, Tim, how long would it take you to whip up a cheesy little color paint program?” (Tim Cotter is our programmer extraordinaire.) He said, in typically optimistic fashion, “Two weeks, if it doesn’t have to be too polished.”
This got us all very excited, so, after a brief discussion, we decided to spend those two weeks, write our cheesy little application, and practically give it away. We finished our current projects, quit our jobs, and moved to Alaska for the summer. Tim, true to his word, had Color MacCheese (as it had become known) running in two weeks. Everyone was impressed. As he predicted, it wasn’t very polished. However, it had several big advantages over conventional software, and we had ideas which we thought would make Color MacCheese not only the least expensive of the horde, but the flat-out best.
By the way, now is a good time to point out that the application is called Color MacCheese. We specifically want to discourage anyone from referring to the application as just MacCheese, since a large fast food franchise that shall go unnamed has a trademark registration for toys and food using a similar name. If you feel like using a one word abbreviation, we like to be referred to as just plain Color or CMC.
Anyway, we were so encouraged by our two weeks of work that we decided to do the polish that we had originally planned to skip. Here’s a well known fact of programming: The first 95% of a program only takes 5% of the time, and the last 5% takes 95% of the time. (A lot like Edison’s inspiration/perspiration ratio, isn’t it?)
So, we went back to the Lower Forty-Eight and continued work on Color MacCheese part-time, while holding down day jobs. In December, Tim finally decided that he wanted to change the very structure of the program (it was getting unwieldy), so he threw the whole thing away and started from scratch. Three weeks later, it was perfect. It still needed lots of testing and debugging, but we were confident that we had the best color paint application known to man.
Now, we had an application that was so great that we were getting a terrific response from a wide variety of sources that our price was too low. “It’s better than the thousand dollar applications, so it should cost at least as much.” We retained our (possibly naive) idealism and refused to relent. This is why we are priced absurdly low: We want to be. We have a lot of silly financial justifications, but when you get right down to it, we just think that, if you ignored the dozens of other paint applications and their astronomical prices, the philosophically right price is just where we put it. It’s not that we’re priced low, it’s that they’re priced high.
Using Color MacCheese
The Help Window
The thing that will make Color MacCheese very easy to learn is our Help Window. When you first launch Color MacCheese, it should be available. Just aim the pointer at the Help Window and read what it says. Aim the pointer at the different tools and see what the Help Window says about them. Pick a tool, aim at the document, and read what will happen when you press the mouse. Get it? Pretty neat, huh?
That’s the easy way to pick up Color MacCheese. You will find it is just like HyperCard or MacPaint, if you’ve used those. (If you haven’t used HyperCard, you should.)
The Help Window will also tip you off as to what will happen when you hold down the shift key and click. How? Just hold down the shift key, and the Help Window will change to show what will happen now. The same with the option and command keys. Want to know what kind of tool that rake is? Just hold the mouse over it in the Tool Window, and voila! We at Delta Tao think you’ll see a lot more things like our Help Window in coming years. Say you heard it here first.
Once you get used to Color MacCheese, you’ll probably just leave the Help Window closed all the time, except when you have some sort of question. It tends to slow things down, plus it can cover up quite a bit of the picture.
The Tools
Color MacCheese has several tools that you have probably never seen before. You might find it easier to figure out what they do by zooming in and looking at the document magnified.
The Magnifier
The Magnifier is the tool you use to change the magnification of the document. The easiest way to use it is to double click on it. It will zoom you in so you can work in a Fatbits mode. To get back to normal magnification, double click on it again.
The Eye Dropper
The Eye Dropper is the tool you use to pick up colors. Say you’ve just drawn a nice light brown house. You want to add a nice light brown garage, but you’ve changed your brush color to green and added trees. Light brown is not one of the colors on the Handy Palette so it could take a while for you to find the exact color again (a long while if you’re working with 32-Bit color). Instead of searching, just select the Eye Dropper tool, and click on the house. This changed the brush to the color you click on, so you are guaranteed an exact match.
You can usually get at the Eye Dropper very easily from any other tool. Just hold down the command key, and your current tool will change to the Eye Dropper. We recommend doing this a lot when modifying an existing picture.
The Rake
The rake takes edges and makes them fuzzy. We used to call it a “Fuzzifier,” but “Rake” seemed much more professional. It scatters the pixels that are aimed at all over the place.
For example, let’s say you’re drawing a tree. Start by using the oval tool to draw a big green circle. Now, you and I know that even the most circular trees don’t have edges quite that smooth, so let’s rough them up a bit. Grab the rake and drag it (slowly) around the outside of the tree. You’ll see that it is swapping the greens in the tree with whatever else is around in kind of a random, fuzzy pattern. It should look a bit more like a tree than it used to.
Aim the rake at the center of the tree. You’ll notice it doesn’t seem to do anything. It’s swapping green for green, so it looks like nothing is happening. You’ll only really notice the effect of the rake where there is an edge between two different colors.
Here’s one way to think of what the rake does: Imagine a neat pile of leaves in the middle of a yard. The rake will take that neat pile and knock the heck out of it, scattering the leaves hither and thither around the yard.
The Water Drop
The Water Drop is an extremely convenient tool for smoothing edges, smearing lines, and creating airbrush effects. Let’s go back to that tree you were just raking. After you raked it, there were blue dots (from the sky) inside the tree, and green dots in the sky. Better than a big green circle, but still not quite right. Choose the Water Drop and use it to blend the areas that you just raked. It smears colors together, mixing them, creating an out-of-focus watercolor kind of effect.
Put some long skinny white ovals in the sky as clouds. Rake around the edges of the clouds, then blend the same area with the Water Drop. You should be able to get a good effect very easily.
The Transmogrifier
According to Funk and Wagnall’s, Transmogrify means “to alter or change rapidly, with grotesque or humorous effect.” And that’s just what the Transmogrifier does. If you don’t want to call it a Transmogrifier, maybe you’d call it a texturing tool.
The Transmogrifier sprays color change. If you aim it at something red, it will change to pink, red, brown, lots of reds. It adds realism and texture to boring expanses of color.
As an example, lets go back to that tree we’ve been working on. The outside of the tree looks pretty good now that it’s been raked and blended, but the inside of it is all one shade of green, and looks dull and unrealistic. One thing you could do is grab the spray can and spray a bunch of different shades of green inside the tree, but that is very time consuming and difficult. Instead, choose the Transmogrifier. Spray all around the inside of the tree. You’ll notice that where there once was boring flat green, now you have dark greens, light greens, lots of greens. It even kind of looks like leaves.
The Palettes
Color MacCheese gives you as much versatility as possible setting up your system. The floating windows (windoids) are one way we do this. You get to decide whether you want to use screen space for the handy color palette, or if you’d rather use the Color Wheel to pick you colors, or maybe the Eye Dropper is enough for you. Whatever you want, we can do.
You can open and close and move around a wide variety of little floating windows. The most important one is the Tool Window. It’s what you use to pick which tool you’re working with, and set all sorts of preferences for the way the document shows up, and what the tools do. If you are actually painting, or drawing, or whatever you call it, you’ll probably want the Tool Window open. If you want to get rid of it, either click in its little close box, or select it in the “Windows” menu. To make it come back, select it again.
Our second favorite window is the Handy Palette. It gives you a constant choice of colors, so that at any given time you can quickly grab any color you’d find in a small box of crayons. It’s easy to use and awfully convenient. You can’t change the colors in the Handy Palette.
There are many colors that are not on the Handy Palette. If you want one of those, you could just double click on your brush color—this will bring up the Apple Color Picker, which will let you get any color the Mac can do. We thought this was a little inconvenient, so we provided an easier way to get at all of the colors available.
The Color Wheel works pretty much the same way as the Color Picker: The bar on the right controls the brightness, while where you click in the circle controls the base color. If you want a bright blue, click in the blue area on the wheel, and click on the brightness bar near the top. Your brush color will change to a nice bright blue.
The really nice part about this is you don’t have to open and close the Color Wheel all the time. If you like it, you can just leave it open all the time. If not, you can leave it closed and use some other way to choose your colors.
The Pattern Palette gives you easy access to various patterns, including the color patterns you can make yourself. (See the “Creating Patterns” section for how to do that.)
The Coordinates Window is useful if you’re trying to make objects exact sizes or line things up. The x and y shown are the actual location of the mouse, so you can put things in a column, or whatever. The ∂x and ∂y either show how big the object you’re making or selecting is or how far you’ve moved it. Leaving this window open tends to slow down Color MacCheese a bit, since it has to rewrite the coordinates every time you move the mouse.
The last window is the Help Window. While you are learning to use Color MacCheese, it will be awfully useful. Heres how it works: Whatever your mouse is pointing at, the Help Window will tell you what will happen when you click, or double-click, or whatever.
The Fancy Stuff
This is a quick cover of the things that are amazing about Color MacCheese, but aren’t obvious. This section is for the mysterious “Power User” in the group, those who want “How to use all of the spiffiest features in only 30 seconds.” This is a lightning tour, and not for the faint of heart.
First, give Color MacCheese lots of memory. Next, hold down the option key while you launch Color MacCheese. A big dialog will come up, letting you play with the configuration you’re going to use. Set the depth to 32 bits. (I assume you’re using 32-Bit Quickdraw.) Tweak the document size until the Memory Needed is less than the Memory Available. You are now running with a 32-Bit document, even if you don’t have a 32-Bit video card. If you don’t have a 32-Bit card, the Mac may feel a little slow.
Fill the screen with a light blue, using the paint bucket. Then pick a darker blue, and click and drag up with the paint bucket. That’s a “linear gradient fill.” Pick, say, yellow. Draw some circles. Pick red, and click and hold for a while with the paint bucket. When you let up on the mouse, assuming you didn’t move it much, you’ll do a “radial gradient fill.”
Turn on Translucency by clicking on the leftmost pair of overlapping rectangles in the Tool Palette. Draw stuff, preferably overlapping circles, or something like that. Set the level of transparency from the “Options” menu.
Turn on Anti-Aliasing by clicking on the jaggy line in the Tool Palette. Draw lines and circles, and they will Anti-Alias as you finish drawing them. (Now they’re jaggy, now they’re not.) Read the section on Rendering. Rendering is baffling, but fun.
Expert Color MacCheese
Most of the tools have special features which maybe aren’t so intuitively obvious that they couldn’t use a little explaining. This section will do just that.
The Brush
The brush has a shape and a pattern. Most of the time, the brush pattern will be a solid color, but you might use real patterns from time to time. The big box will show you the current color or pattern of your brush, and of most other tools. The small box shows your current brush shape. To change the brush shape, double click on the brush or on the brush shape. A dialog will come up which will allow you to choose a brush.
If you hold down the shift key while brushing, you will be constrained to brushing horizontally or vertically. This makes it easier to draw flat lines.
If you want a unique custom brush, we recommend command-dragging a lassoed selection. This works very well.
When you move the brush very quickly, you may notice that it doesn’t form a continuous pattern. Instead, it hits the page with spots of whatever the current brush pattern is. If you really want to draw continuous lines, double click the brush in the Tool Window, and make sure that the “Connected brush” box is checked. On the other hand, if you want to hit the page with spots (if you are using a spray-paint brush, for example), make sure the “Connected brush” box is unchecked.
Color MacCheese patterns are not limited to any particular size or color. This can cause some difficulty when trying to show a brush pattern bigger than our pattern box. Instead of just showing you a portion of the pattern, we shrink down very large patterns so that they fit. This means that when you use big patterns, the brush color box may not show you exactly what you are going to get when you use the brush. Smaller patterns will match, since we just fill the box with the pattern.
The Line Tool
The line tool, like the brush, has both a size and a color. You can change the line color (or pattern) by holding down the shift key when clicking in the Handy Palette, the Color Wheel, the Pattern Palette, or by double clicking in the line color box. Holding down the shift key when making a pattern from a selection will make it the line pattern. In general, however, having a pattern (instead of a color) for lines is not a pleasant effect.
The line tool’s shape and color are used not only for drawing lines, but for drawing the outline for the shape tools, like rectangles and polygons.
To change the size of the line tool, double click on it, or select “Open Tool” from the Options menu while using the line tool. A dialog letting you make the lines look the way you want them will come up.
Holding down the shift key while making lines will constrain the lines to horizontal or vertical. This is handy for drawing parallel lines. The option and command keys, as usual, give you the hand and the Eye Dropper. To change the line color this way, hold down the shift and command keys.
The Lasso
The lasso works pretty much like the lasso in other paint programs. It shrinks down on whatever you surround with it. It ignores the background color, so it may seem to act funny if you have changed that from white.
This feature is convenient if you want to, say, move the sun to a different place in the sky. Change the background color to sky blue, and when you lasso the sun you won’t get the surrounding sky.
Double clicking on the lasso will lasso the whole page, even the parts which are not on the screen at the time.
You can make copies of a lassoed area by holding down the option key and dragging away a copy of whatever you selected.
Holding down the shift key while dragging something that’s lassoed will constrain its movements to horizontal or vertical.
One interesting feature of the lasso is the ability to use a lassoed selection as a brush. Hold down the command key as you drag the selection around and it will act just like a full color brush. It works better if the shape you are dragging around doesn’t have an outline.
The Selection Tool
Also known as the Marquee. If you hold the shift key down while selecting, your selection will be a square, as opposed to a rectangle. You can option-drag a selection to create a copy of it, just like with the lasso.
You can grow or shrink a rectangular selection by holding down the command key and dragging a corner around. This can be slow, so be patient. If you want to retain the original proportions of the selection, and just change the size, hold down the shift and command keys.
The Eraser
The Eraser changes whatever dots it passes over to the background color. If you change your background color from white (by holding down the option key while using the Eye Dropper) the Eraser will seem to act like a brush, painting the background color into the document.
Double clicking on the Eraser will erase the entire document.
One interesting feature of the Eraser: It is the only tool that affects a smaller area as you magnify the document. The pixels you actually see covered are the only ones that are erased. If you need precision erasing, just zoom in a lot.
The Rectangle Tools
This is the tool you use to draw rectangles and squares. To draw squares, hold down the shift key while dragging.
Double clicking on this tool allows you to toggle how all of the shape tools draw. The options are framed only, filled only, or framed and filled.
Rounded Rectangles
Double click on this tool to set the roundedness of the corners of the rectangles.
If you want to toggle between, framed and filled, double click on one of the other area tools, like the rectangle or oval, and then change the tool back to the Rounded Rectangle.
The Oval Tools
This is the tool that draws ovals and circles. To draw circles, just hold down the shift key while dragging.
Ovals can look really good Anti-Aliased. Especially the long, thin ones, which can have jaggies and holes otherwise.
Double clicking on this tool allows you to toggle how all of the shape tools draw. The options are framed only, filled only, or framed and filled.
The Polygon Tools
Use the polygon tool to make geometric kinds of shapes with lots of sides. To finish a polygon, either double click on the last point, or click on the first point again. The polygon will close and the area will be filled (or not, depending on the frame and fill status).
Double clicking on this tool allows you to toggle how all of the shape tools draw. The options are framed only, filled only, or framed and filled.
The Curve Tools
The Curve Tool will always close when you let up the mouse. If you want to draw unclosed curves, try using the brush tool with a smaller brush, or use the pencil.
Double clicking on this tool allows you to toggle how all of the shape tools draw. The options are framed only, filled only, or framed and filled.
The N-Gon Tools
You can set the number of sides you want a polygon to have by double clicking on the N-Gon tool.
The Pencil
The Pencil is a “Bit Twiddler.” We use it most of the time in Fatbits. It lets you draw a thin line in whatever the brush color is. This tool uses colors only, never patterns. If the brush color is a pattern, the pencil color will be whatever the upper left hand corner of the pattern is.
If you click the pencil on a dot which matches the pencil color, the pencil will start drawing in the background color (again color, not pattern) until you let up on the mouse. This makes it a great tool for doing very detailed work. By clicking in the same place repeatedly, you can toggle a dot back and forth between the brush color and background color.
Shift-clicking with the pencil constrains the lines it draws to horizontal or vertical. The option and command keys (which give you the hand and the Eye Dropper) are particularly useful with the pencil, since you are often in fatbits when working with it.
Double clicking on the pencil tool in the pencil palette increases the magnification wherever you last clicked. You can double click repeatedly to zoom in to the exact magnification you want. To get back out, either hold down the shift key while double clicking on the pencil, or double click on the magnifying glass.
If you don’t want to go to the Tool Window to change magnification while using the pencil, command-D will zoom in, shift-command-D will zoom out. (Command-D is always like double clicking on the current tool.)
The Spray Can
To change the characteristics of the spray can, double click the can in the Tool Window, or select Open Tool from the Options menu.
The spray can always sprays in a rectangle, but it tends to spray more in the middle than toward the edges.
The flow rate controls how many dots the spray can blasts in one area before moving on to the next one. This means that by turning the flow rate up too high you can get undesirable effects: The spray rectangle will be almost entirely filled, and the tool will move very slowly. Of course, with too low a flow rate the spray may seem to be unbearably slow. Experiment with different flow rates and sizes.
Some things that you would use the spray can for in other applications you would use the Rake and Transmogrifier for in Color MacCheese. Both do certain spraying kinds of things much better than the Spray Can. If you want to do graffiti, you can use a spray shaped brush with the Brush Tool (make sure “Connected” is unchecked in the “Choose Brush” dialog) to do a good job.
The Paint Bucket
The paint bucket works pretty much just like the one in Hypercard or MacPaint, except that it will only fill one color at a time. For example, if you have several shades of blue in the sky, and you decide you want an orange sky, it will only color one shade of blue at a time.
Color MacCheese has the most powerful and sophisticated paint bucket of any application, because it is the tool you use to create smooth gradients between two colors. This can be useful if, say, you are filling in the sky, and you want it to be dark blue at the top and light brown at the bottom (like in Los Angeles).
The way you create a linear gradient is very simple: click and drag in the direction you want the gradient to go. For example, if you want blue at the top to go down to a light brown, first fill with blue, using normal paint bucket techniques. Then change the color to the right shade of light brown, and click and drag down somewhere in the blue area. The length of the line you drag doesn’t matter, just the direction.
If you want the gradient to go straight vertical or horizontal, you can hold down the shift key while dragging the paint bucket, and it will constrain it that way.
The paint bucket also will make center gradients, which do a smooth fill from the outside in. This is even easier than linear gradients—just click and hold for a bit longer than you would if you were just clicking. When you’ve held it down long enough, it will be obvious because the paint bucket pointer will change a bit to indicate you’ll do a center fill when you release the mouse. (The Help Window will also tell you.) When you do a center gradient, Color MacCheese will fill the area with a smooth transition from the current color that you’ve clicked on to the brush color toward the center. This can create very nice highlighting effects.
Gradients are much smoother if you use 16-Bit or 32-Bit color, even if you use them with a 256 color video card.
The paint bucket can also be used as a rendering tool. See the section on rendering to see how.
The Text Tool
The Text Tool, like the pencil, uses the brush color instead of the brush pattern. (When we used a pattern the text became unreadable pretty darned quick.) If the brush is a pattern, the text will be the color of the upper left hand corner of the pattern.
You can change the font, size, and style of the Text Tool by double clicking on it. A dialog will come up which will let you do all sorts of things.
If you are Anti-Aliasing, you will be able to make text look smoother than it otherwise would. We do this by using information from a larger font size to fill in gray dots between the black ones (assuming your text is black on white.) This means Anti-Aliasing will always help with outline fonts (like Adobe Type Manager), but will only help with bit-mapped fonts if there is a larger font size available than the one you are using. Anti-Aliasing is only available with 32-Bit Quickdraw.
The Hand Tool
Also known as the Grabber. You can double-click on the hand to zoom out to a full page view. Clicking the mouse will return you to where you started.
If your window size is already as big as your document, double-clicking the hand won’t do as much. You can already see the full page.
The Eye Dropper
If you want to change the line color, hold down the shift key while eye dropping. If you want to change the background color, hold down option. Just like with the Handy Palette and Color Wheel.
The Rake
To customize the rake, you can set several parameters. The height and width of the tool are fairly straightforward. The flow rate is much like the flow rate in the spray can—it’s the number of dots at a time that get moved.
The Water Drop
You can customize the water drop by double clicking on it. The “Size” of the water drop is just that—how big an area is affected when you click. The “Radius” indicates how heavy the effect is.
The Transmogrifier
The Transmogrifier has a couple of parameters you can set by double clicking on it. The first is the size of the tool. It sets the area that you will spray color change into. The size is just like the spray can size.
The Flow controls the speed with which the Transmogrifier sprays. For practical purposes, a speed near the middle of the bar is usually good.
The Change is the most complicated part of the Transmogrifier parameters. It affects how much the color of every pixel will change when it gets Transmogrified. If the change is small, the difference will be subtle, or possibly even nonexistent. If the change is large, the effect will be more marked and dramatic, and may be a little psychedelic.
The Magnifier
Color MacCheese lets you work at virtually any magnification you want, from normal size to 9 times actual size. There are lots of different ways to change your current scale. Double-clicking on the magnifying glass is my favorite. That toggles you between normal size and whatever your most recent other size was.
Or, of course, you can use the Magnifier as a tool, clicking on what you want to zoom in on, shift-clicking to get back out again.
Or, you can double-click on the pencil. This will increase your magnification by one, letting you gradually zoom in. Shift-double-click on the pencil to get back out in the same fashion.
Or, finally, you can click on the little arrows by the Magnifier in the Tool Window to change the magnification, either up or down.
Whenever you change the magnification by clicking or double-clicking in the Tool Window, we try to center on what we call the “interest point.” That is the last place on the document that you clicked. We figure that you are interested most on that point, so we zoom in to there.
If you want to zoom in on a particular part of the screen, either use the Magnifier as a tool, or set the “interest point” by clicking on what you want to change, then undoing your click. Once the interest point is set, you’ll be able to zoom in all of the other ways.
Another way to change the magnification is to double-click on the hand. This will reduce your magnification to fit a properly proportioned picture of your entire document in your current window, giving you a full page view.
Gradients
You do gradients in Color MacCheese with the Paint Bucket. (See page .)
Patterns
Color MacCheese lets you play with patterns more easily than any other application. Whenever you have an urge to create a pattern, just use your normal painting tools to create it. Then, select the pattern (which is just a picture) and choose “Selection to Pattern” from the Selection menu. Boom. Your picture is now a pattern, and you can use all of your normal tools with it as your brush pattern, line pattern, or even background pattern.
One thing you do need to watch out for is that pattern sizes have to be a power of two (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64) both horizontally and vertically. If you happen to choose something that isn’t the right size, we will shrink it or grow it to fit into the closest size which is legal. Also, we’ll shrink down anything that’s bigger than 64 pixels wide to 64, since that’s the biggest pattern we’ll do.
Once you have created a pattern, Color MacCheese will save it for you in the Pattern Palette, so you can come back to it any time you want. The Pattern Palette stores its custom patterns in the Cheese Prefs file. If there is a pattern there that you don’t like, don’t want, or otherwise want to get rid of, just drag the pattern into the Pattern Palette’s little trash can, and Color MacCheese will permanently dispose of it for you. You can’t get rid of the pre-recorded patterns we supplied.
The Background Plane
Color MacCheese has an option which will let you work with a background picture that stays even as you change the foreground. You can use this by checking the box in the startup options that says “Use Background Plane.” You get the startup options by holding down the command or option key as you launch Color MacCheese.
The Background Plane can be very useful for doing animation work. We recommend you don’t use it most of the time, since it can be a little confusing, it eats lots of memory, and it slows down your work.
Dithering
Color MacCheese is an especially great painting application. One really wonderful thing we do is allow you to work with dithered colors. Suppose that your monitor card only allows you to use 16 colors. 16 colors just isn’t very many. Want a light orange, or a pink, or a dark purple? Tough—they aren’t in your palette.
Of course, we at Delta Tao wouldn’t leave you in such dire straights. We suggest you trot on up to the Options menu and select “Set Number of Colors…” to change your settings to make things more friendly. Give yourself more colors, and we’ll approximate on screen as best we can. When you do this, when you try to get that pink you’ve always wanted, you’ll get a mixed red and white. Basically, as long as you kind of cross your eyes and stand back from the picture, we’ve expanded your palette from 16 colors to however many you want.
Translucencies and Transparencies
This is another one of Color MacCheese’s fancy features. Transparencies work on patterns, while translucencies work on everything. When you turn Transparent Patterns on, you can see through the patterns wherever the background color is. This can create an effect something like looking through a wire fence.
Translucencies make whatever you’re drawing somewhat transparent. You can set the level of translucency by looking in the “Options” menu for “Transparency Level.” If you have transparency or translucency turned on, Anti-Aliasing won’t work.
Auto Scrolling
Auto scrolling means that when you click near the edge of a window, the document will slide over so that you can see beyond the edge you’re clicking near. This lets you draw around the entire document without having to click in the scroll bars.
Unfortunately, auto scrolling can be very slow. Any time you’re working with a document that’s a different depth than the screen, we recommend turning auto scrolling off (by clicking on the scroll in the Tool Window). This will keep your tools inside the bounds of the window, and will speed up your work considerably.
Rendering
Don’t even read this section unless you’re ready to be a little baffled. Color MacCheese has a powerful rendering feature which can be used to create special 3-D effects. It’s more than a little confusing, and almost painfully slow, so we almost hesitate to tell anyone about it. However, everyone who uses it loves it, so here goes.
You probably already know all about gradients and how they work. Center gradients are great, but sometimes you don’t want to go exactly toward the center of a region you’re filling. For example, let’s say you’re drawing a sphere. A sphere looks a lot like a circle which has a gradient in toward a light colored area where the light is reflecting from.
If you do a conventional center gradient, you’ll end up with a cleverly filled circle which doesn’t look like a sphere at all. One way you could solve this problem would be to cut the circle in half diagonally before doing the center gradient fill. However, this is time consuming and painful.
So we invented the “rendering fill.” If you’re making a black marble, you know that the outline will be black, and that there will be a lighter gray dot somewhere in the upper right hand corner. You also know that it should be perfectly smooth between the circle and the dot. That’s where the rendering fill comes in.
All you have to do for this example is put in the black circle using the oval tool in outline mode. Then put a light grey dot where you want the highlight to be. Then hold the shift key down while you click and hold with the paint bucket in the area you want filled. Color MacCheese will fill in the blanks as smoothly as possible. Eventually. Remember that we are doing lots and lots of heavy math to get this effect, and that filling larger and more complex areas can take a very long time. Our advice is to try to keep the areas under 100x100. If it’s taking too long, you can bail out by command-dotting.
Preferences
We are very good about remembering your preferences for almost everything. If you like to have the screen zoomed out, with all of the palettes open, and some of them on the right and some on the left, Color MacCheese will happily start you out in just that configuration. If you prefer to work on a small window with only the Tool Window available, we’ll do that too. Basically, whatever state you end with, we’ll try to give you when you start again. (Unless we can’t for some reason, like you moved to a computer with a smaller screen. In which case we do the best we can.)
All of this information is stored in the file called “CMC Prefs.” If you ever think that your preferences are bad, you can revert to the defaults by simply throwing the Prefs file away. Keep in mind that this is also where we store the custom color patterns you may have created, so that by throwing the Prefs file away you will lose them.
Anti-Aliasing
Anti Aliasing is a way of using color to make a picture which seems to be one color look smoother. With black pictures (or text) on a white background, this means adding grey scale dots in between the normal black ones. The best way to see this effect is to just turn Anti-Aliasing on, and draw a circle. When you’re finished drawing, you’ll notice Color MacCheese stop and think for a second, and then draw the circle again, Anti-Aliased. The same with text—Color MacCheese will take a second to think, then redraw it better.
We steal the information about where to put the grey dots in Anti-Aliased text from larger sizes of the same font. If you don’t have any larger sizes, and you aren’t using outline fonts of some sort, Anti-Aliasing won’t do much good. On the other hand, if you are trying to do 6 point New York and you have 18 point available, the 6 point will end up quite readable.
Our favorite choice for the size you’re Anti-Aliasing is a size three times the one you’re using: 12 point uses 36, 6 uses 18, and so on. If you can arrange it so that it works out even like that, the results will be very good. With outline fonts, the results will be good in any case.
With only sixteen colors, Anti-Aliasing doesn’t look so hot, with the possible exception of black text on white background, or the other way around. This is because there are a couple of shades of gray included in the sixteen colors, but not shades of light blue, or whatever.
If you are using patterns, instead of solid colors, we turn Anti-Aliasing off.
Printing
If you are lucky enough to have a color printer, you can print your pictures by just selecting “Print…” from the File menu. You may have to use the Chooser to make sure you’re aiming at the right printer, since you probably don’t want to do all your printing on the color printer, just color printing.
At the time of this writing, color printers cost a fortune, and many don’t really look all that good. We keep hoping that this will change soon, but we aren’t going to hold our breath. There are a couple of low priced alternatives to real color printing.
If you have a LaserWriter, you can print color pictures in shades of gray. You’ll get best results by using version 6.0 or later of the LaserWriter driver file in your System Folder.
If you don’t have any of those, choosing “Print…” will allow you to print on whatever printer is available. We will approximate colors in black and white or gray scales as best we can.
Changing Document Depth and Size
Color MacCheese will let you work in an almost infinite variety of configurations. To change the size of your document, or the number of colors it uses, hold down the command or option key while launching Color MacCheese. This will bring up a special dialog which will let you change all of your default settings. Or, if you don’t want to do that, you can get at all of the same things from the Options menu.
The depth of a document has to do with the number of colors it uses. Most machines use 256 colors, which gives you a lot of colors for relatively little memory. Some machines use 32-Bit color, which gives you an almost infinite variety of colors. 32-Bit color can be kind of slow and takes up a lot of memory, though.
One of the many great things about Color MacCheese is the fact that it lets you create dazzling 32-Bit pictures even if you don’t have supporting hardware. We will automatically dither full color pictures down to 256 colors (or however many you have) so that you will always see a best approximation of the actual 32-Bit picture in memory. Admittedly, this dithering is slow, especially when scrolling.
Memory Requirements
Doing fancy color graphics can eat up a lot of memory. The more memory you have, the more power you’ll be able to get out of Color MacCheese. Of course, since Color MacCheese is one of the most versatile applications known to man, you can get by with very little, depending on your particular needs.
The easy way to figure out how much memory a particular configuration uses is to try to set it up (hold down the command or option key when you launch Color MacCheese) and see. Or, you can look at this list to get a good general feel.
320x240 480x360 640x480 560x730
Black and White 500 500 600 700
Four Colors 500 600 700 800
Sixteen Colors 600 700 1000 1100
256 Colors 700 1000 1400 1700
Thousands of Colors 900 1500 2400 2900
Millions of Colors 1400 2600 4200 5200
This is the amount of memory you would need to allocate Color MacCheese if you are running MultiFinder (which we heartily recommend.) You do that by choosing “Get Info” from the File menu in the Finder. You can then change the amount of memory Color MacCheese will use. If you’re not running MultiFinder, we get everything that isn’t used by the System, and you can only increase that amount by buying more memory (or using virtual memory).
32-Bit Quickdraw
This section is to give you a quick idea of what 32-Bit Quickdraw is all about, and why we think you should use it.
When the Macintosh first came out, it used Quickdraw. Apple wrote this to work primarily in black and white and it was stored in ROM (on a chip as opposed to on the disk.) Whenever Apple improved Quickdraw, they put the improvements in the System file. (This is why System files have grown so much over the years.)
With the Mac II Apple decided to do color, so they wrote Color Quickdraw. Color Quickdraw, for technical reasons, doesn’t run on the original machines, so Apple again put it in ROM instead of in the System file. Improvements of Color Quickdraw were again put into the System file.
Then Apple decided to do real color, so you can have every color available all the time. They called it 32-Bit Quickdraw. They put it in the ROMs of the new machines (like the IIci) but didn’t want to increase the size of the System file by as much as they would have to make it work on the earlier Mac IIs and the SE/030. Instead, they put it in a special file called 32-Bit Quickdraw. That way, if you decided you didn’t want or need it, you wouldn’t have to use the extra disk space and memory it needs.
The thing is, 32-Bit Quickdraw can make your life better even if you don’t have one of the special 32-Bit cards (which tend to be expensive.) Color MacCheese takes great advantage of the new features in 32-Bit Quickdraw and doesn’t run as well without it. For example, even with 256 colors, if you are using 32-Bit Quickdraw you can Anti-Alias everything, open color pictures (and see them pretty well) on a black and white screen, and do better dithering on gradients. Plus lots more.
In summary, we highly recommend that you use the latest version of 32-Bit Quickdraw available, preferably that found with System 6.0.5 (on the “printing tools” disk) or later. The next major version of Color MacCheese (tentatively called Color MacBrie 7.0) will require it.
Common Problems
Anti-Aliasing doesn’t work.
Color MacCheese uses special routines which are found in 32-Bit Quickdraw to do Anti-Aliasing. If you don’t have 32-Bit Quickdraw, you won’t get Anti-Aliasing. What’s more, if you are using a version of 32-Bit Quickdraw older than 1.2 (Get Info on the file in the System Folder) Anti-Aliasing might not work correctly in all screen depths. We recommend that you use System Software version 6.0.5 or later. Also, make sure that you have Anti-Aliasing enabled by clicking on the “AA” in the Tool Window. To top that, Anti-Aliasing doesn’t currently work if you are using translucent tools or transparent patterns.
It’s going really slow.
Color MacCheese will let you work in depths other than the screen depth, so you can create (and modify) full color pictures on a black and white or sixteen color screen. Furthermore, it will let you use 16-Bit and 32-Bit color on your 256 color machine. Or whatever. When you do, we will do our best to use what colors we have to make the picture look as good as possible. This is called dithering. It looks pretty good, but can be slow, especially for scrolling. We recommend that if you are doing this (which I always do) you turn off Auto Scrolling by clicking on the Scroll in the Tool Window.
It keeps bringing up a memory dialog when I try to launch.
There are two kinds of memory dialog. One is created by Multifinder, when an application asks for more memory that the Macintosh has available. It usually says something like “Do you want to open it using the available memory?” Usually, you do. The other possible dialog we create to let you know that you just don’t have enough memory to do what you’ve asked to do. Just decrease the number of colors you’re using, or better yet make the document you’ll work with a little smaller. That’s what this dialog is for. Or give yourself more memory, by Getting Info on Color MacCheese from the Finder.
Everything I draw is transparent.
Click on the “transparency” icon in the Tool Window. This turns transparency on and off.
I can’t get out of Fatbits.
Double click on the magnifying glass in the Tool Window.
I can’t change the line color.
Hold down the shift key while choosing a color.
I can’t paste from the Scrapbook.
Color MacCheese always has enough memory to cut and paste any picture which will fit in the window. However, you can’t be sure that the application you’re copying it from (like the Scrapbook) has enough memory to copy the picture to the Clipboard. Problems of this sort will usually happen when you’re dealing with very large or very complicated pictures. To correct it, make sure that the application doing the copying has enough memory to copy, by either giving it more memory, or by quitting from some applications in MultiFinder. It is possible to have pictures that are so large or complex that they can’t be cut and pasted.
I crash all the time.
You’re probably running applications that we didn’t write. Our stuff doesn’t crash.
Except sometimes. If you do find a reproducible crashing bug with Color MacCheese (meaning you can make it crash on demand), we really want to hear about it, so we can fix it. Call our Tech support and tell us.
I can’t draw worth a darn.
Heck, neither can I. When I screw up, I Undo. At least when I use the computer, I can draw a perfect circle and a straight line, which is more than I could do before.
Technical Support
We pride ourselves on being able to solve virtually any problem one might have with Color MacCheese, and lots of other problems as well. If you call us directly at (408) 730-9336 at reasonable California business hours and ask for tech support, we’ll be happy to help you with anything we can. It is also possible that you can get us at unreasonable hours, since we work hard and late, but we can’t guarantee it.
Keep in mind that we’re understaffed, overworked, and appreciate brevity. If you can answer questions like “What version of the System and Finder are you running?” without checking, we’ll be ecstatic. If you call with questions like “What’s a Finder?” we’ll be peeved. Okay?
If you ever have an urge to contact us in writing, our address is:
Delta Tao Software, Inc.
760 Harvard Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94087
We love getting mail, especially mail with pretty color pictures (on disks or printouts).
Recommended Reading
These are a couple of books that don’t have anything to do with Macintosh graphics, but we enjoy reading them time and again. On top of that, we think they say something about the Delta Tao philosophy.
The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, Penguin Books, New York, 1982.
Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, Andrews and McMeel, Kansas City, 1987.
The Macintosh Way, by Guy Kawasaki, Scott, Foresman and Company, Glenview, Illinois, 1989.
Acknowledgments
Loads and loads of people were fairly crucial to the development and production of Color MacCheese, and to making Delta Tao a success. Here are some of them. We thank them all profusely.
