







 Rainbox is a "psychedelic" paint program.  It uses palette animation to make your drawings appear as if they're moving.  
 To run Rainbox you must have a monitor capable of displaying 256 colors.
 Rainbox is free.  Legal stuff below.
 Send bugs, suggestions, and comments to alexrosen@alum.mit.edu 
 Visit the Rainbox Home Page at "http://www.tiac.net/users/axlrosen" for the latest version of Rainbox, and other programs I'm working on.

The program is mostly self-explanatory.  Choose a shape from the Shape menu; click and drag it around the screen.  Choose a toy from the Toy menu, and click to place it.  For lines and spirals, click and drag to indicate the size you want.

The Line and Spiral1 toys use the current settings from the Shape and Effect menus.  For example, selecting the star shape and then drawing a Spiral1 will draw a spirally star.  The other toys are unaffected by these settings.

Hold down shift to constrain movement to 45 angles.  Hold down command while clicking in the lower right-hand corner to resize the window. (Clicking without the command key will just draw.)  

Hit Command-period at any time to cancel drawing if it's taking too long.

Choosing a background from the Clear menu will clear your picture.  This will erase your picture, but you can get it back if you "undo" it immediately.

You can save a Rainbox picture as a PICT, so you can open it with other applications. Of course, it won't move if you save it as a PICT, and you can't load PICTs into Rainbox. If you want to be able to see your picture in Rainbox again, be sure to save it normally as well. Note that unlike Rainbox documents, PICTs often look better at a monitor setting of thousands or millions of colors, instead of 256 colors.

                                                          Random Notes:

It's best to run Rainbox with no other applications open.  First of all, if another program is calculating something, Rainbox's color animation may look slow or jerky.  This is true with some programs (e.g. Microsoft Word) even if they're not calculating anything.  Also, because redrawing is slow, I have set Rainbox so it does not redraw when it's in the background.  So if you switch to another application and then later switch back, Rainbox's display may be messed up.  If this happens, choose "Redraw" from the Options menu.

The first 6 shapes (circle through star) are drawn differently from the rest.  This allows them to look good at any size.  The others are icons, which will look blocky at large sizes.  Also, currently the icons cannot be transparent, and are not drawn in mirror image in kaleidoscope mode.

Here's an explanation of the preferences options:
  Hide cursor while drawing: Hides the arrow cursor while you're drawing.
  Snycronize toy colors: If checked, the colors of all the toys you draw will all be in phase. Otherwise, they will be randomly out of phase. (It's hard to explain, try it and you'll see what I mean.)
  "Sticky" toys: When you choose a toy, it stays chosen until you choose another, or until you choose "No Toy." Otherwise, the toy turns off after you use it.
  Animate always: If checked, the color animation continues even when you've got a menu or a dialog open.

                                                          Modifying Rainbox:

If you know how to use ResEdit, you can add icons and color schemes to Rainbox.  Just add a new 'ICON' or 'clut' resource.  Please don't distribute a modified version. (But if you'd like to send me your cool color schemes, I might include them in future versions of Rainbox.)

                                                          Future Enhancements:

As you can probably tell, updates will not arrive very often, but here's what I'd like to add, eventually:

Give icons and text the ability to be transparent and kaleidoscopic.
Add font and style menus, and generally improve text input and drawing.
Add animation speed controls.

                                                          Version History:

Version 1.3
------------
 Fixed a bug that would sometimes prevent opening a file, giving an out of memory error, when there actually was enough memory.
 Added 3 new color schemes (Flash, Lite Brite, and Contrast)
 Disabled "Save As PICT" when no windows are open


Version 1.2
----------
 Added "Save As PICT"
 Added "Hide Menu Bar"
 Added 3 new color schemes (Laser, Kozik, and Day-Glo)
 Included Rainbox Fader screensaver, for use with "DarkSide of the Mac" (see "Rainbox Fader Readme" for more info)

Version 1.1
----------
 Added Undo
 Smarter memory allocation - There's no longer any preset limit to the size of a picture.  The size is limited only by Rainbox's available memory.
 Improved redraw accuracy
 Improved two-tone drawing
 Added Delete key support in text drawing

                                                          Legal stuff:

Rainbox is free but  1993-1998 by Alex Rosen. There is no warranty of any kind on this software, so use it at your own risk. In other words, I'm not responsible if anything bad happens from using this software.

You may copy this software freely, with these limitations: (1) you must keep all the files together and intact; (2) you may not copy this software to an on-line service that charges a fee (other than ordinary connection time fees) to download this software, without my permission; and (3) you may not sell this software, alone or as part of a compilation, without my permission, except for compilations sold by non-profit computer user groups. 