So, I’ve been continuing to work on Painter, in spite of everything else that is urgently awaiting my attention. The project is coming along, especially the module for the custom function language that is working as a Netbeans plugin. Very cool.

Anyway, I am at the point of building an actual procedural painting program for Painter to interact with in building its work, and I have been looking around for source material to base the code on. Maybe this is just my gradual corruption as a budding humanities scholar, but I have suddenly been feeling this strange compulsion to base things that I do or create in the context of existing work, rather than creating it all by scratch. It’s very odd. Something clearly must be wrong with me.

I have spent a little while digging though the source for The GIMP. I still fondly appreciate C/C++ as my “native” programming language, but reading through it is reminding me why I migrated to Java. Unfortunately, there are very very few good Java painting and graphics applications out there. In fact I haven’t seen one yet. I want something on the level of GIMP or Photoshop, or, ideally, Corel Painter. The hunt continues.