Tux Paint
From Schoolforge-UK
| Description: | Easy to use Paint program aimed at young children |
| URL: | http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/ |
| Platforms: | Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Sharp PDAs |
| Licence: | GPL |
| Av. rating: | ***** |
Tux Paint is a friendly and easy to use paint program with many features attractive to young children. It has a large collection of rubber stamps and all the usual paint features such as fill and text and also provides some attractive special effects such as blur and sparkle. Saving and printing have been simplified and most actions have associated sound effects, which add to the appeal. Overall it has a very friendly and solid feel and is a good way to introduce children to the features of modern GUI applications such as open/save and modal dialogs whilst they have fun.
Simple help prompts are provided by a friendly Tux at the foot of the window but it would benefit from speech synthesis, as many of the target audience do not have strong reading skills.
A few starter pictures are provided but it more would be useful. They can have layers allow painting to 'hide' behind objects. More can be easily be added as .png files. This allows favourite pictures from painting books to be used many times by simply scanning them. Some touching up of scanned images may be needed to ensure that the fill works without flooding large areas. Rubber stamps can also be added, each with its own sound effect and a large extension set can be found on the website.
Excellent configuration features are provided for using in networked school settings and for restricting access to features. The various configuration options can be set via command-line switches, config. files or a GUI as you would expect from a mature program targeted at widespread deployment.
My children use the Windows Port on XP Pro and they both give it the 'thumbs up', often asking to use the 'penguin' (a tendency to be encouraged). My 4 yr. old daughter particularly likes the stamps and fill and soon moved on to trying the other features. Her mouse and creative skills have rapidly developed.
I use an administrative login for my wife and myself and a separate account for the children. Installation with this configuration was straightforward and I used the --nopaint option on the shortcut with another 'daddy' shortcut to save my printer ink for the time being.
I did feel that the dialogs for saving files on exiting were a little confusing and intrusive and I was sometimes prompted to save changes when none had been made. In addition in a couple of places such as the picture gallery and text editing the modalities and how to get out of them are not that clear. However these are rapidly learnt and it is hard to see how a cleaner design could be achieved.
The only problem I experienced was Windows specific, namely the context cursors don't change in full screen mode. Automatic use of Windows 'home' folders for users files would be an improvement but this can be achieved using options in shortcuts.
The Tux Paint web site is well organised with clear download and deployment instructions, screen shots, videos, reviews and a community gallery. A tee shirt is also available for those who love branding. The lead-developer, Bill Kendrick, responded quickly and usefully to my questions and feedback about the Windows port.
Tux Paint is one of those programs that should be 'just be there' on all PCs that children use.
SteveLee 10:07, 20 May 2005 (BST)
