An estimation of the potential worldwide userbase of Mojave Paint, estimated Drake Equation style. The Drake equation – for estimating how many civilizations might be trying to communicate with us.

Read my very unscientific analysis at https://mojavepaint.app/articles/drake-equation.

I purchased a weeklong sponsorship over at sixcolors.com, check it out at the top of every page:

And as part of the package I get a sponsored "thank you" post both on the site and in their RSS feed. RSS feeds… that's not part of my media consumption currently, but it sure makes a lot of sense. It's indie, it's diy, it's a "screw you" to the big tech algorithms.

So I got NewNewsWire and added a few feeds including Six Colors, and while I'm at it, I added an RSS feed to this very blog.

Check it out at https://mojavepaint.app/rss.

I saw this post marking six years of basicappleguy.com and I thought it would be fun to make a similar graphic in Mojave Paint. First thing would be to save the file and open in Mojave Paint, and pick the colors out as saved swatches.

Next I drop the size down to 16x17 so I can work in true pixel art style, and draw some colorful worms. I started with the single pixel row/column selection to get a basic lattice, then I hand drew some irregularities with the pencil tool (shift for straight lines was useful here).

Then it's just finding a reasonable-looking six figure to put on top. There are no antialiasing options in Mojave Paint yet for type, but I can cmd-click the type layer to get a selection, put a layer mask on a solid white layer, and threshold the layer mask to make it hard edged. Finally, I upscaled by 94x to get something on a similar scale as the original. The six figure looks pretty crappy, probably better to hand draw or trace something, but you get the idea!

Too much snapping annoys me -- you're just trying to reposition something and it's snapping to midpoints and all the other objects on all the other layers. So for Mojave Paint we do something a little different and only snap to guides.

But the guides themselves snap, so if you want to align things to the midpoint of the document, just put a guide there. Also, you can hold Option to snap them in thirds, making it easy to divide the canvas into thirds or sixths or twelfths.

With guides in place, the move tool and the marquee selection tools will snap to those guides, unless you hold Control to disable snapping, or uncheck View > Snap in the menu items, or hide the guides.

These "learn Photoshop" tutorials really take me back to 2003, when I was doing continuing education at Shoreline Community College to learn graphic design. The computer labs at that time were all Mac, half OS 9 half OS X, with laminated "Think Different" posters on the walls.

I plan to do a regular series walking through some of these lessons in Mojave Paint, many are doable as is with no changes!