Interface
The interface of Pixquare contains many areas. A few of them are permanently visible on the screen, however, to give us a clean workspace, the majority of them are either collapsible or completely hidden when not used.
Those in blue are permanent elements of the UI, the white ones can be collapsed, and the green components can be hidden if not used.
1. Toolbox
Here is the container of all the tools we can use in Pixquare: Move, Brush, Eraser, Line, Shape, Selection, Color Bucket, Eye Dropper, Additional Tools, and Color Picker. Some of them can be activated using quick actions.
2. Settings
This is only the entry for the settings panel. It also has the back button and save button (only needed if auto-save is not enabled)
3. Size and opacity sliders
Tools like brush, eraser, line, and shape can have adjustable stroke size and opacity, so these sliders allow us to change those settings.
It also houses the undo/redo buttons (which can be done with gestures)
The little button in the middle is to activate the quick eye dropper.
4. Symmetry tool
Pixquare supports symmetry (or mirroring) on vertical and horizontal axes. When expanded, we use this window to manage the axes (add, remove, change coordinates or color). This can be hidden in the settings.
Read more about symmetry tool >
5. Reference images
Sometimes we will need to constantly look at some images as reference, so Pixquare allows us to import them as floating windows right inside its UI. Expand this component to manage the images.
Read more about reference images >
6. Gesture pad
Working with an iPad means that a lot of time, we won't have access to a keyboard. To compensate for that limitation, Pixquare offers the Gesture Pad to somewhat substitute the keyboard shortcuts. We can customize what each gesture does.
7. Color palette
Color/palette management is super easy in Pixquare with this component. We can add/remove/reorganize colors, all in this little panel. We can also import palettes from a variety of sources like Lospec, images, files, etc. Pixquare also allows us to generate a ramp of colors to add to our palette.
Read more about palette management >
8. Timeline/layer panel
Pixquare is ideal for both static artwork as well as animation, that's why it combines the layers and animation frames into 1 panel. Layer and animation management are all done in this panel.
Read more about layers/frames >
9. Preview
Oftentimes, we'll want to quickly glance at the artwork in a smaller size to get how it looks overall. We can expand this window to do that.
In this window, we can zoom and pan the preview. The window itself can be resized and dragged around.
Tapping on the preview will navigate the main canvas to that point.
Preview also has an option that keeps the center of itself and the main canvas in sync.
Preview will play the animation along with the main canvas, but if we tap the Play button of the preview, it will play the animation independently from the main canvas.
10. Contextual menu
Depending on what's happening on the canvas, this menu will show/hide automatically. The intention of this dynamic design is to let users know exactly what they can do with the current state of the canvas without needing to do anything and the fact that it will only show up when needed helps keep the workspace clean and clustered-free.
Depending on whether you have left-hand mode enabled or not, the contextual menu will show up on the left or right edge of the screen.
We'll go into more detail about this menu in several sections for specific parts of the app.
Last updated
