This project was also done during the 6th semester as a part of the curriculum. The main thing about this was that the project implementation was complete in barely 3 days. Though it was so fast it was comfortably one of the most stable and best looking projects in the class. Some of the features of the project were that the image icons were not written as code as done in some editors. As as example if other people have to write a button with an icon on it the icon is written as a part of the code which makes moving the button to some other part of the screen if necessary very difficult. This project again was implemented using C++ because of the object oriented features provided by the language. This is one project that I can say is totally object oriented. Even the mouse pointer was an object.
Below I will discuss some of the salient features of the project.
The Button Icons
This was an interesting facet of the project by which I could create most attractive buttons very easily. All I had to do was create a file which had the colors of the individual pixels. This was a bit time consuming but I found a way to get around it.
What I did was I wrote another program that drew the buttons as such then another function in the program copied down the pixel positions into the file as a result I got a nice icon file. The main advantage of this over the normal method was that I had to displace a button there was nothing I needed to do. I just had to pass the start point of the button to the button constructor with the name of the icon file. At the necessary place the object would draw the button. Another advantage of this method was that I got a very fine grained control over the pictures in the icons. I could manually edit the files to see that the icons were like how I wanted them to be. Below I have put an example of a simple icon file.
File Saving Format
This was a bit of innovativeness from my end. If you see the editors of other mortals you see that the size of the graphics file is no less than 250KB, even if the graphic is empty. But then you have my editor. The size of the file varies by the frequency of the number of colours appearing in the file.
I'll start by telling you how others save the graphics in their files. They read the pixels in one by one and write it directly this is no doubt simple but an unnecessary waste of disk space. What my file saving module does is that it reads every pixels and it checks to see if the colour of the current pixel is same as that as of the previous pixel if so then then a counter is incremented. If the colour is different, then the previous colour and the counter value are written to the file. The counter is then reset to zero. This way the number of writes to the file is reduced thus reducing disk space for a file and making the program very efficient
Spray Paint
This is probably the stupidest thing people get foxed by. All you have to do is generate a random x and a random y for some given boundary conditions and translate the point position relative to the point position the mouse cursor.
You can try this using MS Paint. Take the spray paint tool and hold it down on a point for some time continuously. You will see that it either forms a box or a cirle. The boundary of the box or the circle is the boundary condition for the random point. By varying the size of the boundary condition you can change the size of the spray paint "brush".
Another thing is the density. This is again simple. You start up a small loop every time the spray paint gets control to generate the said number of random points. By increasing the value of the loop condition you can increase the density of the spray paint "brush".
Reading Material
For starters you need to know the various algorithms. For this you can refer Graphics Programming in C. This book the