I’ve been playing a lot of Nintendo DS lately – the portability is a big issue, since I feel guilty about playing video games at home instead of drawing or being otherwise productive. There’s a lot of old school games getting re-released for it (handy fact – did you know that playing Arkanoid DS at full volume on a bus makes it more likely you get the seat to yourself!) and there’s also lots of ‘homebrew’ applications. ‘Homebrew’ is stuff that isn’t officially released which means you need a special cartridge for it, but they can open up what a DS is for!

Besides the Commodore 64 emulator I’ve been ‘playing’ a lot of “Colors!“. It’s an art program that in a ways is a lot like Corel Painter. (Anyone remember that?) Pick a colour (yes that’s how I spell colour), set your brush size and start doodling on the touch screen. Simple! What makes it really cool is that the screen is pressure sensitive, you have real control over the size and opacity of the brush and the image you are editing is pretty high-res for the DS – 512×384. And even better, you can email pictures out to yourself or other people.

Hey, here’s something I quickly knocked up just to test it out:

Cool, huh?

I won’t be drawing any comics on it any time soon but it’s a very, very cool utility. A while back I was looking into buying a Wacom Cintique because the idea of being able to draw directly onto a screen really appealed to me. That would have cost me several hundred dollars for a really heavy, old, second hand one that’s permanently tied to my PC.

Instead, I now have a portable version I can use anywhere, any time, for practically nothing.

Yeah, very cool!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.