ColorToy is released into the public domain, for what it’s worth.
After years in the black and white world of the “Fat Mac” and the Mac Plus, God graciously endowed me with the means to buy a real computer: a Mac IIci. I was eager to experiment with Mac color, and ColorToy is one result.
As the name implies, ColorToy is not a serious application that merits a lot of explaining. Instead, I invite you to play with it. I think you’ll find it an interesting diversion. I do want to mention a very few things:
• ColorToy must be run on a machine with Color QuickDraw. Trying to use it on a “Classic” system will only get you a dialog box saying so.
• Under the “Modes” menu I’ve included the transfer modes I think produce the most interesting patterns. ColorToy comes up using the “subOver” mode. Try out the rest and observe the effects.
• There are three “sweeps” available under the “Other” menu. The first resembles an expanding and contracting trapezoid. The second works something like an old-fashioned radar screen display. The third begins at one corner and sweeps the window top to bottom, left to right, etc., depending on the rotation. The sweeps may be made to rotate in a clockwise (default) or counterclockwise direction.
• Sometimes it may seem that the “sweep” has stopped. It hasn’t. ColorToy chooses colors at random, and the new color it chooses is sometimes not distinguishable from the last one. Also, with most of the modes, what you see drawn is a product of one color combined with another. Sometimes the combination doesn’t produce a visible change. Give it a few seconds. The sweep will show up again.
• To clear the screen and set the background color, choose “Set Background to…” from the “Other” menu. It brings up the Color Picker. (It’s the same one you get when you set you computer’s desktop color and pattern using the General control panel.) Click on the color you want and press “Ok.” The window will be filled with the color you chose.
• Under the “Other” menu, I give a choice of colors or grays. In computer lingo, a “gray” is any color where the red, green, and blue elements are numerically equal. (Incidentally, to a computer white and black are “gray.”) If a gray is drawn on top of a color using anything but the “Copy” mode, all you’ll notice is a combination of the gray and the underlying color, which will usually be a color. If you’ll start out with a uniformly gray screen, you can usually get gray patterns.
• Clicking anywhere in the window will pause the sweep. Clicking again will cause it to resume.
