What is Toolbox

Beautiful. Notice the drop shadows around the blocks and around the output image. Notice the slick busy indicator animation that is shown when Toolbox is working. No visual noise. Just beautiful.

Vector tagging is what CSS classes are to HTML. It makes it possible to do custom styling and filtering of a single vector path. You can assign tags to points and shapes.

No wires. In traditional node-based editors you have to connect nodes with wires and its a waste of time, because wires aren't necessary at all. Wires also make move/copy/paste/duplicate operations impossible. Toolbox doesn't have any wires and saves you a lot of time and trouble.

Helpful messages. A "blur" filter needs an image as input. Otherwise it cannot blur, when that happens a helpful message is shown that explains what's going on and how to resolve it. This eliminates guessing and saves time.

Feedback oriented. See what you do, while you do it. Many other programs have failed, their user interface is lagging, or nothing is happening when you drag a slider. In Toolbox you always get your feedback immediately.

Block browser, is where you locate the block that you want to insert. This can be done with partial searching or with tag browsing. There are 3 difficulty levels: easy, medium, hard. Be sure to start out with easy.

Easy-to-use. Toolbox is easy to learn, saves time, easy to remember. Serious errors cannot occur. Toolbox is satisfying to use. What else is there?

Busy indication. A moving striped bar is shown whenever Toolbox is busy. Its easy to follow what Toolbox is doing when you change a parameter.

Sliders everywhere. A slider is complimented by a text-field so its possible to type in a precise value. Many other programs still use text-fields so that you have to type in text on the keyboard and that is a waste of time. Sliders eliminates the need for typing and saves precious time.

Comments, lives in the construction area behind the blocks. They are gray rounded boxes with text inside. Are used in the example projects to describe how things works.

Example included. There are 50 example projects included with Toolbox, they can be accessed via the "Examples" menu. Its a good way to see what Toolbox is capable of. Feel free to use them as templates for your own projects.

Resize blocks. You can make a block wider by dragging in the left or right side. This is needed with blocks that takes multiple inputs and in situations where data is needed multiple places. Also aligned blocks looks nicely ordered.

Recycling. In traditional graphics programs you throw away your work when you are done. In Toolbox you can take the good things you made in a previous project and use it again. This saves time.

Status in title-bar. The window title-bar shows filename and info about the output. If Toolbox is processing data, then progress is shown. For bitmap output it shows the resolution. And it can tell you if there is no output.

Bitmap filters and generators, such as blur, perlin, worley, crop, text, trim, light, normal, gamma, photo, extract, gradient, stripes. Some of these filters are able to change the size of the image, this is unique for Toolbox.

Mouse/keyboard as in Finder. CMD for inverting the selection. ALT for duplication. ESC to cancel an ongoing mouse operation. Double click to focus.

Vector filters and generators, such as edit, soft, align, transform, gear, mount, mix, shape, style. No other programs has vector filters, which makes Toolbox entirely unique. Be sure to check them out.

Fitts law. The UI is made with minimal mouse movement in mind. This is the reason the parameter tab is located in the right-bottom corner. Use the spacebar for scrolling. Saves time and is better for your arms.

Mesh filters and generators for advanced distortion effects such as tunnels, twirls, planes.

Zoom and Move. Click or hit F1 to toggle between size to fit or actual size. Drag to move. Use mouse wheel or plus/minus to change zoom factor.

Meta blocks are a special category of blocks. Their purpose are to re-route the data to another place in the graph.

Swap areas. Press F2 to rearrange the large areas in the UI. This can either give a bigger view of the output or the construction area.

Drag + drop. Blocks can be moved and resized. Vector paths can be drawn. Photos can be dropped. Blocks can be dragged from the block browser into the construction area. Its used everywhere.

Photo browser, scan through your photos without opening iPhoto. When you have found an image you like, then drag it into the construction area and it will insert a "Photo" block.

Vector editor. Draw closed shapes with minimal use of the mouse. Double click to insert a point. Additional clicks for inserting more points. Move mouse away and you are out of insert mode. You find it in the "Edit" block. Unique!

Automatic software updates. New releases of Toolbox are downloaded to your computer and installed. Saves you the trouble of doing this manually. Thanks to Sparkle!

Single window. Everything you need is inside one window. This makes better use of screen space and is less cluttered than multi window programs.

Undo/Redo. If you accidentally delete some blocks or change the wrong parameter, then you can go back in time and do things differently. A life saver.

Export bitmap graphics as PNG or JPG. Either with or without alpha channel. The compression ratio can be changed while the file size is updated.

Document based. You can have many documents open at the same time. This allows you to copy/paste from one document to another.

Export vector graphics as a PDF file, that can be imported in another program for further editing or for printing. This way you can get it on business-cards, posters and even T-shirts.

Multithreaded, so the UI is responsive and you don't see crazy beach balls.

Import PNG, JPG, PDF, PSD, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PICT, TGA, ICO, ICNS. There is a "Photo" block for this purpose.

Cocoa + OpenGL, for UI and for high speed screen updates.