Stardust

My first interactive graphical application, Stardust was born as an exercise in programming the X Window System. At first a simple painting editor for pixel-based images, it later evolved into a 2-D drawing program based on objects, which could be individually moved and edited. Objects have attributes like interior and border color, border style and width, and so on.

Some features

Multiple simultaneous documents
Pixel & color edition; importing GIF, raster, PCX and other formats
Editable objects (including polygons, text, Bezier /Hermite curves)
Object scaling, rotation, blending
PostScript printing and exporting

Stardust snapshot

No one of these drawings was scanned or imported in any way, except the basic map which was vectorized from a geographical database and colorized in Stardust. The editor also extruded the state map and the logo.

Simple object handling could emulate some paint capabilities, like these color gradients. Stardust mixed pixel/object operations. Bezier curves and polygons are edited in similar ways. However, text operations are somewhat limited.

Polygon blending, object flipping

Complex architectural plan with multiple objects and layers zooms around for detailed edition. Using different colors in different layers ease precise positioning. Blending can also be used for quick object cloning at predictable intervals.

Stardust used only the Xlib library, not even X Intrinsics, so it was portable to any Unix system supporting X with no source changes. Its user interface modules were refined and afterwards became the Astra User Interface Library

The Stardust project was discontinued due to the availability of modern, user-friendly vector drawing tools for Unix.