Dabbler 2.0

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On: 2015-07-23 18:51:17
Updated by: MR
On: 2023-12-23 17:02:07
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  • Dabbler 2.0 
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What is Dabbler 2.0?

Want to draw with your Mac, but can't justify the expense of a professional-level paint program like Fractal Design's Painter? The same company's aptly named Dabbler 2 might he the answer. A 16-bit color program, Dabbler 2 provides much of Painter's natural-media-emulation environment at a fraction of the cost.

Dabbler 2 includes a flipbook feature, for creating simple 2-D animations, and provides built-in drawing lessons. The program now comes on CD-ROM with 120 paper textures, 300 stencils, 100 professional stock photographs, and 3 libraries of image fonts from Image Club.

Four Drawerfuls

Dabbler is organized around a simulation of an artist's drawing table, with four drawers holding drawing papers, tools, colors, and xtras (tool modifiers) arrayed across the top of the screen. The drawing area beneath these items represents one page of a sketchbook.

Click on a handle, and that drawer opens to reveal its contents. Icons on each drawer's face display your most recent selections, keeping frequently used tools and colors handy. The paper drawer’s libraries give you access ro more texrurcs.

The colors drawer holds eight colorchip palettes, eight gradient palettes, and a color wheel for customizing them. You can paint using the colors of an underlying image, a process called cloning. For example, yon can import a photo and recast it as an oil painting. Dabbler accepts standard plug-ins, including Acquire filters for directly scanning images.

Like Painter..., Dabbler emulates natural media, so pencils and brushes interact realistically with the digital paper to which they're applied. Water blends colors, crayons leave a waxy trail, and felt markers bleed, all quite convincingly Dabbler 2 offers five tool sizes, up from three in the previous version.

At first glance, this version of the program appears to have fewer tools. That's because Dabbler 2's image-processing functions (sharpen, soften, motion blur, glass distortion, and so on) have moved from the cool drawer to an expanded Effects menu. Similarly, the Sketchbook-Browse/Edit, Type Styles, Sound, and Sessions Recorder functions have been transformed into menu commands.

These changes improve Dabbler’s interface. Accessing these functions from the menu saves you from opening drawers frequently to retrieve tools you’ve put away. You can also now browse the current sketchbook, as well as invoke the program's tracing-paper and image-cloning modes, by using buttons on the face of the drawer cabinet — a great improvement. However, to edit the current sketchbook, you must use the menu command — a ⌘-key sequence here would be a nice addition.

Dabbler's teaching methods are also improved. Dabbler 2 replaces version 1's simple recorded sessions with Tutors, QuickTime-driven, interactive lessons that play on floating windows above your drawing page. You can interrupt the lesson at any time and try the techniques on the drawing page, right next to the Tutor.

Tutors are based on Walter Foster Publishing's learn-how-to-draw books — Cartooning with Brine Blitz (of the PBS series) and Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair, the famous Disney Studio animator. Unfortunately, the two lessons in Dabbler 1, taken from Walter Foster's How to Draw volumes 1 and 2, offered more basic drawing lessons for beginners, and these are gone. Nonetheless, both new Tutors are excellent and entertaining.

A Tutor also supplants a primed manual. In truth, Dabbler is so easy to learn that there's not much to document Overall, the Tutor-based manual and tutorials are fine, but they obscure drawers and dialog boxes while you're learning. Call me old-fashioned, but I found Dabbler 1's printed reference (a mere 18 copiously Illustrated pages) more useful.

Dabbler 2 stores images in userdefined multipage sketchbooks. These offer a convenient way to organize projects, and Dabbler automatically saves their contents when you close them.

Generally speaking, autosaving is a good idea, but this implementation makes it very easy to damage an image. For example, if you apply a global effect, say glass distortion, and inadvertently touch the tablet with your stylus, you can no longer undo the effect — like it or not, it’s now part of the sketchpad image. There is a Revert command, but it takes you back to the start of the session, so you lose intervening changes you do want to retain. Of course, you can save images as separate files (doing a Save As every time) or continually copy images to new pages, but that's a pain.

Dabbler 2 uses the linked-page structure of sketchbooks to produce flipbook animations. Fliphooks are limited to 100 pages in length, and their images, to 320 by 320 pixels in size, but building them is wonderfully simple. You can have as many as 3 pages transparent, letting you easily fine-tune image movements. VCR-style controls let you flip pages os you draw and run the finished animation. You can export fiipbooks as QuickTime or Video for Windows files and print them to produce physical flipbooks — even Nintendo-jaded kids will love them.

The Last Word

Budding artists and novice computer users will find Dabbler 2 an easy and affordable way to paint on the Mac. It’s perfect for home use or light professional applications. And if you're among the artistically challenged, its built-in, interactive lessons might even help you learn to draw.

Martinez, Carlos Domingo. (March 1996). Dabbler 2. Macworld. (pg. 63).


Download Dabbler 2.0 for Mac

(9.55 MiB / 10.02 MB)
System 7.0 - 7.6 / compressed w/ Stuffit
25 / 2015-07-24 / f2576e1afa7f70a260477e9c2234bebacf326293 / /
(9.49 MiB / 9.95 MB)
System 7.0 - 7.6 / Zipped
18 / 2015-07-23 / 638fc0c5beb616868f787b4bc53796adcef85be6 / /
(304.15 MiB / 318.93 MB)
/ compressed w/ Stuffit
3 / 2017-11-26 / c950f13c2d9222e4bc2fffdbe34ff01ec8b57118 / /
(175.86 MiB / 184.4 MB)
/ compressed w/ Stuffit
1 / 2023-12-23 / 732c1e69a37e97974b55d2e8e10c0050c6355b42 / /


Architecture


68K + PPC (FAT)



Compatibility notes

S/N: DM200NAZ0006148-FKWW-001

Installation Instruction for OS X 10.4:

  1. Unzip the Dabbler installer, and you should be left with an .sea file. (e.g. Dabbler_2.0_Installer.sea_.zip changes to Dabbler_2.0_Installer.sea)
  2. Change the .sea extension to .app, and then launch the installer. (e.g. Dabbler_2.0_Installer.sea changes to Dabbler_2.0_Installer.app)

 

 


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