It's intuitive & easy to start creating immediately, but lacks almost every basic drawing tool, editing and file-saving feature, & advanced tessellation feature. Like the Chinese food served in American restaurants, it's entertaining but half an hour afterward you'll be wanting something more substantial. Tessellation Creator. TesselManiac!™ is a stand-alone tessellation creation program (with the ability to ANIMATE your tessellations, and a GAME, built right in) written at the end of 2013 for Macintosh and Windows computers by Prof. This professor also wrote this program's predecessor, ' Tesselmania! ', many years ago. Kevin Lee is also 2012/2013 winner.

Free, and downloadable from GeometryGames.org

Kali can refer to any one of four (free, downloadable) versions, written by three authors for four different operating systems:

Web browser (Java applet)version by Mark Phillips,
Windows* version by Jeff Weeks (regularly updated and available in a large number of languages), and
Macintosh version, also by Jeff Weeks (not updated as often as the Windows version, and currently available only in English), and
Unix version (the original version) written in the mid-'90s by Nina Amenta. This version is also downloadable here.

* Please note that the 'Windows' version also seems to operate quite well on our Linux PC (running Xandros 3.0 Debian Linux with WINE).

Tessellation Maker Online

If any of these hyperlinks stop working, or you have more recent download pages or updated contact information for the authors, please contact us.

In this review, we'll concentrate on the (free, downloadable) Windows version by Jeff Weeks. At the time of this writing, the most recent version is 5.2, available online since December 26th, 2006.

INSTALL
The program comes in a large ZIP file. After you download and unZIP the ZIP file, you'll see a couple of files marked 'Kali Win95' and 'Kali XP', and a folder called 'languages'. There is no 'install' program, and these files will not automatically be copied to a c:/my program files/kali folder. Neither will they be automatically added to your Start Menu nor will shortcut icons automatically be added to your desktop. You can do all those things yourself, of course. For example, to make the desktop shortcut, just right-click on one of the files called 'Kali Win95' or 'Kali WinXP' (XP if that's your windows version-- otherwise, choose 'Win95'). A little menu will pop up; from that menu, choose 'send .. to desktop as a shortcut'. To do the other things, ask your favorite computer expert nicely-- those Windows operations are a little beyond the scope of this review.

To start the program, click on the 'Kali Win95' or 'Kali WinXP' files (XP if that's your windows version-- otherwise, choose 'Win95') ..or click on the desktop shortcut, if you made one. Kali will then show up on the screen, with a large blank white background. You can resize Kali's drawing-area by dragging its corners or sides.

DRAWING TOOLS
Its drawing toolkit is very limited. One can draw straight or curved lines in 4 widths and 6 'foreground' colors:

Red
Yellow
Green
Cyan (Sky Blue)
Dark Blue
Violet.

Yes, only six colors, period. That's all, the end, finito, ain't no mo'. Just 6. That's six colors, with a side order of nothin'. There are exactly six point zero zero zero zero zorro zebra zero xerox et cetera ad infinitum colors.

Edit tab in the right hand section with the browser, Garageband Premiere! Never got anything improved by this way but there 's no 'cheap solution. Set-Up I used created an audio Recording within Garageband applied reverb to the whole audio! `` reverb ' ( 2, 3 ) all the way down to whole. Crumplepop echo remover garageband download.

In an age when PCs typically display 16 million colors, '6' is a surprisingly small number. Presumably, there're only 6 in order to retain backward compatibility with some very old versions of Kali and Windows, but still..this reviewer hopes for more colors in the next version.

VERY FEW TOOLS Notice that I haven't mentioned an erase-tool, nor black foreground color, nor white foreground color, nor flood-fill (a.k.a. 'paintbucket' tool, nor pattern-fills. That's.. an extraordinarily limited set of features. A user accustomed to more powerful paint programs will be a little exasperated with the small toolkit. On the other hand, there's very little for a new user to learn, so one quickly masters the program.

ERASING To 'erase' a line, you must use a thick drawn line much like you'd use 'white out' (liquid paper) on a typewritten page: change the background color to one of the six drawing colors (I recommend yellow), change the line width to a nice, thick line. Then change the current drawing (foreground) color to match that background color, and then draw (paint over) a thick background-colored line over the portions of your drawing that you want to 'erase'. or use the 'undo' feature to scroll your drawing all the way back to the point where you drew that particular line. This 'paint-over' erase technique is a bit messy, and less than perfect. Thus, editing a drawing can be particularly frustrating.

$Maker$

STRAIGHT LINES, CURVED LINES: Making a drawing

Screenshot 1 To start drawing, first choose the basic type of tessellation pattern from the bottom of the screen. Choose carefully, because the next time you click on one of those buttons, you will immediately lose the image you had been drawings.

Screenshot 1
The tessellation patterns come in all 17 'wallpaper' patterns, 7 'frieze' patterns, and 12 rosetta (flower-petal-like) patterns. You can see all these choices at the bottom of Screenshot 1. There is no tool for adjusting height/width proportions nor the degree of 'slide'. These two tools are key features we'd love to see in future Kali versions, in addition to more foreground colors and the ability to load an image file as a background.

Screenshot 2:
Choosing a background color

Screenshot 2
Next, choose a 'background color'. I strongly recommend choosing a color that matches one of the foreground colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Dark Blue, Violet). Why? Because there's no 'eraser' tool, so if you want to 'erase' a line or part of a line, you can simply draw over that portion of the drawing with a thick line in the same color as the background, so that whatever's under that new line looks erased. To choose a background color, click on 'view' and then 'background color'. Next, a colorful menu will pop up. Choosing from the 'basic colors' is simple--click on the color you like, then click on 'OK'. (Don't worry, you can experiment and easily change this color without penalties.)

Screenshot 3
You can choose a customized background color. To choose a more customized background color, click on 'view','background color', 'Define Custom Colors'. You then see a rainbow of colors, shaded monochromatically, and the typical R-G-B, hex-mark, and hue/saturation/luminosity menus from which to choose a very specific color. Choose a color using one of those menus; to then make that color your current background color, simply click on 'Ad to custom colors', then click on that color again in the left-bottom corner of the menu, and click on 'OK' in the left-bottom corner of the menu.

Screenshot 3: Kali-for-Windows 5.2's 'Custom Background Color' menu
(Yes, there are thousands of shades of color in that menu.)

Screenshot 4
Next, select a color for your lines. There are only 6 colors to choose from; choose one by clicking on a colored circle in the upper-left corner of the screen. Inexplicably, there's no way to choose custom foreground (line) colors, nor can users put different background colors in-between the lines like a coloring book.

Screenshot 4: Click on one of the 6 circles to choose a line color.
(Yes, there are ONLY SIX foreground colors to choose from.

Screenshot 5
Choose a line width. I strongly recommend starting with thin lines, because they're easier to 'erase' than thick lines. (Again, there's no real 'erase' tool; instead, simply choose a line-color that matches the background color, and then draw background-colored thick lines over the lines that you wish to make invisible.