PixelMaster

May 2013 – mid 2015 · age 31–33

What it was

A pixel-art editor for Android phones, written in C# on Mono for Android with OpenTK and OpenGL ES 1.1, kept beside a release build of an earlier 2013 prototype that shared only the name. Its model knew nothing about Android: surfaces that could put, get and draw pixels, finger interactions chosen from thirteen strategies, and one struct that carried screen, canvas and pixel coordinates together so no tool ever converted them. Each undo step was three packed integers, trimmed to a byte budget. A single functional per-pixel pass, which Jeff named Kinkolate, classified each pixel as cut, copy, keep or delete, and so implemented four clipboard tools at once. Textures remembered when the GL context died and re-uploaded lazily. It worked as a single-layer editor with six brushes, mirror painting, selection and PNG save. Layers were modelled and switched off.

Wins, for the age

• At thirty-three, Jeff kept a phone app's model entirely free of the phone, so everything interesting could have run and been tested on a desktop.
• Kinkolate: cut, copy, move and stamp as one pass with four different lambdas. A primate invented the word and the abstraction together, and both stuck.
• Undo as packed deltas with a byte budget, finding on their own what GIMP's undo memory limit (2004) had found, and the right design for a phone.
• Survived GL context loss by stamping every texture with its upload tick, with no global re-upload pass.

What it taught

• Separate the model from the platform even when there is only one platform.
• A product with six names has not been decided. The launcher, manifest, assembly and solution all disagreed about what to call it.
• Per-pixel get and set calls explain why a memory readout sat on screen every frame: Jeff could feel the cost.
• Invented vocabulary sticks. Kinkolate and the toolbar "troopers" set a naming habit that shows up later.

Genealogy

Ancestors: none on record. This canvas started fresh. Descendants: Cutter: rectangles and pixel heuristics over art, for an asset pipeline. World Bootstrap: an editor model kept apart from its toolkit, with undo as data.

Epitaph

Here lies PixelMaster. Six names, one good model, and a made-up word that meant cut, copy, move and stamp all at once.