Pixen is an innovative graphics editor for the Mac. It's designed from top to bottom for pixel artists—people who make low-resolution raster art like the sprites you see in old video games. But it's great for artists of all arenas: Pixen is like a very powerful MSPaint or a simpler, more agile Photoshop. And best of all, it's Free!

Layers allow you to take control of your image's composition and encapsulate its components for efficient editing. Keep shading separate from colors; keep hair separate from the rest of a character's head. And Pixen's the only pixel editor that'll let you do it.

Pixen allows you to create animations just as easily as you would single images. It's just drag and drop, then you've got an animated GIF, a QuickTime movie, or even a sprite sheet on your hands.

If you're working on a sprite for a cell phone game, you know what it's like to work with restricted palettes. Pixen understands your pain. Its palette features allow you to edit, reuse, share, quantize, and otherwise manipulate your palettes. And it supports Adobe's, Microsoft's, and Jasc's palette formats natively!

If you're working on tiles for a game or a background, you have to be sure that it looks good when it's repeated over and over again. Pixen's tile view allows you to check out your seams in realtime—without limiting your editing abilities in any way.

Pixen's extensive background tools let you see your image just as it will appear in-game: you can draw Ralph the Crusader over that rugged grass tile. Alternately, you can work on a traditional transparency indicator and have Pixen draw a different background when your mouse is outside the window to quickly get another perspective on your work.

We've been working on Pixen for about three years now, so it's accumulated a great deal of features. Here are a few of our other favorites:

• Beautiful Aqua+Cocoa interface
• Extensive file format support:
• Image formats: .pxi, .gif, .jpg, .png, .tiff, .bmp, .ico, .eps, .pict, .lif, and .pxi
• Animation formats: .pxa, .gif (animated), .mov, a sequence of images, a sprite sheet
• Palette formats: .pxpalette, .pal (Microsoft), .pal (Jasc), .act
• Assign a tool and color to the right mouse button
• Alignment crosshairs to keep your work straight and proportionate
• Configurable tools: brush size, tolerance, contiguity, sampling sources, etc.
• Make and draw with patterns
• A flexible preview window to keep things in perspective when you're zoomed in
• A floating info panel gives you instant answers about colors and sizes
• Overlays in animation to show you what the previous cel looked like
• Highly customizable grid for any kind of project
• Optional automatic backups for complete confidence
• Comprehensive, searchable documentation
• Universal binary for any Mac
• Automatic updates with Sparkle

The Open Sword Group uses the Subversion RCS for our work on Pixen. If one has Apple's Developer Tools and wishes to see the sources of or work on Pixen, or simply to get the very most recent version, one can run

svn co http://code.andymatuschak.org/pixen/trunk/ Pixen

It is important to keep in mind that Pixen sources obtained in this manner will likely be buggy or unfinished. They will probably require XCode 2.3 to build.

If there is a patch that anyone would like to have committed to Pixen (or if there are any questions about Pixen development), please e-mail us and we will review it for admission. Pixen is open-source, and so we welcome fixes and features from outside as well as in.