Summary

ArtPaint, Becasso, Pixel32, Refraction, Wonderbrush are still active.

ArtPaint

Latest: 2.0 March 2003. Previous +1 day. Open source

Status: Under development as part of BeUnited. At the moment (Sept 2003) there is very little activity in CVS - a shame for this to fade away.

ArtPaint is a really nice program. It is fast, and supports layers, transparency, filters and add-ins. It is very easy to pick up and use.

The UI is not always completely comfortable to use, e.g. the save as does not use a filename by double clicking on the file.

A PowerPC version is available for the latest build... Hassle Emson to get a copy.

Becasso

Latest 2.3 July 2003. Previous +9 months. Commercial $29

Status: In development

Becasso is a really nice image editor, with a unique feature of the selection mode where a selection may be made using any of the normal painting tools.

However the GUI is not completely intuitive. There are lots of key / mouse button combinations that you need to know to use it well. They are documented on the sumware site though.

v2.2 seems to hang when using some filters in conjunction with the select mode, and moving/drawing on the preview box. The author has fixed this problem and it should be in the next release.

BePhotoMagic

Latest 0.62a Aug 2001. Previous +2 months. Open Source

Status: Developer (DarkWyrm) will work on Eden and GIMP for BeOS projects instead of bpm.

This is not really stable enough to use. Also drawing (e.g. with the brush) is not responsive.

Easel

Latest 1.0 Apr 2001. Freeware

Status: No more development.

Eden

Latest 0.7a Feb 2002. Previous +0 months. Shareware

Status: Developer (Guillame Maillard) is now working on BlueEyedOS and will come back to Eden when that is finished.

It looks interesting but the interface is just too confusing to figure out what to do.

GIMP for BeOS

Status: This is being ported but apparently has stopped. See MissingInAction.

Inferno

Latest Beta 3 Jan 2002. Commercial.

Status: This is now called Refraction.

Photon

Latest 0.5.2 Sep 2000. GPL Open Source

Status: Abandoned. Team moved on to work on Inferno.

Pixel32

Latest 0.99.8 alpha demo 349 Dec 2002. Previous +8 months. Shareware $32 for prerelease - will be $75-$100 on release.

Status: In development for several platforms (win, linux, qnx, solaris).

Refraction

Latest 1.0 Beta 6.3 August 2003. Previous +5 months. Commercial 39.95

Status: In development.

Wonderbrush

Latest 1.0.0 25 August 2003. Commercial $7.50

Status: in active development.

This is reported to be a very fast editor. Well worth a download.

ImageMagick

Latest: 5.3.6 July 2001. Open source

This is a port of a widely used Unix app, however the port is CLI only, since the GUI version uses X11.

Nevertheless, the CLI utilities support an incredible amount of formats, and allows you to do a lot of operations on image files, which you can automate with shell scripts.