In the “useless but pretty” category comes today’s application out of Google’s Mac Playground: Top Draw. Google has long been accused of giving short shrift to the Mac community, and their Google Mac Playground is an attempt to rectify that situation. Top Draw is a fun little application from the Google development treasure trove for Mac heads to play with.

What it does is give you a place to play with scripted images on your Mac. In a way, it brings the power behind the iTunes Visualizer to your desktop, since most of the images seem to have that pretty, surreal, trippy visualizer feel to them.

This program is a lot of fun, but only has one useful feature - it offers a safe place to play with scripts. Often you can’t risk running an unknown script on your Mac (well, you could, I suppose, but it would not be smart). This gives you what Google has deemed a “safe sandbox” to play with your generated images and scripts without doing your system any harm. That’s a beautiful thing.

Top Draw also lets you create desktop wall papers out of the images you make, which can be a fun feature for people who like to change their wall paper often. It also includes a built in viewer for seeing the images running with the scripts, and a way to use the images as a screen saver. All of these features are available to you the moment you make your image.

The program uses a combination of Apple Quartz and CorelImage as its backbone. It also runs JavaScript scripts. The folks at Google outlined the rest of the backbone best: “In addition to the drawing commands that are supported by the HTML canvas tag, there is support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing and much more.”

Google’s Top Draw is a free download.

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Entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 9:28 pm under Mac software.  Print This Post

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