Pixen requires Mac OS 10.3 or greater. If you'd like to see what's new in this version of Pixen, please visit the changelog.

In the course of developing Pixen 2, we created a custom color picker to complement the new color palette. It allows the user to drag in any two colors and choose a color between them. This could easily be used for light effects, blending, or anti-aliasing in pixel art, but we also realized that it would be quite useful outside of Pixen. Thus, we separated it from the program. Just follow the simple included instructions, and you can use the gradient color picker in any graphics application on your computer. You can download the NSColorPicker here.

Thel Fergison created these two palettes and sent them into us. Thanks! To install, just put them into /Users/YOU/Library/Application Support/Pixen/Palettes/Presets.

• Solids
• Pastels

The Pixen sources are released under the MIT license. If you want up-to-date sources, use subversion (see below).

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 svn://www.andymatuschak.org/Pixen/trunk Pixen

assuming that one has the SubVersion client. There is a Fink package available for SubVersion. 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 1.2 to build.

There is also a web-based interface to our repository.

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.