Magic Designer Emulator 1.0

This computer program is an exact emulation of a toy which was sold years ago called Magic Designer . It also once had the name Hoot Nanny. It is made out of metal gears and comes with circular paper and colored pens.

Fun artistic tool set for producing mathematically inspired designs.

Allows you to produce an almost infinite number of spectacular designs. Simply enjoy, or use Magic Designs for rad T-shirt transfers, cool CD/DVD labels, vivid transparencies, glam greeting cards, boffo biz logos, or even as patterns for unique tattoos.

The original device: Its 6 inch diameter Center Gear meshed with two 1-inch Planetary Gears, each with a circling Peg. The Pen Arms were placed on these Gear Pegs or on fixed Stud Pegs at either side. The Left Gear was moved in a 60 degree arc by the Shift Lever. By selecting holes in the arms and a setting on the shift lever, brilliant designs could be cranked out on rotating paper discs.

The emulator is based upon solving mathematical formulas to calculate the point at which the arms meet given all of the current settings and an incremental turning of the Center gear. These series of points are connected in a smooth curve. And this constitutes one design. Using the emulator to save many designs together is what makes the result so beautiful.

There are generally two types of design suites one would make. One would be a series of closely packed varied designs. The second type is drawing a few designs and painting (coloring in) the overlapping symmetrical shapes. One can save the results to either PDF file or make a screen capture with an external tool. One can also load and save custom text design specification files (MGS). The files can be shared with either other users of the app, or with other implementations of the emulator.

It uses The High Fidelity 2D Graphics Rendering Engine for C++ known as Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG). It uses FLTK as its GUI toolkit. For PDF output, the program uses http://libharu.org/