Paint
A drawing application built for one artist.
This one started as a request from an artist in my family who could not find a drawing application that felt right. The paid ones were bloated, the free ones fought the tablet, and the good ones wanted a subscription forever.
So I built one. It is a real desktop application rather than a toy: pen pressure, layers, selections, transforms, a full brush engine, and a document format of its own.
Made for a pen
Pressure-sensitive input with smoothing, so a drawn line looks like a drawn line rather than a shaky mouse path.
Undo that branches
Instead of one straight line of history, the undo stack branches: try something, go back, try something else, and keep both. A timeline lets you scrub through the drawing's whole history.
Real brushes
Three separate brush engines, so brushes made for the major open drawing tools work here without conversion.
A workspace that moves
Panels dock and undock, layouts save, and a focus mode clears everything off the screen except the canvas.
It was a gift, and a gift is a good way to find out whether you can really build something. Nobody grades an internal tool the way a working artist grades their brush.
It also runs on Windows and Linux from the same code, which mattered more than I expected it to.
What it proves: The hardest audience for software is one person who will use it every day for something they care about. If it holds up for them, it will hold up for a team.