Colors! is a digital painting

Digital painting

Digital painting is an emerging art form in which traditional painting techniques such as watercolor, oils, impasto, etc. are applied using digital tools by means of a computer, a digitizing tablet and stylus, and software. Traditional painting is painting with a physical medium as opposed to a...

 application for the Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS

The is a portable game console produced by Nintendo, first released on November 21, 2004. A distinctive feature of the system is the presence of two separate LCD screens, the lower of which is a touchscreen, encompassed within a clamshell design, similar to the Game Boy Advance SP...

, iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

 and iPod Touch

IPod Touch

The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

. It was voted the most popular homebrew

Homebrew (video games)

Homebrew is a term frequently applied to video games or other software produced by consumers to target proprietary hardware platforms not typically user-programmable or that use proprietary storage methods...

application on the Nintendo DS by readers of the R4 for DS blog.

History

Colors! was originally released in June 2007 as a simple homebrew painting application for the Nintendo DS. It was developed by Jens Andersson, a programmer and designer who was on sabbatical from the games industry and wanted to experiment with the potential of the new handheld platform. Shortly after, Rafał Piasek created an online gallery where users could upload paintings made with the program.

Colors! quickly became one of the best-known homebrew applications on the Nintendo DS and, in September 2008, it was also released fo the iPhone and iPod Touch. As of August 2010, it had been downloaded almost half a million times.

Development of Colors! DS homebrew officially came to an end in December 2010 although the official gallery still accepts submissions from DS users and the unofficial forums remain active.
However, it has recently been announced that it is set to be released on the eShop for Nintendo 3DS towards the end of 2011, thereby giving it a wider audience than its previous incarnation.