Whaaat? Only one color per note? What a let down.

That's clearly a design decision and not a limitation of the hardware, which is why it baffles me.  I like to draw on swapnote and it's really hard to do certain stuff without color. 

I think it might be a limitation.

Remember, Swapnote works via Street Pass as well.  Does anyone know what the limitation on the actual amount of data that can pass via Street Pass is?

I agree with UB. This is almost definitely a technical limitation with the fact that it plays a replay of the drawing and doesn't just transmit the image.

You can see evidence of it in how erasing is handled on the replay, the way it doesn't play back the strokes, instead just neglecting to draw there.


Still, it seems like there should be some way to solve that problem...

It's available in the US now

I only have one question. WHY?

If it can transfer a whole picture and 5 second sound file via street pass, it can handle a variable change.  I'd assume it's because of the original design it was not designed to make any changes while 'streaming' the video of the drawing, but it's definitely not a memory limitation.  They'd likely have to re-structure the code which they're not willing to do.

Nintendo are true entertainers, taking the "always leave them wanting more" motto to heart. Guess this is just another cool idea that arrived half-baked. Color Swapnotes would be awesome, if only you could use more than one color at a time. Maybe we'll be able to change folder colors with the next update (of course, with a limitation of changing the color of all folders at once and being unable to adjust them individually).
::)


Guess I'm insatiable.

Oh, they updated Swapnote? That's cool. Did they make it more user friendly? No? Alright. See you guys next time they update it.

I think you guys are on the right path.

Since Swapnote has to replay a "history' of the drawings, changing the color of each pixel would be a pretty big step since each pixels data isn't stored just individually but sequentially. These basically aren't 3D drawings, they're 4D drawings because of the time component added. Nintendo made the simplest step: a blanket color change across the whole note which probably wouldn't involve altering the swapnote internal message data structure that much.

The importance of not changing that message structure, something compact Nintendo probably designed for super-fast street-passing, is probably backwards compatibility. Don't have the update yet? Well, you can still see color notes that people send, no problem. Just all in black.

Colors! 3D can play back almost every stroke and erasing you make (up to a few hours worth). It's a design choice, not a technical limitation. I remember reading somewhere that they chose to limit the amount of ink, because they believed it would take way too long to redraw the entire note if they hadn't limited the ink. I'm thinking they have their own design reasons and concerns to create limitations on ink color. (Though honestly, I don't see any reasons myself.)

I suspect the design choices were also driven by the desire to streetpass the notes to people over a matter of seconds, which probably led them to design the data to be ultracompact and not really that flexible.

You're right Vahne, these are design choices, not technical limitations (except maybe in the case of any streetpass hard data caps? Do those exist?). In this case, early design choices must've restricted their ability to add new features down the line, like colored ink.

The update I'm looking forward to most is when I can block certain 'Friends' from sending me messages. I don't mind having them on my friends list but I really hate being spammed with mindless drivel. I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account for a reason.

People might be forgetting that they wanted to do color originally, but Nintendo decided that it would be too complicated for users (how, I don't know; it worked fine for PictoChat v.2). So this seems like a half-way measure, allowing color, but not allowing it to become "complicated" by having more than one color at a time.

Does it send these via Street Pass?

Did anybody try to read the colored messages without updating? What happened? Did you even get the messages? Were they in color or black and white?

I have not updated mine yet.
I got the messages.
They were colored in the little preview screen.
But when I opened them up they were just black.

lets swap notes ppl friend code: 1032-1460-0690

If Swapnote can say "this part is normal, this part is popped out," I don't see why they wouldn't be able to make it say "this part is normal and black, this part is popped out and blue."  The only reasonable explanation I can come up with for the single color limitation is backward compatibility with users who haven't updated, as was mentioned earlier.