Switchnote Studio

Switchnote Studio is a Nintendo Switch homebrew app for making frame-by-frame drawings and animations. It began with the artwork and interface assets from Jaames's 2020 Fakenote Studio April Fools' project, then grew into a working editor.

This is the source snapshot for Ver 0.1.51. The included switchnote.nro is the original build from the project, with SHA-256 B0B56FDC81766C8740622AC81BA5E72E90293099CBDB96B5BBF0372AC0C10CCA.

What it does

• Draw on a 640 × 360 canvas with four layers, pen and brush tools, an eraser, fill, undo and redo.
• Make and play animations at eight speeds, with onion skin and frame controls.
• Add music and frame sound effects. Images can be imported from the Switch album, an IR camera or another device.
• Save signed .sppm Switchnotes locally, make spin-offs, and export animations.
• Browse and post through Switchnote Gallery at https://reximemo.net/nswitch/.

The app needs full Homebrew Menu memory. Launch it through App Override; it cannot run in Applet Mode. Put the NRO at switch/Switchnote/switchnote.nro on the SD card. User data is stored under sdmc:/switch/Switchnote/.

Building

Install devkitPro's Switch toolchain, libnx, switch-pkg-config, switch-sdl2, switch-sdl2_image, switch-sdl2_ttf and switch-sdl2_mixer. On Windows, run ./build.ps1 from PowerShell. The script expects devkitPro at C:\devkitPro, or you can pass -DevkitProPath. On Linux or macOS, set up the devkitPro environment and run make from a path without spaces.

The build writes switchnote.nro to the project root. source/ and include/ contain the app, romfs/ contains its bundled assets, and FORMAT.md describes the .sppm format. server/ contains a local Gallery test server; it is not the production service. The JavaScript and Python readers and converters are in tools/.

Licences and assets

The app code is released under the GNU AGPL version 3. The standalone tools have their own MIT licence in tools/LICENSE. Fakenote Studio assets and Bitstream Vera fonts have notices in licenses/.