🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2431@sousa.tay.dec.com> long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com (Rich Long) writes:
> I've gotten an offer from Deneba to purchase their new paint program,
> ArtWorks, and Spelling Coach Professional, for an attractive price. I wonder
> if any of you have seen either of these yet, and could comment on them?

artWorks is basically a new version of UltraPaint. I've used UltraPaint for
years as my main drawing and painting program and always liked it better
than SuperPaint. I found it to be solid, easy to use, with incredible 
graphics power for the price. I use it for drawing technical figures at
work and for editing 300 dpi scanned images at home. I've only had 
artWorks for a week or so, and am happy with it. 

It's easy to combine bitmap images of any resolution (up to 2700) and
bit depth (up to 32) with draw objects. You can even edit 32 bit color
drawings and paintings on an 8 bit system.

It reads and writes lots of graphics formats:  Canvas, EPSF, GIF,
Illustrator 1.1, Illustrator 88, MacDraw I, MacDraw II, MacPaint, TIFF,
Startup Screen, PICT I and II, and of course UltraPaint..

I found UltraPaint to be a very solid program; Deneba put out a couple of
free updates to fix minor problems. artWorks has a minor screen redraw
bug at high magnification (it will show up to 3200X); based on
previous experience with Deneba, I'm confident it will be fixed
quickly. 

artWorks has introduced a new feature that seems great, but I'm
reserving judgement. Against Apple guidelines, they use MultiFinder
temp memory (the memory normally used to launch new applications)
for image storage. UltraPaint was always memory-hungry, and any time
you're editing large 300 dpi images you will need lots of memory.
But if you switch between editing draw graphics or small bitmap
images and editing large scanned images, you have to keep readjusting
your application memory partition. By using MF temp memory, artWorks
avoids this. If you watch the Finder about box as you edit in artWorks, 
the "Largest unused block" bounces up and down as you edit and undo.
artWorks will happily eat all the free RAM in your machine as needed to 
allow editing of large images. When you close the file, it releases the
memory.

artWorks is not a replacement for PhotoShop. It can't feather
selection edges -- an absolute necessity for sophisticated photo manipulation.
It can, however, use Photoshop filter plug-ins to expand its already
large repertoire of image effects. And it does have a magic wand and
a smudge tool, so basic photo editing isn't totally hopeless. 

artWorks gives you the drawing power of MacDraw II and the painting
power of Studio/32 (more or less) for a fraction of the price of either.
I think it's a great program at a great price.
-- 
Russell Williams
Not speaking for Apple Computer