| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION GRAPHIQUE ★ CHERRY PAINT ★ |
| CHERRY PAINT (c) MICRO C (Hebdogiciel) | CHERRY PAINT (Amstrad Computer User) | CHERRY PAINT (Amstrad Action) | CHERRY PAINT (CPC Amstrad International) |
Cherry Paint has knocked me off my feet. It makes the Amstrad look like an Apple Macintosh. Now those machines cost around £2000, so this program represents the bargain oi the decade. What do you get for your cash? Cherry Paint :s an art program which can be used to produce black-and-white pictures in mode 2, the Amstrad's screen mode with highest resolution. Like the Mac, :t works in user-friendly WIMP style. That's the buzzword for windows, icons, mouse and pointer. Cherry Paint will work tlirough the keyboard, a joystick or a mouse - run a configuration program to select which, or to set up printer controls. The program only has one screen. Down its left, icons - pictures rather Thar, words on a menu - select different methods of putting ink or. paper: a pen for freehand drawing, a spraycan, a paintbrush and a rubber. You can also print text anywhere on the screen. The others are a little more abstract. The hand is for rolling the screen around, so that you can use the whole rather than just one corner. The line is for drawing lines; they behave like rubber bands, stretching and contracting until you set them. Zoom is easy to use. Move a small window about the screen; its contents are magnified, and on the blow-up you can change pixels individually. You use this option for "cut and paste" see below. The other two icons draw boxes.
To the left and bottom left are icons to change the line texture and painting. You can draw thick chunky lines or pixel-thin ones, and use a fine or hefty brush. At the bottom is the palette of textures. These are the 40 patterns that you can actually put on the screen, ranging from white through dots and liatchings to jet-black. Unfortunately you cannot edit them to create new textures. One pull-down menu simply tells you that the program was written by Pascal Higelin. As you might gather from the demon stration pictures, Cherry Paint :s French in origin. The second menu lets you load and save pictures, select disk-drive, clear the screen or print out the picture. While the printer is chuntering away, you can move the cursor around. That's totally unneccessary, but is still a pretty impressive feat of mimicry - GEM is exactly the same. With the third option you can cut out a portion of the screen and do all sorts of clever things with it, like mirroring it in either axis, copying it to another location or pasting it somewhere else. The fourth allows you to see the whole screen at once. The next option lets you select a font - however, only one font is available, so this seems a waste of time. From the last two menus you can change the size and style of any text. Cherry Paint has one huge advantage over many of its rivals: it's so well designed and laid out that you want to use it to draw pictures. The control of the pointer is "intelligent" it moves in pixels at first, but if you keep moving it accelerates. That way control can be as fine or as crude as neccessary. I have not seen the manual or documentation, so all I can say is I hope that's because a little care is being taken over them. The program really explains itself, and that is what WIMPS are all about - making programs easier to use and understand. AA |
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