If the name Easiart sounds familiar to you, it may be because Interceptor released a program called Easyart. This review is about a much better offering so be wise with your eyes and don't buy the wrong one. This is yet another art program and is not as complete as some. It can edit pictures only in mode 1 (the Amstrad's four-colour mode) and can draw in only one corner of the screen. Mind you, it performs well enough within these limitations. It starts up by asking you whether to load the art program or some utilities for integrating Easiart features such as mouse control into your own programs. It then asks if you have a trackerball, a mouse or a joystick. If you have not any of these, don't buy the program. When you press the cursor keys your graphics cursor moves by one pixel, so this is a worse keyboard clobberer than Daley Thompson's Decathlon! On screen, you are shown a bar of icons on the right and some coloured blocks along the bottom. There are five of these: one each for the colours and one showing the colour in use. Now to the program. This has a huge selection of features. Here are some of them. - Spraycan. Variable nozzle; can splatter many different patterns onto the screen.P
- Paintbrush. Over 40 patterns, each in two colours. You can swap the colours very easily and get 160 different textures; you can edit some of them to give you even more. The filling routine is very fast.
- Geometric drawing. Straight lines, rectangles, squares, triangles and circles all have their own icons and are very easy to draw.
- Icons. Can be edited and put straight onto the screen. Very useful for people who want to draw designs, such as electronic diagrams.
- Text. Two heights, bold and normal printing, sloping right or left, rotated. Put on the screen with pixel accuracy.
Rubber. Alters the presently selected ink to ink 0, that is, the background colour. Excellent range of sizes. Once switched on, the rubber stays on until deliberately switched off. - Zoom (the icon is a magnifying glass). Creates a pixel image that you can edit without fuss.
Changing inks is very easy. Simply select the icon and press Fire to change it. If you leave the program to edit the icons or texture patterns, then the picture is preserved in memory until you return to it. Also, when you save a picture the program also saves the colour information, so on reloading the colours are correct. If you have a strange non-Epson-compatible printer, you can create a new printer-driver routine that will cope with picture dumps to it. The program also asks you if you want single- or double-density print. Results were quite excellent. One very annoying point is that the graphics cursor is "unintelligent" - it stays at the same speed until you press a key. The whole idea of using a joystick is not to bother with the keyboard. This small oversight makes the program a little clumsy to use in comparison to Cherry Paint. If you have a trackerball the problem doesn't arise. When you take everything into consideration, this program is of a very high quality. It doesn't try to be ultraclever but provides all the useful features of an art program at a competetive price. I wish it well. AA | 
