A
remarkable combination of function and
price: it seems to do three times as
many things as any other program, for
a third or a quarter of the price, so the
cost is effectively one-tenth of what
the established biggies cost.
Functions
- image-editing (like
Photoshop or Fireworks)
- painting
(like Photoshop or Painter)
- drawing
(like Illustrator, FreeHand or CorelDraw)
- layout,
including web-pages (like Pagemaker,
FreeHand or ClarisWorks)
- presentation
(like PowerPoint or ClarisWorks)
- animation
for gifs and QuickTime movies (likeGifBuilder,
GIFmation, ImageReady, WebPainter,
LiveMotion etc.)
There
were many causes of pleasure:
- it
feels like a very generous package,
both because you get so many functions
for a low price, but even more because
you get lots of lovely help freely
accessible on Deneba's web-site,
and there seems to be a friendly
community of users
- every
new object is automatically put
on its own layer - like Illustrator,
isn't it?
-
but ...
1.
It means it's a major job to take
it all on board and start learning
it ... and with so many diferent functions
and operating modes and tools, perhaps
it's not surprising that the on-line
help isn't very well indexed:
e.g.
in trying to find out how to create
a calligraphic pen, I was directed
to the pen manager, but there was
no indication of what or where that
was ...
...
ah! it's a second sub-panel of a sub-panel
of the strokes palette ...
2.
There were rather too many functions
which didn't work as I expected, for
me to want to go a lot further with
it ...
Some
aspects which for me were not intuitive
-
though I guess they must work properly
for people who think in a different
way:
- I
never worked out when it was going
to auto revert to the pointer from
a pen tool
- when
I created a calligraphic pen, with
everything deselected as it says
and as is normal, and then started
to draw/write, it reverted to 'standard'
every time ... maybe it's a limitation
of the SE version, but it doesn't
make you want to shell out money
to get the full version
- I
missed the Adobe/Macromedia shortcuts
for select, deselect, zoom - these
are by now pretty well standard,
and I had a hard time even doing
something as simple as changing
the stroke colour ...
- sometimes
I couldn't choose colours for stroke
or for text, neither in post-OS8
sticky mode, nor in OS7 non-sticky
mode, nor by tearing off the palette
Some
of the functions I missed
-
although at the price, it's perfectly
reasonable that they're not there:
- the
layers palette isn't particularly
friendly
- Canvas
has nothing to correspond to Photoshop's
history palette of course ...
- the
templates felt rather primitive
- the
'mouse-over' indication of the keyboard
shortcut for a tool which Photoshop
and Illustrator give you
Some
oddities
-
things which I can't see that they
depend on me, so I suspect actually
don't work properly:
- it
feels odd and unnecessary that the
aspect which is unversally called
'fill' elsewhere is called 'ink'
in Canvas - it's not even logical,
since the stroke can just as much
be done with ink ...
- 'demystifying curves'
says "deselect = esc": but when
I clicked on esc three times, it
did three levels of undo without
deselecting ...
- in
the tool bar the colours usually
don't show, just black and white
- when
I tear off the colour palette from
the stroke colour in tool bar, what
appears is called inks, and if the
inks for the fill were already torn
off, the new one replaces the old
...
- "you
may smoooth a polygon by selecting
the object and the choosing path
> smooth" - but when I did that
to my triangle the path sub-menus
were greyed out ... I had tested
that it was indeed selected, by
pressing the arrow keys, and it
moved
- Canvas
7 seemed to have problems redrawing
the palettes on screen after I had
selected something (text?)
- the
list of templates offered when I
asked for a new 'animation' document
was actually the list offered for
the presentation document ...
Of
course this is just a personal view
- it's such a revolutionary idea,
such a generous deal, and such friendly
and helpful tutorials, do get the
demo and try it for yourself!
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