pjd@cwruecmp.UUCP (dr. funk) (02/18/86)
Product: DEGAS Developer: Batteries Included Address: 17875 Sky Park North, Suite P, Irvine, CA 92714 Phone: (416) 881-9816 Price: Discounted to $23 (MRSP unknown) Probably everyone has heard of DEGAS by now and there have been several reviews in magazines. Frankly, it is $23 (or so) well spent. The human interface is well designed and it appears to be quite a capable paint program. Since I am not an artist, I'm not really qualified to comment on its suitability for art, but the demo pictures are really quite nice. It IS, however, a good tool for viewgraph preparation. As a frustrated typographer, it's fun to create a new font with the font editor and try it out in a graphic design. I was a little disappointed in the quality of the fonts provided (I am working on a Futura-like font) and the 8H x 16V fixed character format is a serious restriction. The magnify feature is good for touching-up large display text. The EPSON print driver works OK with our Panasonic 1092 with good results. (Running the dot matrix output through a Xerox copier tends to integrating the jaggies and reduces "blockiness.") DEGAS is easy to learn and has a good user's manual. Give this one 3.5 stars. -- paul drongowski decvax!cwruecmp!pjd case western reserve university pjd%Case@CSNet-relay
knnngt@ukma.UUCP (Alan Kennington) (02/23/86)
In article <1417@cwruecmp.UUCP> pjd@cwruecmp.UUCP (dr. funk) writes: >Product: DEGAS >Probably everyone has heard of DEGAS by now and there have been >several reviews in magazines. Frankly, it is $23 (or so) well >spent. The human interface is well designed and it appears to be >quite a capable paint program. > >one 3.5 stars. >case western reserve university pjd%Case@CSNet-relay It is true that in comparison to a lot of the poorly written stuff on the market for the ST, Degas is refreshingly usable. (Unlike the revolting terminal "emulator" I sometimes use.) But in spite of all the good things said and written about Degas, a perusal of the VDI and AES manuals will reveal that the author(s) simply made rational use of existing program components. There seem to me to be few innovations in Degas. The idea of using the left mouse button to flip between a control window and the worksurface is a very nice way of doubling the effective screen area. But the actual operations selectable from the control panel are almost entirely selected from the repertoire provided in the OS. If congratulations are in order for Degas, they are equally appropriate for the designers of VDI/AES who have written in many Mac-like painting routines, and even a resource creation and icon editing facility, so that the design of a control panel is a positive pleasure. If you haven't created a set of control panels, menus, alerts and dialogs with the development kit yet, you really should deny yourself the pleasure no more. And all the fuss over the manuals being slightly difficult to read is beyond my comprehension. The only really painful thing is trying to use the routines from C with only one disk drive. And I certainly don't want to find out how to use VDI/AES from Basic. Any good feeling I might have had towards this "language" have evaporated as a result of the nasty little 130K patience-tester that Atari were unwise enough to try to pass off as a Basic interpreter. But I think Basic will be okay as soon as they get a team of experts to rewrite it. Sorry I can't think of anything good to say. So long, Alan Kennington.