CRAFTY ARTS: ICONS, FRACTALS AND JIGSAWS More Interesting Arty Tools to Dazzle and Delight by Leigh Murray  <> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <>  INTRODUCTION This is the fourth article in the Crafty Arts series, and this time I'll write about my true loves: fractals and icons. I never seem to get sick of either. I'll describe some of the programs I use in these areas, and perhaps a few readers will be interested enough to try these products themselves - they are all very easy to use, and no artistic or mathematical skill is needed to use them effectively. And they are fun. I will also describe some more disks I've recently set up for MegaDisc. In a way, this article is a companion to the disks, rather than the more usual way of having disks as a companion to an article, because in the past few weeks, I've made so many interrelated disks that they have more or less driven the direction of the article. FETISHES: FRACTALS & ICONS ETC I think the Amiga uses I get most fun from are icons and fractals, and I even sometimes manage to combine the two, as in some of the main icons I've done recently for MegaDisc. (But the latest is very techno-oriented, by editorial request - Tim, ever polite, barely managed to suppress a groan when I suggested I do another fractal main icon!) Talking of main icons, one of the sets I most enjoyed making was that for MegaDisc 29, the flypast by fighters. I don't know that anyone else liked them, but I had a lot of fun trying to get passable-looking fighters (sort of FA-18 Hornets) into an icon. Len Zech's terrific picture on MegaDisc 24 of a couple of F-15s in a vertical climb inspired me (as someone who has been aeronautically-obsessed since early childhood) to attempt to encapsulate all that glorious metal in a few pixels. Not easy. But FUN. I spent hours poring over diagrams from Jane's Fighting Aircraft, altering a pixel here, a pixel there ..... I'm so attached to these icons, I've used modifications of them on the MD.Reviews compilation disks (which I hope to have ready by the time MegaDisc 34 is published). The first icons I made were for the MegaDisc catalogue listings on my hard disk. I was very impressed by some icons on Fish 124, so I took those as a basis and modified them to suit my needs. I have found icon-editing interesting and educational, the latter because I soon discovered the value in learning to use a directory utility for copying and deleting the icons I was creating, and gradually, as I continued to work with icons, I started to understand more about the way the Amiga functioned. ICON MANIPULATION For icon editing, all you need is a good icon editing program and a willingness to experiment (and you don't even need an editor to copy interesting icons from elsewhere). Very little artistic skill is necessary because you are working with such small pictures that the fine details are lost. So if you can't draw, don't despair - you could still create whole windows full of wonderful icons. And an interesting array of icons certainly makes using Workbench that bit more attractive and inviting. Starting Out To make your icon-editing initiation easier, round up a few good icons to work with, because it is much easier to start by editing someone else's icon rather than creating your own from scratch. (For safety, ensure you have backup copies of any icons you intend replacing.) If you are interested in editing icons, but haven't tried to do so yet, you may find the IconStarter disk (START 1) helpful. It has icon editing programs, icon tools, tutorials, and close to 200 varied icons. And there are plenty of other icon-oriented disks in the MegaDisc PD collection. You may wish to do some of your icon-editing work in a Paint package. The standard screen resolution used by Workbench is hi-res non-interlaced, 2-bitplane (4 colours), so this is the screen resolution you will need to work in. Using Workbench 1.2 or 1.3, the colours are, in order from colour zero, blue, white, black and orange; for Workbench 2 they are grey, black, white and mid-blue. IE Icon Editor This is an excellent icon editor, written (and well-maintained) by an Australian, Peter Kiem. I wrote a lengthy tutorial describing my use of IE (find it on MegaDisc 27 or the IconStarter Disk, START 1), so I won't go into the details here. Suffice it to say that IE really is very good: with it you can load existing icons for modification, or import IFFs for conversion to icons; and you can easily swap colours in icons. It has a Preview window, handles very large icons (up to full-screen size) in up to 16 colours, and allows editing of all icon details (icontype, image highlighting, window size, position, default tools etc). IE is nice to use and reliable, and I use it all the time for the icons I make for MegaDisc etc. IE is now the only icon editor I use - IconEdit, which comes with Workbench 2, doesn't handle big-ish icons (which many of mine are) and is definitely quirky; and IconMaster, although having some good points, was a bit flakey, a feature I do not appreciate (it guru'd regularly with long pathnames, and it once had my hard disk icon for dinner!). (As an aside, I DO wish Amiga programmers would test their programs more thoroughly - all those bugs and gurus are rather off-putting, and the troubles they cause greatly increase the time it takes to put together a robust compilation disk, one that functions well on all levels of the operating system. The only positive is that you learn a lot in the process of dealing with flakey programs.) The currently released version of IE is 3.0, and a new version is under development. Version 4, which I am starting to test, will have many new features (AGA graphics support, faster scrolling etc); it will run only on Workbench 2 and higher. It is well worth registering for this program (it costs $20) because this is the only way you can get the full version 3; you could also give feedback and perhaps get extra features. Peter Kiem's new address is 15 Penfold St, Browns Plains QLD 4118. Workbench 2 IconEdit Quirks: Beware This editor is easy to use but has some drawbacks and, worse, quirks. One drawback is that the maximum icon size is 80 x 40 pixels (the main icon I prepared for the MD34a disk is 252 x 111 pixels, and even the MegaDisc disk icons are 76 x 40, which is only just editable by IconEdit. Most of the icons on the Pix Starter disks and IconStarter (in MegaDisc's START series) would be too big (just) to be edited by IconEdit. Now for a couple of quirks. If you load an icon which is bigger than IconEdit's editing window, anything that doesn't fit in the window is chopped off. There is no warning message while you are editing. This is less than terrific. When you try to Save or Save As, the following warning message is issued: "Invisible parts of MD.Test have been lost. Save anyway?", and IconEdit gives you two choices for action: Save or Cancel. If you Save, you lose the bits chopped off, forever (unless you have a backup copy of the icon - a good idea). If you Cancel, IconEdit unilaterally decides to do an Undo, and undoes all your editing!! (#@!?#.) If instead of Save you decide to do a Save As (usually a safer approach anyway), a different problem arises. If you load an icon which is bigger than the editing window, edit it without realising the right-hand side is chopped off, and then try to Save As some other name, IconEdit gives you the same warning message. If you choose Cancel, you will find your editing changes still there. BUT .... the name of the icon shown at the top of the IconEdit window will be the new name you just tried to Save As - and this icon does not actually exist yet anywhere outside IconEdit's window. A bit odd, that. If you choose Save, then the chopped-off icon will be saved with the new name; this is what you would expect to happen, a nice change for IconEdit. Another oddity: if you load a big icon, make no editing changes, then Save As, IconEdit will make a duplicate copy of the full icon (not just the cut-off-in-its-prime version), and rename the editing window. The icon-chopping process is temporarily delayed! In summary: IconEdit a la Workbench 2 is rather confusing and can only edit quite small icons. Although it is a big improvement on the Workbench 1 version, logic is not its strong suit and it still has a long way to go to catch up to the best icon editors, such as IE. Deft, ViewIcon, Mouse-xy: on Revised IconStarter Disk I found these programs so useful that I revised the IconStarter disk, START 1, with all of them on it; I also added ICONtrol (see below) for remapping all the icons on a disk, tidied up the window layouts so icons don't overlap when the Workbench 2 icon boxes are added by the system, and used ReOrg to optimise the disk, making it much faster. If you already have START 1 and would like to replace it with the new version, contact MegaDisc. Deft (which comes on START 1, MegaDisc 32 or Fish 739) can be used to change the default tools of a whole group of project icons in one fell swoop. Deft will search through a disk or directory, finding all icons that contain a specified default tool and change that tool to a different one. It might, for instance be useful for changing the default tools of text files to your favourite text viewer (perhaps FullView). Deft is a reliable program, nicely presented and very easy to use. Other excellent programs by the same author, Gary Smith of Brisbane, include FontViewer (which was on MegaDisc 26 or, a later version, Fish 732) and FindIt (on Fish 731). ViewIcon comes on START 1, MegaDisc 28 or Fish 717. This program by Robert Lang lets you view icons from the Shell. It opens up a window and displays the icon in it; clicking on the icon displayed has the same effect as clicking it on Workbench, so you can also see the icon's alternate image. I have ViewIcon set up to run automatically from SID2 (the great directory utility I use all the time - other good ones include DirWork and Directory Opus). When I double-click an icon file (which is any file whose name ends in .info) in a SID2 directory list, a small window pops open, the icon image is displayed by ViewIcon, and I can click on that to show the alternate image. This is a very handy facility if you are doing much work with icons. I use it to check I have the latest (and greatest?) version of each design, because if (like me) you have hundreds of the little beasties floating around various hard disk drawers, with names that are sometimes hard to fathom some time later, it is hard to be sure what's what. Mouse-xy is one of those programs that takes your fancy as soon as you see it although you can't quite figure out how it will be useful to you. I found it when I was looking for suitable stuff to put on the Disabled_Aids disk. I'd found only a few programs truly aimed at the disabled, so to make the disk better value, I added some programs which have a LeftyMouse feature (for left-handed users), on the tenuous link that being left-handed was a slight disadvantage in a right-handed society. (And did you know that there's a higher proportion of left-handers amongst programmers than the general population? What that says about programmers, one wonders.) Back to the point. Mouse-xy. When I first saw it (on Fish 543), I couldn't think what I'd use it for, so I put it on the Disabled_Aids disk (MISC 149) with the other mouse-oriented programs, so I'd know where to find it easily once I thought of a use for it. Finally, that use dawned on me. Mouse-xy is invaluable for lining up icons accurately within Workbench windows. By using it, you can easily get whole rows of icons in perfect alignment. What does Mouse-xy do? When you click on its icon, it opens a tiny window in the top left corner of the Workbench title bar. This tiny window stays there until you click on its close-gadget, and it shows the mouse coordinates and the color under the current position of the mouse pointer. If the left mouse button is being held down, the coordinates are relative to the spot where the pointer was when the button was pressed. The coordinates can be monitored while you are moving/re-sizing windows or dragging workbench icons. This is a very handy, well-written program. Remapping Icon Colours Icons prepared for Workbench 2 (or higher) systems look strange on Workbench 1 systems, and vice versa, because black and white are used differently in the two systems. Such icons will look better if they are remapped - that is, black and white are swapped in the icon images. (The short article called Icons_&_WB2 on MegaDisc 28 or the IconStarter disk briefly explains colour mapping in icons.) There are two programs I use regularly for remapping icons, RemapInfo and ICONtrol; both are on the IconStarter disk, with detailed instructions on their use. RemapInfo is ideal when you want to remap a few icons, but if you want to remap all the icons on a disk, then ICONtrol is easier and faster. RemapInfo is very easy to use. One way is to click once on its icon and then, holding the shift key down, double-click on the icon you wish to remap. Remapping takes place before your eyes on Workbench 2+ systems; you have to close and reopen windows to see the remapped icons on Workbench 1.3 and 1.2 systems. ICONtrol is also easy to use but cannot be started from an icon; it can only be used from the CLI. This was the only program that I could find that would remap all the icons on a disk with a single simple command, but I'd have preferred it to have a Workbench interface rather than CLI-only, which is less user-friendly and more prone to problems from typing errors. Still, the command is pretty simple (eg, ICONtrol df1: recolor all); I've put detailed instructions to help beginners on the IconStarter disk. So, all you have to do is type a few words then have a coffee break while all the icons on the disk are remapped. Other Utilitarian Goodies On MISC 118 I (JAMDisk 9) or Fish 597, there is IconToolsII, a set of four programs that will do some of the same jobs as those mentioned above, plus a couple of extras. MISC 118 I has other useful programs too: DirWork v1.62, a neat little directory utility (also on Directory Utility Starter START 2); MultiDos, which lets you read IBM MS-DOS disks on a standard 3.5 inch Amiga drive; AmiDock v1.3, which provides buttons on Workbench for launching other programs; and a few printer drivers etc. It looks a more useful disk than the Fish, and good value if you need these programs. The IconTools Suite There are 4 programs in the IconToolsII suite, designed to allow one operation on many icons at once by shift-clicking (that is, holding down the shift key while clicking on multiple icons). . FloatIcon performs the same function as the Workbench 2 UnSnapshot command, making an icon floating. (When an icon is floating Workbench will decide where it should be placed when a drawer is opened rather than the icon always appearing in a fixed position.) . ReplaceTool lets you change the default tool of a number of icons at once. To use it, click on the ReplaceTool icon, then shift-click on the tool to be used and all the project icons; that tool's path and name will become the default tool for those project icons (you will be asked to confirm the path details). . SwapColors swaps colours 1 and 2 in icons. . ReplaceImage lets you change the image of a number of icons to be the same as the first one clicked. All of these functions can be done within IE for individual icons. The great advantage of this IconTools package is that, like RemapInfo, you can process a batch of icons at the same time and easily, via the Workbench extended selection method of shift-clicking. Note that if you are a Workbench 1.3 user, one function of ReplaceTool (that of changing the default tool to point to a tool which doesn't have an icon) will not be available to you unless you have version 39 or higher of arp.library in your system libs: directory, because it uses the ARP requesters. I prefer the Deft method of changing default tools, but the ReplaceTool approach is different, and easy to use, and some may like it better. The FloatIcon function of unsnapshotting an icon can be achieved quite easily on Workbench 1.3 by dragging an icon over a closed drawer. The icon will be copied (or moved if it is on the same disk) into that drawer as a floating icon. (And you can make an icon fixed by dragging it into an open window; it will be made fixed at the new location.) The ReplaceImage feature is provided in IE for individual icons, in a more powerful form (you can replace the two images of an alternate-image icon with images from 2 other icons, if you want to), but ReplaceImage certainly provides a very nifty way of changing all the Workbench 1.3 drawer icons, for instance, with Workbench 2 drawer icons, simply by shift-clicking the icons. The SwapColors function appears to be very similar to that of RemapInfo. Icon No-Go's One thing I noticed while testing the functions of the IconTools package was that the icons on the JAMDisk were protected against writing and deleting, so that when I happened to make copies of these on to my RAD: disk for testing, the icon tools wouldn't work on them. You may come across the same problem. Also, none of the remapping tools that operate from Workbench will remap an orphaned drawer icon (that is, an icon that has icontype drawer but does not yet have a directory associated with it). So, if nothing happens when you try one of these tools, check that none of the icons is protected against writing, or if there is a drawer icon amongst them, that it has an associated directory. In either of these situations, you can still edit the icon from within an icon editor such as IE v3. Load the icon into IE3. Select ReColour if you want to swap colours, or Edit Details if you want to make the icon floating or change its tool, or Import from Icon if you want to change its image. (IE will be much slower at swapping colours than a dedicated icon remapper, but it does a good job, in all situations.) With the Writable protection bit not set, you won't be able to write the icon back with the same name, so when you save the altered icon, you will need to use Save As with a different name. The protection status of the new icon will be set by IE to the more normal RW-D, allowing the icon to be written (ie, updated) and deleted as well as read. Or you could change the protection status of your copy of the icon, via the CLI Protect command, or (more easily with less typing) by using the Protect command within a directory utility such as SID2, DirWork or Directory Opus. And then you would be able to use any of the icon tools to manipulate the icon. DeluxePhotoLab This is a three-in-one paint/image-processing/poster-printing program that I use most of the time while preparing icons and clip-art (I occasionally use DeluxePaintIII instead, for one or two better-implemented Paint functions, but mostly I prefer PhotoLab). One very handy feature of DeluxePhotoLab is the tiny image of the picture it creates as an icon whenever a picture is saved. I made use of this feature when I set up the Pix Starter disks of ready-to-use clip-art, so that by looking at a window of icons, one can see at a glance what the clips are in that drawer (making it easier to locate the perfect picture to include in a letter). Using the Pix Starter Icons Elsewhere When I revamped the IconStarter disk, I said in the notes that many of the PhotoLab-created icons on the Pix Starter disks might be useful as a basis for other icons. Well, I've already found some of them handy myself - with a few mods, many became suitable icons for the Kids.Disk and Jigsaw Disk (see below). I think some of the icons are quite cute, particularly a few cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse etc). KIDS.DISK FOR TINY TOTS When I was in the middle of making various other disks for MegaDisc, I went off on a tangent, and compiled yet another disk. It is called Kids.Disk, and it is aimed firmly at toddlers. It came about when Peter Kiem (the author of IE icon editor - see above) mentioned in a phone call that his 2-year old daughter was fascinated by the spline blanker on his Amiga. That reminded me of a slightly-sidetracked project I started a while ago, to develop a disk for little kids. So, I sifted through the programs I'd gathered, extracted (and tarted up) suitable pictures from the Pix Starter disks and other graphics disks in the vast MegaDisc collection, added some animal sounds culled from Fish disks, wrote the doc, fixed up icons...... Many happy hours later, there it was - one Kids.Disk. I had a lot of fun making this disk. I love some of the animal sounds (the kookaburra and rooster are wows), and one of the programs on the disk, KeyBang, seems brilliant to me. Now what's needed is a try-out by kids. If you have any little kids at your place, or even little visitors, they may enjoy this disk. I would certainly appreciate feedback relayed from those for whom the disk was designed: tiny tots. JIGSAWS GALORE Kids.Disk is not the first tangent I went off on. Casting around for a game I could play as a short break between other Amiga tasks (one that let me swap back and forth between other tasks), I came across GA 23, a jigsaw disk. This disk contains some IFF pictures and a program, IFF2PCS, to make a jigsaw puzzle out of those pictures. Jigsaw Program IFF2PCS is a cute program. It will use any IFF of 16 colours or fewer to make a jigsaw of up to 374 pieces (for 320-pixels-wide pictures), or 624 pieces for 640-pixels-wide pictures. The pieces are all square - there are no irregular shapes as in a normal jigsaw. But they are scattered, overlapping and often rotated, so the puzzle is not quite as easy to solve as it might seem. Although I said that IFF2PCS will convert any IFF, in practice you need a low resolution non-interlaced IFF, because when the program loads the picture into its high resolution interlaced screen, each pixel in the IFF becomes one pixel on the screen, and it only allows the top half of the screen for the puzzle grid. An IFF of 320 by 256 pixels (a normal PAL lo-res non-interlaced full screen) will take up one quarter of the screen when loaded into a high-res interlaced screen; a double-width lo-res IFF of 640 pixels wide will take up the top half. Any picture of greater than 256 pixels depth will have its bottom chopped off by IFF2PCS. Because the pixels in the hi-res interlaced screen used in the puzzle are nearly square in shape, only an IFF composed of square pixels will maintain its proportions when displayed on this screen. This means that only lo-res non-interlaced or hi-res interlaced pictures will look correctly proportioned when used by the IFF2PCS program. Although pictures in hi-res non-interlaced format (which has tall oblong-shaped pixels) or low-res interlaced format (with its wide oblong pixels) can be used for the IFF2PCS jigsaws, they will look distorted. One drawback of IFF2PCS is that it uses an interlaced screen, which means it will flicker unless there is a flicker fixer in the system (although turning down the screen brightness helps). But it is a nifty program that multitasks well (use the front/back gadgets on its title bar to swap out to another application such as word processing). Doing a jigsaw makes a good short break between other tasks, and I enjoy reconstructing a beautiful picture. New Jigsaw Disks When I tried using the pictures on GA 23 in jigsaws, I struck a lot of problems. Some of the pictures looked distorted in shape, because they were not in a square-pixel format, and many of the grids were almost impossible to see (eg, dark brown on a black background). So I revamped the disk. And I got rather carried away with fractals once I discovered they made good jigsaws as well as interesting icons, and made another disk, Fractal.Jigsaw. In revamping the GA 23 disk, I used about half of the 15 pictures on the original disk, and scrounged through my collection of MegaDisc disks to find others to add. Some of the pictures on GA 23 didn't seem very interesting, so I dropped those from the new disk. Converting Pictures To make pictures more suitable as jigsaws, I modified them in several ways: converting to lo-res, reducing colours to 16, resizing from the NTSC screen size of 200 pixels deep to the PAL size of 256, and swapping colour registers to get different background and lettering colours. It was quite an interesting exercise, and, in the process, I learnt a bit more about manipulating IFF pictures. Many of the pictures were originally hi-res interlaced (640 x 512) - the width would be fine in the jigsaws but the bottom half would be chopped off, or hi-res non-interlaced - which would look distorted in the jigsaws. I converted these to lo-res non-interlaced. Detail is lost - it is hard to convert to a pixel 4 times the size without losing some detail - but many of the pictures converted surprisingly well. Resizing to PAL size can be a bit tricky. Some of the pictures look squashed already, so they simply expand out to look `right'. But with others, the scale must be maintained. Resizing often results in a rather messy-looking picture, with blurred lines where there were originally sharply-defined ones as adjacent pixels are given colour gradations. Often PhotoLab does better at resizing than does DeluxePaintIII (even the Paint section of PhotoLab is better); a 24-bit conversion routine, such as ADPro, should give even better results (but forget that idea unless you have 5MB RAM on your machine). (There was an interesting article by Steve Bolton in MegaDisc 33 on image-processing, called Enhancing Your Graphics.) One method I sometimes use to get a nice clean resize when the picture is very simple is: convert it to black and white, load it into a 1-bit plane hi-res interlaced screen, resize it, save it, then convert it back to the resolution and palette I want, and recolour it. Resizing is usually best done at the highest resolution, hi-res interlaced. Reducing colours: an image-processor is very handy here, and the sort-on- population feature can be useful if you want to pick up one extra colour - some colours might be hardly used at all, so a similar colour can be copied to that, and then that one used for a new colour (perhaps to give a white colour zero for a picture with a palette that doesn't have white in it.) Colour zero, the first colour in any palette (the colour registers are numbered from 0 to 31), sets the colour of the screen border used by the Amiga display. If colour zero is also used as the background colour in a picture, then the picture will not appear to have any border. But if the colour allocated to another colour register is used as the background colour in the picture, then it will appear to have a border of whatever colour is allocated to colour register zero. Getting the best allocation of colour registers was one of the trickiest tasks in setting up the jigsaw disks. IFF2PCS uses the colours in certain ways, some fixed, and some in a rather single-minded and apparently uncontrollable way. It always uses colour zero as the background for the jigsaw grid and pieces. And when colour zero is white or a light colour, it uses colour 1 as the jigsaw grid. But when colour zero is black, it chooses its own grid colour; all attempts to make it change its mind proved fruitless, and sometimes its choices look awful. Generally, I found black not very kind to the eyes as the background to a jigsaw, so I often changed colour zero to white or a light colour; but with some pictures, black is best. Gorgeous Graphics There are some wonderful pictures on these disks. On the Jigsaw Disk, there are absolute stunners by Henk van der Graaf of orchids, a tiger, and a giraffe (modified from GR 17), a gorgeous chinchilla cat by Denis Sibera, a few terrific cartoon characters by Mick Parker, Tom Grant and Andrew McInnes, and several interesting scenes. These pictures all make interesting jigsaws, and they still look good in lo-res, but they look even better in their original format, usually hi-res interlaced. FANTASTIC FRACTALS Some of the most beautiful computer pictures are fractals. I produced a bunch of wonderful fractal pictures simply by running the programs on the FracStarter disk (see below) using sets of parameters supplied with the programs. Where necessary, I resized or recoloured them to make oomphier jigsaw pictures, or converted them to lo-res 16 colour format. Some of the fractal pictures weren't suitable as jigsaw pictures because they didn't convert well. But many remained stunners, and being so detailed they make excellent subjects for jigsaws. And in lo-res they don't take up nearly as much disk space as the more usual format of hi-res interlaced. Many of these pictures are superb. Having assembled my fractal jigsaw collection, I put the ones I like best on to a disk for MegaDisc, Fractal.Jigsaw, in case any others would like to enjoy them too. Even if you aren't the slightest bit interested in jigsaws, you may want to see some samples of the types of wonderful pictures that can easily be produced with a fractal program. I have provided a script on the disk for showing the pictures as a slideshow. Of course, if you want to try your hand at producing some fancy fractals yourself, the FracStarter disk has some of the best programs, with notes to guide new users, and there are many fascinating fractal disks for only a few dollars a pop in the MegaDisc PD library (look in the Graphics section for starters). No maths skill or knowledge is required to produce beautiful fractal pictures - anyone can do it. I find it absolutely fascinating to watch them unfold, but also you can leave them to get on with the job overnight or while you use your Amiga for something else (most have front/back gadgets on the title bar, and the others can be swapped to the back with the Left Amiga and `n' key or Left Amiga and `m' key combinations). FracStarter Disk I have almost finished setting up FracStarter (START 6). It has what I think are the best, most varied and easiest-to-use fractal programs, plus tutorials and notes to guide new users. Most of the fractal programs on FracStarter come with sets of parameters supplied by their authors. Anyone can turn out stunning fractal pictures simply by loading one of these sets of parameters into the program and telling it to go do it. Then, some time later .... they take a while .... you are the proud possessor of a fantastic fractal picture. You can save this as an IFF, and modify it later if you wish, or just display it in all its glory. Apart from trying out the standard parameter sets, it is easy to produce some completely original fractal masterpieces, simply by zooming in (click and drag the mouse to outline an area, and the program will do the calculations for you), or changing palettes (most programs let you do this, sometimes while the fractal is being drawn), or slightly changing one of the parameters. There are some terrific programs on FracStarter. My two favourites are MandelMountains, which produces wonderful three-dimensional pictures based on the Mandlebrot and Julia sets, and FracGen, which draws superb fractals based on `seeds'. I've played with fractals quite a lot now, and I've yet to delve much into the maths - the pictures are so mesmerising that I always postpone the maths to another time. It is certainly fascinating to see this art unfold. COMPATIBILITY WITH WORKBENCH 2 All of the software mentioned above works fine on Workbench 2. I think that Workbench 2 (or higher) is becoming increasingly worth getting as so much software is being written now that will only run on these versions of the operating system. This is especially so of programs in the public domain. From a programmer's point of view, Workbench 2 is so much easier to work with that it will be surprising if many programmers bother to make their new programs compatible with Workbench 1 systems. Also, as an ordinary user, Workbench 2 is much nicer to work with. I didn't expect to find the differences very noticeable (particularly as I do so much work from within a directory utility, SID2), but now when I go back to Workbench 1.3 to test a disk I'm preparing, I find the older operating system a bit of a pain. CONCLUSION I love designing icons, and I adore playing with fractals. Both make excellent crafty-art uses of the Amiga. With some of the better fractal and icon programs available, achieving wonderful pictures and icons is so easy that even those with little artistic skill can be quite creative. © Leigh Murray Queanbeyan NSW June 1993  <> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <>