Test reports

3. Software test: Paint program PPaint v7.1b (by Malte Mende)

»Yahoo! You can now get PPaint 7.1b free from Aminet. The worlds best paint program for nothing! I just had to get it. So I launched the PC of my brother, downloaded, splitted, copied to disk, merged it together again and installed it.

Well, not really installed, you just have to copy the whole directory somewhere. There is no minimum configuration either, but you should have a 020 and some RAM.

I guess everybody knows PPaint and has at least version 6.4 on his computer. After all it is almost as widespread as Wings of Fury or Silkworm. But if somebody really shouldn't know PPaint:

Personal Paint 7.1b is a palette based paint program (I think the name comes from the operation of selecting colors from a palette). It features the typical tools like boxes and circles, airbrush, flood fill (either one color, dithered or pattern) and many more; useful functions to make painting easier like zoom or a almost unlimited undo and two user definable functions:

The effect function: Here can you have many effects, e.g. anti-alias, negative, lighten or darken, dithering or transparence effects. You can define you own effects or fine tune the existing. Some effects look really great while some others seem quite useless to me.

The ARexx port (this is the biggest enhancement since 6.4): The ARexx port features a lot of example scripts like animated text, vector font, a slide show generator and more. Some are just trash, like the text viewer. I experienced some crashes while playing around with those scripts, so be careful here. All ARexx commands are documented in the manual, so you create your own scripts. It also supports the standard ARexx commands. Have fun while trying it out...

Furthermore, PPaint know a lot of commands to manage the palette, you can cut out brushes and manipulate them, insert text and there is also a tool to create and load animations. PPaint only supports the ANIM format, so Quicktime and MPEG is out of question.

The magnify function has been removed. But who needed it anyway?

Personal Paint comes with a manual in three languages (English, German and Italian), which appears a little unclear. But you won't really need it anyway, since the handling is really easy. You can quickly draw wonderful pictures or manipulate existing ones. The results are mostly impressing, but of course this depends on the ability of the artist.

Result: Anybody who has the slightest desire to paint a picture is obliged to get this great program. You are missing something if you don't.

Malte Mende <MacMendeX@aol.com>«