Program: Icon Graphix
Producer: Audiogenic Software Ltd.
Retail Price: £9.95

Following in the wake of the icon driven graphics packages is ICON GRAPHIX from ASL which is being marketed by AUDIOGENIC.

Following the current trend towards icon driven graphics utilities, Audiogenic have released ICON GRAPHIX from ASL. This is being marketed as a powerful icon driven graphics and design tool and competes with comparable offerings such as ART STUDIO from Rainbird Software and THE ARTIST from The Edge.

The program cassette contains the basic software as well as a Microdrive compatible copy which can be installed on a Microdrive cartridge automatically once it has been loaded.

The screen of ICON GRAPHIX displays the drawing window surrounded by the option boxes. Pictures may be created in the drawing window using the tool icons grouped around it. Selecting (or changing) drawing tools is achieved simply by positioning the current tool over the box to be selected and by pressing CAPS SHIFT or fire on the joystick. There range of drawing tools to choose from includes felt pens of various shapes and sizes, sprays and brushes. All drawing is done in the current pattern and there are 34 patterns to choose from. If that's not enough, existing patterns may be edited to create your own patterns.

A magnify facility with a simple pixel set or reset facility can used for detail work. Corrections can be made with the Rubber tool or with the powerful Undo routine, which cancels the effect of the last function selected. Push Page provides access to hidden parts of the screen. Special drawing functions provided are Elastic Line, Box, Circle and Ellipse.

Usually, the picture is drawn in black and white first. Then the colour mode is entered, which displays the palette of colour options including Bright and Flashing and colour can be added to the picture. Once Ink and Paper colours have been selected, the Pen tool is used to fill in the attribute characters over the existing pattern.

A screen dump routine allows screen pictures to be immortalised by printing the 24 screen lines to a ZX or Alphacom printer; pictures and documents may be saved to tape or Micro-drive cartridge for later use. Pictures are equivalent to Screen saves, while documents also include any new patterns generated.

ICON GRAPHIX performs very well and is very userfriendly. The various drawing options and tools are located at the bottom edge of the screen, with the large selection of pattern boxes spread around the edge of the drawing window. The current pattern is always displayed in the bottom right corner and to change the current pattern this box must be accessed and CAPS SHIFT pressed. In colour mode the top line of pattern boxes is replaced with the colour palette.

Several important functions and facilities found in most graphics packages nowadays are missing from ICON GRAPHIX. Cut, Paste, Copy and Move facilities, which would allow screen details to be duplicated or moved to other areas of the screen are noticeably absent. There are no special drawing modes for blending new designs into existing screen drawings using the logical AND and XOR functions. Serious screen designers will miss a screen dump routine for 80 column dot matrix printers, as the minimalist 32 column thermal print-outs are unlikely to satisfy them. Despite these omissions ICON GRAPHIX is a handy screen creating tool which could prove to be a lot of fun to use.

Publisher: Audiogenic
Memory: 48K
Price: £9.95
Joystick: Kempston

It may have icons but this package is not quick on the draw. The speed at which it performs its operations precludes its use by any designer who wants to produce images swiftly and with the minimum of fuss.

My test for icon packages is to see how far I can get into the program without resorting to the manual. I was able to understand most of the icons - except the rubber - but none of them seemed to work.

A quick look at the instructions, which are very brief indeed, did not reveal any wrong doing on my part so I tried again. Eventually I found the need to hold down the fire key or joystick button for three to five seconds.

Control may be slow but Audiogenic brings a whole new meaning to turtle graphics. It is the slowest drawing program I have seen. A utility written in Basic could do better. Icon Graphix takes 10 seconds to draw a line across the width of the screen. To fill the screen with a texture - it can't do colours - takes, on average, 35 seconds. What are they using, Basic ROM routines?

If Icon Graphix is not so fast it does have a wide range of graphics and text effects. The three drawing implements available are felt tip pen, paint spray and paint brush.

You can select the width of the felt pen using the Shapes icon. Sixteen nib or spray shapes can be selected, ranging from short, straight lines, through blobs to large squares of texture or colour.

The texture of your pen is changed by selecting a new texture from the blocks around the screen. Those include solid black, various hatch patterns, and plain white. You can also design your own textures using the draw option.

Lines, circles and boxes can be drawn in felt pen mode. Those shapes are elastic-banded, so that you can see the shape expand as you manipulate the cursor. To draw a line, you would press the fire key and move the cursor to the position at which you want the line to end. You can twist the line in any direction and when the fire key is released the line is completed.

Drawing predefined lines, circles and boxes is even slower than drawing simple pen trails made up of individual texture dots. The speed difference is very noticeable - we're now down to a snail's pace.

One of the only outstanding - and fast - features of the package is the magnification. It can treble the size of a particular area of your design - where the cursor has been located - and can make detailed design work easier. Unfortunately you cannot select the level of magnification, a feature which would have been useful to professional designers and artists, but in general the magnification is enough for most line drawings, plans and circuit diagrams.

Icon Graphix lacks colour - most of the time. Drawing is done in black and white and colour is added afterwards by selecting the colour menu - which appears at the top of the screen - setting the colour and then moving over your design with the felt pen. That works well enough for simple shapes but you cannot add colour on a pixel scale to complex drawings, or paint the whole screen in one colour with one instruction.

Audiogenic has relied upon the popularity of icons in an attempt to make much more of what is a sub-standard product. The package is too slow, in both control and operation, and does not have the flexibility which a professional designer would need.

Even if you're not a professional the best design equipment available is Art Studio, or The Artist, or even Animator1.

A.S.L.
£9.95

There have been quite a few graphics packages or the Spectrum released in the last few months, what with The Artist, The Art Studio and a mouse each from Kempston and AMS. And with all that graphic activity going on this slightly more modest utility from Audiogenic seems to have been overlooked. Admittedly it's not as sophisticated as some of its recent competition but it's the only one with a price that's not in double figures which makes it at least worth some consideration.

ICON DO THAT

The name Icon Graphix is a bit of a giveaway, since it tells you straight away that the program is controlled by a series of icons. These, along with the patterns available for the Fill and Spray options, are very conveniently arranged around the border of the screen so that they surround the drawing area like a frame. Most of the commands that you would expect are available for drawing standard shapes such as lines, boxes, rectangles, circles and ellipses, although there is no quick way of drawing triangles other than to join three straight lines. A 'push page' command allows you to move the picture around the screen so that you can see the areas normally covered up by the icon area border.

These operations aren't performed as quickly as they are in a program like The Artist, but that's not necessarily a bad thing since I've often found both that and Art Studio getting a bit out of control before I can figure out what I've done wrong. On the other hand, the movement of the cursor around the screen can be irritatingly slow at times and it can also be a bit tricky to control since the choice of control keys (Cap Shift, Z, X, C and V) is a bit odd. Fortunately there is an option for joystick control and, very sensibly, a microdrive compatible version of the program on side two of the tape. Not so sensible is the bug (?) which causes the program to return to Basic whenever you press any of the keys on the bottom row (other than the control keys). Since these are so close to the cursor keys I found myself dropping in and out of Basic like a yo-yo, though this doesn't affect what you've drawn and can be remedied simply by typing RUN.

Other features include the now obligatory Fill and Spray routines with about thirty predefined patterns and a facility for defining your own pattern if desired. The Pen option allows you to choose from sixteen types of nib and some of these can also use the standard patterns for shading effects, which can be quite useful.

What is missing is some of the fancier refinements such as being able to Cut and Paste areas of the screen, text handling and reflections. How indispensable you consider these to be is very much a matter of opinion, but at least the lack of frills is reflected in a price that's only about two thirds that of most graphic packages. I think that's about the best way to sum up Icon Graphix - a 'no-frills' package that provides all the basics that you might need if your pocket can't quite stretch to £15 for one of the other programs or if, like me, you're a doodler rather than a dedicated screen designer who really does need a state-of-the-art utility.

There is to be an enhanced version of the program for the Spectrum 128 though, and that could be well worth looking out for.

HOT ON THE HEELS OF THE ADVANCED ART STUDIO COMES AUDIOGENIC'S GRAPHICS PACKAGE FOR THE 128 AND PLUS 2.

Audiogenic
£12.95

Audiogenic's Icon Graphix package was launched about a year ago, at the same time as the Spectrum 128 appeared. The first version to appear was for the 48K machines but, not surprisingly, Audiogenic also announced that an enhanced version for the 128 was on its way and, now that Amstrad's own version of the 128 is well and truly here, they've finally gotten around to releasing Icon Graphix 128.

NEW FEATURES

Unlike the enhanced version of Art Studio, which uses the 128's additional memory mainly for fast data storage/retrieval and which has relatively few new facilities for actually creating graphics, the new Icon Graphix package features a number of options which were absent from the original. Mind you, the original Icon Graphix lacked certain features that could be found in both Art Studio and The Artist (such as text handling and 'cut and paste' commands) so the upgraded version has been brought into line with what we've all come to expect as standard from graphics packages these days.

The layout of the screen display remains unchanged, with the central drawing area surrounded by a border made up of the various FILL patterns and, along the bottom of the screen, icon symbols for the graphics commands. This icon menu now has an added feature though - a PAGE icon, which when selected calls up pages 2 and 3 of the menu containing the new commands.

The FILL, PEN, and shape commands (for drawing boxes, lines, circles and ovals) were all standard on the 48K version but the new commands include some for adding text to your pictures (and there is an impressive variety of fonts included on side two of the tape, although only one font at a time can be held in memory).

The other new commands are mainly for 'cut 'n paste', allowing you to define small sections of the screen which can be 'lifted up', moved around, rotated, reflected and otherwise abused. As I mentioned these can be found on ordinary 48K packages, so while their inclusion now is a good idea it's not exactly a giant leap forward.

TRACE

One new feature which is quite original is the TRACE command. Once you've defined a window (or a 'cutting' as the manual calls it) you can use this command on whatever is drawn within it. What it does is to invert the paper and ink within the cutting and to then surround any solid areas with either a black or white outline depending on the nature of the drawing. This might sound a little pointless but it actually creates a kind of 'polarised' effect that makes even simple drawings look more interesting, and it can be used repeatedly to build up some unusual shading effects which might otherwise take forever to produce if they had to be drawn conventionally.

This TRACE command is the highlight of the package, and, along with the icon menus (which I found simpler to use than on Art Studio or The Artist) is one of the areas where it scores over the competition. However there are other features which could be improved upon given the 128's potential.

Although the program allows you to control the cursor from keyboard, joystick or (Kempston) mouse, the movement of the cursor is fairly slow and it can take a couple of seconds to move the cursor from one side of the screen to another (good if you're doing detailed work using the MAGNIFY option, but irritating if you're trying to quickly move from one icon to another).

The FILL and shape drawing commands are also slow, and if you're defining a cutting with the cut and paste commands that is more than about 1/4 of the size of the screen you can almost hear the poor machine straining to keep up as it tries to constantly redraw the window. Finally, the SAVE/LOAD facilities are a bit of a mess. You can save or load a normal SCREEN$, a 'document' or a cutting, though the manual doesn't really explain how a document differs from a SCREEN$. The loading option is a bit finicky about accepting names and you can't just load the first SCREEN$ that you come to on tape (ie using LOAD "" SCREEN$), as you've got to know the name of the screen to start off with. This is fine if you've saved a picture drawn from scratch on the package, but if you've got some pictures saved onto tape that are taken from anywhere else you've got to make sure you know their names before you can get at them. Icon Graphix 128 IS an improvement upon the original. I found it easier and more enjoyable to work with than many other graphics packages I've had to review in the past, mainly because the icon menu is so self-explanatory and visible on screen all the time rather than just popping up and down before you've managed to figure out what you're doing.

As I mentioned, the program could be faster than it is, but on the other hand it does cost just £12.95 compared to a fairly hefty £25 for the 128 version of Art Studio, so while it might not match Art Studio in sheer speed and number of options it still works out at quite good value.