SX Paint and WebAK - by Chris Wenham

X Paint briefly made an appearance last year as a "Proof of Technology" demo on the Modular Dreams web site. After SPG's June 30th announcement that development of ColorWorks for OS/2 had been stopped, Modular Dreams (or MD+F for short) decided the time was ripe to finally bring a full working version to market. Since the product is not yet fully up to scratch though, MD+F is bundling it for free with its existing web graphics package; WebAK (Short for Web Animation Kit).

WebAK, on the other hand, features no painting capabilities and is geared towards creating GIF animations for use in web pages. It also incorporates the fascinating background pattern generators inherited from MD+F's "Renders" plug-ins for ColorWorks V2 (Incidentally, they're also the same as the "Background Tile" pattern generators found in ColorWorks: Web 3 for Windows).

SX Paint is, of course, the most interesting of the two. Modular Dreams has replicated all of the functionality of WebAK into SX Paint, meaning that one could safely install SX Paint alone and not worry about missing features from WebAK. SX Paint also inherits some of the catalog browsing abilities of MD+F's third product, M3, which is an image cataloging database.

What makes SX Paint exciting though is that it shows a lot of the pioneering "breaking the mould" spirit that we saw in ColorWorks. For example, any effect can be painted to the canvas with any tool just like you could do with ColorWorks. But SX Paint also takes a more visual approach to the job of linking effects together -- letting you drag-n-drop target and source images to each effect panel before finally drawing.

This review will cover WebAK first and the features unique to SX Paint last.

WebAK

WebAK comes in an OS/2 and a Windows 95 version, both of which are included on the same set of diskettes. As its full name, Web Animation Kit, implies, it is primarily a tool for creating GIF animations destined for the Web, although it does have some powerful image filtering and background pattern generators too. A GIF animation is like a regular GIF file, except that it stores multiple frames and information on how to 'play' those frames.

Installation and Documentation

WebAK does not have a glamorous installation utility. It comes on five 1.44K floppy disks and requires the user to run two Rexx programs before the software is fully copied over to the hard drive. Then one must set up a program object on the Desktop manually, since the Rexx script will not create one for you. Uninstalling the product would involve deleting the directory it copied itself into, then deleting the program object.

Documentation is a 58 page booklet that explains all the concepts you need to know about using WebAK, especially its ubiquitous use of something called an Image View Canvas (discussed later). It is recommended that you read through the first portion of the manual before starting to use the product, since working with WebAK is probably not what you're used to. There are places where I wished the documentation had been more clear.

User Interface

The WebAK user interface is much more user friendly than the installation program was, thankfully. Upon starting, you're first greeted with a pleasant welcome dialog (GIF, 12.8k) that gives you access to the most frequently used functions of the program -- Image Editor, Resurrect, GIF Animator, Close and Exit. This welcome dialog can be configured to dismiss itself automatically once the program has finished loading itself completely into memory.

WebAK's toolbars can be tugged out of their normal position and 'docked' at several locations around the screen, such as under the menu bar, next to the status bar, anchored to either side or free floating. Just grab one with the mouse and start dragging around. The status bar is also thicker than you might usually find elsewhere and is home to two of the Image View Canvases you'll find used a lot throughout the program. These two "IVCs", in particular, show thumbnails of the currently selected image and its Alpha Channel.

The next most conspicuous screen element is a task list, which is a small window docked in the bottom left corner. It usually just shows short internal processes that are going on deep within the bowels of the program and rarely displays anything relevant to the user, nor does it seem to interfere.

Image View Canvases

Before delving in, let me first cover a few terms. An Editor Window (GIF, 38.5k) is a window in WebAK that you can edit images in by applying effects and filters, etc. It's just like the canvases you'd find in regular paint programs like Embellish or ColorWorks.

An Image View Canvas is a thumbnail representation of an image in memory, which can be one already loaded in an Editor Window or one hanging "in limbo" until you decide to do something with it. These Image View Canvases (or IVCs for short) are a little bit like the Colorwells found in Embellish and are receptive to drag-n-drop operations between other IVCs in much the same way. They also have context-sensitive menus accessed with a right-click of the mouse, giving you functions to clone (copy), shadow (link), close, delete and more. They're used everywhere, from displaying each frame in an animation, as preview windows for effects, and even arranged on handy palettes (GIF, 20.1k) for temporarily storing a bunch of loose images. They're the most object-oriented aspect of WebAK and SX Paint, and to really get the most out of either program you need to learn how they work.

Dragging and dropping to and from an IVC is performed the same way it would be with the Workplace Shell. Copy an image (Ctrl key down) and you'll have two identical copies now in memory, taking up twice as much RAM. Shadow or Link the image (Shift+Ctrl keys down) and you'll be creating two views of the same image in memory -- changes applied to one will be reflected in another.

This is important to note, since when shadowing/linking an image you can often take powerful advantage of the interface's ability to update itself instantly. One tool provided is a window that tiles whatever image is dropped into it, so you can see how it would look as a web page background and fix any seams. Link the source IVC with an open Editor Window and as you make changes to the image they will be reflected in the tiled view almost in real time.

This method also allows one to combine effects. Link the target of one filter, say a blur, with the source of another, say an emboss, and you've just created a combination blur-and-emboss effect. This is similar to the effects stacking and combining that could be done with ColorWorks. The representation of this effect is more visual though, and you have greater control on the order in which each stage is applied. The downfall is that it takes up a lot more screen estate to have all these effects and filter dialogs laying around.

Suffice to say, you'll either hate this method or love it, but it does add considerably to the learning curve of the program. WebAK attempts to make it a little easier to get started without having to learn the whole concept of Image View Canvases first though. If you select a filter and click on "Apply" it will assume you want to apply the effect in the currently active Editor window, without having to do any dragging-n-dropping beforehand.

The GIF Animator

GIF files can be loaded into WebAK by two different means, either through the standard File.Load procedure which will put it into a single window ready to have filters and effects applied to it, or through the GIF animator tool (GIF, 14.1k) which acts a bit like a separate program bolted onto the WebAK frame. You can't load an animated GIF file through the regular File.Load method and expect to edit its separate frames. What you can do, however, is copy a frame into an Editor Window, edit it, then drag-n-drop it back into the animation. I was unable to edit frames in place though, since telling WebAK to create a shadow of a frame opened an Editor Window for me, but did not reflect any changes in the GIF animator until I'd drag-n-dropped the edited frame back in.

WebAK is possibly the most powerful tool for creating GIF animations on OS/2 though, since it supports changing almost any aspect of the animation from the offsets of each frame to the disposal method. WebAK even supports a few disposal methods that Netscape does not.

Once the animation is assembled, you (with your mighty T1 line hooked to the company Ethernet) might want to check on how those poor peons with their 14.4's and their 28.8's might be seeing your grand creation as it trickles in. No problem, there's a Download Frames Tester which can be set to simulate several different popular bit rates. Unfortunately, this tool won't actually show you the animation slowed down, it'll just give you a graph of projected arrival time for each frame.

The space for entering animation filenames is also limited to 32 characters and doesn't give you access to a standard file browser; you have to type it in manually.

Pattern Generator and Other Goodies

If you don't do much in the way of animations for your web pages, you may still consider picking up WebAK for its background pattern generator. Actually, I wouldn't recommend most of the patterns available as backgrounds since they're much too strong and hard on the eye. But far be it for me to suggest that you can't find something to do with them.

The patterns generated are the same as the ones in the MD+F ColorWorks Renders plug-in already reviewed in OS/2 e-Zine!. (All except for the Fire, Waves and Magnetic Waves patterns, which couldn't be included due to a bug in the OpenClass libraries used in the product.)

If you need to create an image map for a web page then look no further than the tool included here. It's more than capable of the job, letting you define regions as rectangles, circles or polygons, then generating code for either client-side or server-side image maps.

Collapsed environments and Scripting

WebAK provides a unique method for storing your work environment to disk and restoring it later exactly as you had left it off. Editor Windows, Image Holders, GIF animator windows and all their settings, positions and sizes are stored to a file. This can be a time saver when you don't want to go through the chore of opening windows left and right when you come in for work in the morning and have to pick up where you left off the previous evening. It can also be used for trading setups with your associates, especially when these files can be traded freely between the OS/2 and Win95 versions of WebAK.

And then there's the WebAK Scripting language; a proprietary, object oriented, C++ style language that can be used to automate and control almost every aspect of the program. I sort of wished for old fashioned Rexx scripting, but this language is easy enough to learn and is actually quite powerful. Modular Dreams has an example on their web site of an animation that was put together by one of these scripts.

SX Paint

At the time of this review, SX Paint was very much a moving target. As I mentioned in the introduction, it is being bundled with WebAK for free until Modular Dreams Inc. considers it ready for prime time, at which point you can expect to see it sold separately on CD-ROM. At the moment, however, it comes on a single floppy disk with the WebAK set, reusing many of the WebAK disks for its files, but installing itself in a separate directory on your hard drive, not sharing files with an existing installation of WebAK.

Features and limitations of the current version of SX Paint, 1.5 at the time of this review, shouldn't be considered set in stone until the 'ready for prime time' version ships. It is, however, a shipping product and not a Beta, even though it has been updated at least once a week since its first bundling.

ColorWorks Similarities

Users of ColorWorks will probably be the first to get comfortable with SX Paint, since it borrows much of SPG's concepts. You can flip into mask mode and paint around the object you wish to float, for example. You can also load ColorWorks texture files into the Alpha Channel of an image or a brush, and to a lesser degree there is some SMP support -- though not as deep as what you'll find in ColorWorks. And you can paint combined effects to the canvas with any of the drawing tools (anti-aliased too, which I might add looks considerably better than ColorWorks' anti-aliasing).

Drawing

SX Paint utilizes a floating tool palette that gives you fast access to most of the frequently used features. There's one-button-access to such things as flipping an image horizontally, vertically, and rotating by 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. There's also an abundance of shape tools for drawing pies, wedges, chords and more in addition to just the regular circle, rectangle, freehand and text. There is no bezier curve function, however.

I discovered a problem with adding emphasis to text drawn with SX Paint. Specifying italics will not make SX Paint use the proper italicised version of the font, instead it will simulate italics by slanting the text -- something that would make any professional typographer have a heart attack. Not only that, but the emphasis checkboxes and point-size setting in the standard OS/2 font selection dialog is ignored. You have to set these again in SX Paint's text-entry dialog.

Extremely handy, though, and a refreshing break from ColorWorks, is the access to all mask functions on the same tool palette. Not only can you toggle in and out of mask mode but you also have a button for inverting the current mask, saving as a protection mask, floating the mask and merging the mask with the canvas.

Some things are confusing though. It was by accident that I discovered you could still paint to the canvas while a mask is floated. If you're not in mask mode when you click on the magic wand button, you'll probably be baffled when the tool does absolutely nothing at all.

Of Special Effects

SX Paint has some very cool "Black Box" like special effects that can be applied to floated images. These include a Cutout and Drop-Shadow effect (something that once took me an entire Graphics Tips column to explain), Glow, Surround and Noise Mask. All of these are nicely configurable and will quickly add a cool, if not just a bit cliché touch to your web page graphics. What I found pleasantly interesting is that once floating, a mask is defined with an 8-bit transparency channel. Run the Glow effect for example, then move the floated image around, and you'll see the underlying image showing through the faint edges of the glow.

Other effects worth mentioning are those once found in the MD+F Effects Plug-in pack for ColorWorks, also previously reviewed in OS/2 e-Zine!.

Performance

...is questionable, at least on an 80mhz 486. Various dialogs are slow to come up, the time between applying text or shapes to a canvas, and when it actually shows, can be a wait of a few seconds. Moving floated images around a canvas is a full-image-drag deal too, no fast marquee outlines here. I expect this might look terrific on a high-end Pentium but if you're not so blessed it can be a real drag (no pun intended). MD+F says they will be addressing this in the future though.

SX Paint is also memory hungry. With the frequent use of IVCs everywhere there can be multiple full-size copies of images stored in RAM in addition to the regular working set. The thumbnail browser incorporated from another MD+F product, M3, likes to drink a lot of RAM too.

There's some relief to the RAM problem though. SX Paint is able to compress the Undo buffers in memory, limit the number of Undos available, and even let you specify in megabytes what the maximum amount of RAM to use for Undo is. SX Paint cannot compress the main image in RAM like ColorWorks does though.

Summary

This has been a very difficult review to write, perhaps the hardest I've done. Why? Two reasons. The first is that SX Paint is crammed with features worth talking about. Either I write until my fingers explode or I leave something out! The second is the current lack of documentation for anything but WebAK and the high learning curve associated with the product. I'm still coming to grips with the finer aspects of the (sometimes aggravating) Image View Canvases. This program is definitely an acquired taste and really not suited for the casual dabbler. You either sit down and commit yourself to spending a few hours learning it, or you're only going to get a fraction of what it's capable of delivering.

But if you were really dying to get an OS/2 version of ColorWorks 3 and left bitterly disappointed last month, here are a few consolations: 1) Not much has changed with the painting functions of ColorWorks from 2.0 to 3. The bulk of its new features comes in the way of gadgets for the web, much of which you'll also find in WebAK. 2) SX Paint is as apparent an heir to the throne of ColorWorks as I've ever seen. You can consider it in the same class as ColorWorks: the hard to learn but mightily powerful painting tool. And as pointed out above, it's also adopting many of the features that ColorWorks used to have.

I'm optimistic for SX Paint, it only remains to be seen what Modular Dreams decides to do with it.

As for WebAK, this tool is simple enough that a casual user can start using it right away with few problems. Animations, image maps, good looking background patterns and basic retouching filters are all there. It's a great utility and worth the price. Bundle the two together and you've got a bargain.

SX Paint and WebAK

by Modular Dreams, Inc.
MSRP: US$69.99

Chris Wenham is a freelance web designer, writer and Englishman who now lives in Endicott, NY. In the past he has written comedy, sci-fi, Pascal, Rexx, HTML and Gibberish. He has been using OS/2 exclusively for the past 2 years.

--

[Our Sponsor: ChipChat Tech. Group - 32-bit OS/2 text paging software and Sound Cards.]

Copyright © 1997 - Falcon Networking