Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: gl511@appl1.hrz.uni-siegen.de (Lars SFX Eilebrecht) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Weird Science CLIP ART CD Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 12 Feb 1995 04:57:05 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 284 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <3hk4f1$nnb@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: gl511@appl1.hrz.uni-siegen.de (Lars SFX Eilebrecht) NNTP-Posting-Host: hobbes Keywords: CD-ROM, graphics, clip art, commercial Originator: barrett@hobbes.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME Weird Science CLIP ART CD BRIEF DESCRIPTION This CD-ROM is a non-bootable data CD-ROM containing lots of clip art in different graphic formats. All clip art is ready to use straight from the CD. Only some additional utilities (graphic-tools) are archived. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Weird Science Address: 1 Rowlandson Close Leicester Leicestershire LE4 2SE ENGLAND Telephone: 0116 234 0682 DISTRIBUTION As far as I know, you can order this CD-ROM directly from Weird Science, but most dealers should have this CD-ROM in stock. I got my copy from Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe (Germany) LIST PRICE DM 39,-. Approximately $26 (US). SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga equipped with a CD-ROM drive. More than 1 MB RAM may be required for processing some images (i.e., EPS). A hard disk is recommended, of course. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 1.3 or higher required. A suitable CD-ROM filesystem (like AmiCDROM) is required. To use the clip art with its different graphic formats, it is highly recommended that you have a DTP program such as Pagestream, Pagesetter or Professional Page. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000, 2 MB Chip RAM, 12 MB Fast RAM Toshiba XM-3401B CD-ROM drive Several hard drives AmigaDOS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.70, Workbench 40.35) AmiCDROM 1.15 REVIEW First, I would like to explain the different clip art formats found on this CD-ROM, and say some words about the disc's quality. Then I will look at the included utilities. Last but not least, I will review the compilation of the CD-ROM. GRAPHIC-FORMATS/DIRECTORIES top directories size in MBytes graphic format ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BITMAP 274 IFF-ILBM (most) BRUSHES 3 IFF-ILBM COLOUR 65 IFF-ILBM CORELCDR 5 CDR (Corel-Draw) EPS 72 ASCII-/IBM-/MAC-EPS (Illustrator) IMG1 31 IMG bit image IMG2 58 IMG bit image PGESETTR 1 IFF-ILBM PGSTREAM 4 IMG (1MB), GEM (3MB), Tools (<1MB) PRNTSHOP 5 PNM/POG (PrintShop) PROCLIPS 2 ProDraw Clips PRODRAW <1 ProDraw Clips UTILITY 14 (Amiga: 3 MB / PC: 11 MB) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (total size) 533 MByte ----------------------------------------------------------------------- INSTALLATION There is no installation required nor provided. Only the archived utilities provided on this CD-ROM must be installed. Some utilities are unarchived and are ready to use from the CD. FIRST IMPRESSIONS The first thing I did after I bought the CD, was to insert it and click on the icon appearing on my Workbench. I saw... NOTHING! There are no icons on the CD except the "disk.info" and some drawer icons in the Pagestream subdirectory. After looking closer at the CD via the shell, I found a ReadMe text in the root directory. It contained only seven lines mentioning the copyright, that it is a data disk, and that some utilities for Amiga and PC are included. CLIP ART Now, some words about the different clip art and its quality. Bitmap pictures make the biggest part of the CD-ROM. The pictures in the 'COLOUR' directory are very good. Every subdirectory has an index picture included for a quick overview. Most pictures are in HAM6 format, and some are in 16 color HiRes-Interlace. All colour pictures have a white background; this makes them easy to use within DTP programs. Other colour bitmaps can be found in the 'BRUSHES' directory. The pictures/brushes have pixel sizes below 640x400. The quality depends on the size of the image, but most ones are nice. All other bitmap pictures are black and white or greyscale. Most greyscale pictures have a size less than 640x512 with (very) good quality. The pixel sizes of the black and white pictures vary in a wide range. During testing I found very big ones with 1600x3600 or 2048x2048 and very small ones with 88x52, but most are about 640x400. The IFF ILBM images found in the 'PGESETTR' directory are very small and of poor quality. The EPS clip arts are varying from simple drawn objects (less than 10KB) to very complex objects with sizes above 600 KByte. Very nice. Other bitmap objects are provided in the IMG format found in the directories 'IMG1' and 'IMG2', but even in the Pagestream directory some IMG clip arts can be found. Besides the IMG pictures, we find also GEM Metafile objects in the Pagestream directory. Most IMG files are below 50 KByte per file and in most cases the quality is good. Same applies to the GEM objects, but as they are vector objects, you can use them without quality loss in any size you want. Other vector objects are the ProDraw clips found in directories 'PROCLIPS' and 'PRODRAW'. Most objects are colour clips with a good quality. I wasn't able to look at the PrintShop and Corel Draw clip art, because I don't have PrintShop nor Corel Draw. As far as I know, no Amiga program can currently work with CDR files nor display them. UTILITIES In the UTILITY drawer of the CD, we find various archived tools and utilities. Most are converters for different graphic or font formats. Lots of Pagestream 2.x import modules are included, and various packing/archiving programs like LHA, DMS, ZOO or Uncompress. Surprisingly, further Amiga utilities are found in the Pagestream directory. Among the IMG and GEM files, we find things like ShowFont4.01, ScreenX3.0, DrawMap2.30, RMBShift2.0... (I didn't check the included PC utilities.) COMPILATION Well, there is not much to say. The CD is just a compilation of various other clip art or graphic collections. Some additional utilities were added. Nothing more! USAGE As said before, it is recommended that you use a DTP program that is able to import the different clip arts found on this CD. You can start to browse through the different graphic directories, but you will surely need a long time to view every single file... :-) I think 'normal' usage of this CD would be like this: You are just doing some DTP and are in need of a special image or graphic. You insert the CD and start searching the different directories for a proper file. And probably you will find one or more clip art that fit your need.... The CD is not ready to make available on a BBS, as the required BBS.txt files are not on the CD. But in my opinion this is not necessary for a clip art CD. LIKES AND DISLIKES I like the high quality images and bitmap graphics with a high resolution, because such images look best in a document created with a DTP program. Some images from the CD have a quality/resolution that is too low for use in DTP. I really don't like the directory layout of the CD. It is not well chosen and looks a bit weird. Also, I found some duplicate files on the CD. The CD has a separate utility directory, so why are there utilities in the Pagestream directory? These utilities have nothing to do with Pagestream. Most are graphic related, but why is there a RMBShift program? From the compilation point of view, this CD is terrible. It looks like Weird Science smashed some existing clip art collections together, took some utilities from Aminet, and burned this onto a CD. No additional overview files, like index pictures or explaining text files, are found on the CD, apart from files found in some subdirectories. The CD is not intended to be used from Workbench. Icons are very rarely found the CD. Unfortunately, the CD contains some (more or less) outdated utilities. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS I cannot say much about other clip art CDs because this is the first one that I have owned. But currently, not many other clip art CDs are available. CONCLUSIONS The CD is for Amiga users who are interested in desktop publishing. But even users who are looking only for some nice images to insert into their letters or documents would find much on this CD. The images on the CD cover nearly every topic. Not all clip art on this CD is useful, due to low quality/resolution, but there is enough material left. The compilation is poor, but the CD is quite usable and some of the images I found on the CD are very nice. So I rate it 3 out of 5 stars. The reason for only giving 3 stars is mainly the poor compilation of the CD. No additional texts or index pictures are included, the directory layout of the CD is not well chosen... (as already said before... :-) The CD is only a data CD, but other CD creators showed that it is possible to add good search and overview tools for a CD to make them easy to access for the user (i.e., with search/find tools, AmigaGuide, or HTML systems). If the CD had a better compilation and layout, the price would be OK, but as it is, the price is too high! Indeed, this CD is does not help the reputation of Weird Science! It is just a simple collection of various clip art collections. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review represents my personal point of view. If you would like to re-publish this review in any way, the author requests at least a copy of the used media. Copyright 1995 Lars Eilebrecht. All rights reserved. Author address: Lars Eilebrecht Glueck-Auf-Strasse 23 57223 Kreuztal GERMANY email: SFX@appl1.hrz.uni-siegen.de --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews