Sofware In Review

It's been a long time since the March/April 1992 issue of RUN magazine. In that issue I reviewed Fun Graphics Machine. Since then, I have to admit, I've pretty much left all my graphics and desktop publishing chores to GEOS, since as most of you know by now, I'm a confirmed GEOS-aholic; I stayed with what I knew and was comfortable with.

So when the editor of Commodore World asked me to write a review of FGM, I had to do a little searching. I still had the disks, of course, (and even knew where they were, pretty much), so in that way it was no trouble. I remembered some of what I'd done with the program all those years ago, and even remembered where the box with the keyboard overlays and printouts was. When I found the manual (spiral bound to lay flat, by the way), I wandered through it for an hour or so to remind myself of some of the finer points. Then I booted up the program and started to play around a little, and it didn't take long for things to come back to me. It also didn't take long for me to arrive at some of the same conclusions I had arrived at a few years ago.

Before I jabber on about the little details, though, I think I'd better get the number one question settled. What exactly does the Fun Graphics Machine do, anyway? If you ask an FGM fan that question, you'll probably hear the answer "Everything!" In a sense they're right, although that isn't really very informative. The ads for FGM proclaim that it will create everything from business cards to video titles, but even that only gives a general impression of what the program itself does. Yes, it can be used to do desktop publishing. Yes, it is amazingly versatile. But what the heck does it actually do?

FGM is first and foremost a high-resolution graphics editor that allows users to put existing elements--text and graphics--wherever they want to for the creation a screeen image. In other words, if you want the screen to say "Welcome to our home" with a little picture of a house in the corner, FGM will let you do that. If you want the house to be a different size or the text to be written with hollowed out letters, FGM will let you do that too. Fun Graphics Machine lets you place text and graphics anywhere you want on the screen and then gives you tools to modify, adjust, distort, and alter them to create exactly the screen design you're looking for. Then, FGM will print that screen out.

So far so good. But let me note a few things about what I just said, things that will help explain exactly what FGM is and does. First of all, note that you need to have the graphics you want to use before you get going with FGM. Fun Graphics Machine is not a paint or a draw program. Secondly, FGM does printing. That's important; it's where a lot of the power of FGM lies. Let's look at that first point a little closer. FGM takes exisisting artwork and puts it to use in new ways. You can import graphic images from quite a few sources, including Print Shop graphics, high-resolution bitmaps, and even multi-color screens, and place them on the screen. Once there, those graphics can be smoothed, distorted, and changed into the image you really want. This is a lot like what Print Shop does--taking artwork and placing it on the screen--but with a much, much larger selection of tools. Also, FGM has no pre-set places where the graphics have to go, which means you are limited only by your own creativity. The graphics tools include smoothing and slanting of any size area of the screen.

The second point, the printing, comes into play once you've created a screen or series of screens. Here FGM behaves a lot like Newsroom, putting the screens you create together on a page. Unlike Newsroom, however, you have complete control over the placement of the various screens and even over the resolution of the printout of each one (which affects the area that screen takes up on a page). You can, for example, print a page made up of three screens stacked one on top of the other. You could also print a page consisting of eight screens printed in two columns of four, rather like Newsroom does. The printer drivers in FGM are superb, offering pretty much any resolution your printer can manage. Each different resolution, in other words each different number of dots per inch, results in a different sized printout, so you can fine tune your final document by adjusting the resolution of the various sections.

Fun Graphics Machine, then, is similar in m any ways to Print Shop and Newsroom. It allows you to take graphics and text and use them to create a printed document. The variety of options, however, for graphics manipulation and for printing, leave those other programs in the dust. Fun Graphics Machine will let you do pretty much anything you can imagine with graphics on a page.

I called Ron Hackley, the author of the program, and found out that there have been no major upgrades since the last copy I received, so I booted up the disk I had and dove in. When I started working with FGM again after a few years, I found myself impressed all over again. Fun Graphics Machine is an incredibly powerful program. There are options for smoothing that even GEOS can't match. FGM can import a multicolor screen better than any high- resolution program I've ever seen. And the options for printing are astounding. I was pleased with FGM back then, and I still am today.

All my impressions weren't rosey before, though, and as I worked with the program I realized that I still have the same concerns now that I had a few years ago. FGM is a very complicated program to use. There are several different modes of operation with almost identical functions. I assume that memory constraints were the reason for this, but that doesn't make it any less confusing. The entire program operates using keyboard combinations, often involving three keys at a time. These are not particularly intuitive in many cases; I found myself constantly groping for the manual or poring over my keyboard overlay. Granted, it didn't take me long to memorize the basic commands, but I didn't want to limit myself just to the basics. A set of onscreen drop-down menus or a movable toolbox would go a long way toward making the system easier to use, as well as making some of the more esoteric functions more accessable and easier to try out. The joystick is used to place graphics, but it isn't used to select areas of the page to manipulate, which would seem a logical job for the joystick to do. Finally, the manual, while chock full of excellent information, is daunting indeed. The introduction suggests that you use the manual as reference, reading the sections that you find you need, but since many of FGM's functions are hard to imagine until you try them, I'm not sure what will induce someone to find out about them.

Now I'm sure some of you will accuse me of being biased in what I'm saying. I stated right up front that I am a GEOS fan, and many of my complaints about FGM sound like I wish it were GEOS, with its intuitive interface and less-cluttered documentation. It's true, I do find GEOS far more intuitive and user-friendly. But Fun Graphics Machine isn't GEOS any more than it is Print Shop or Newsroom. It shares some of the characteristics of each of those other programs, true, but it is more powerful in some ways than any of them. What is unfortunate is that it's interface is difficult enough that all that power is likely to go to waste, and it's not just my GEOS addiction talking when I say that.

I asked Ron about some of this and he explained to me that he preferred to use the limited memory space of the 64 to add more features and capabilities to the program instead of such niceties as an intuitive interface. He does have a point and FGM certainly has enormous capabilities. I'm just afraid that in this day and age when computer programs are expected to be user-friendly and intuitive as well as powerful, FGM will be abandoned by users who don't care to dig through the manual every time they want to desktop publish something.

But the fact of the matter is, you can do amazing things with Fun Graphics Machine, and once you get over the initial learning curve, you'll find yourself having a ball. The keyboard overlays are a great help, and the lay-flat manual does have plenty of illustrations and examples as well as a multi-page summary of all the functions and their keyboard commands and a comprehensive index. You can import a great many types of graphics into the program and there is even a fantastic selection of clip art disks available in FGM format. The price is very reasonable, especially when compared to the price of a GEOS system with the same capabilities. On top of all that, Ron provides excellent customer support and honestly uses and enjoys his own program. When it all comes down to it, then, I can sincerely say that I recommend Fun Graphics Machine highly. Buy it. Use it. But keep in mind that it may take some time to get really going with FGM. Give it the chance, though; it's worth it.