Colourful Kestrel

There are some quite nice effects to be obtained using Art Designer - another graphic design package for the BBC Model B and Electron.

It does not aim to be in the same vein as the usual line-arc-triangle-circle packages which all turn out to be much of a muchness. Here they have decided to be slightly off the others' wavelength and in several ways this policy comes up with some nice touches while in others the user pays for eccentricity.

It works in Mode 2, losing sharpness but gaining all the possible colours, and has only Draw to, Text, Circle and Ellipse procedures in common with the rest of the herd.

It shows its individuality by having such functions as Air brush - variable densities of dots sprayed at the screen in the area around the cursor; two infill techniques which give the facility to create many shades of colour; user defined characters defined in a separate part of the program suite and then brought on command into the main drawing where required; and Kestrel.

Kestrel is a little character that the programmers have previously defined which looks vaguely like the bird, although any self respecting kestrel would sue for defamation.

It is not just plonked on the screen like the other user-defined characters but can be dragged around by the cursor leaving a trail behind it. I am not too sure what it is meant to achieve but it does give an idea of the program's off-beam approach.

My copy had a bug in it which kept giving SYNTAX ERROR whenever I tried to WIPE the screen or call up MENU.

However, this is a minor matter - it is the command message idiosyncracies that I felt rather distracted from the enjoyment of the program.

Most of the commands have to be called using Ctrl plus character which calls for a lot of hand waving and doubles the workload, and generally the program is rather slow in setting up the effects.

I think it would take quite a while to get really proficient.

That being said, it isn't like all the others and that I do like.

Terry Hallard