At first sight, I thought that here was yet another Mode 7 screen designing pack - so what could this have that would make it better than others already on the market?

The answer is that it has quite a lot going for it, and it out-performs most of the others available (which quite often cost many pennies or pounds more).

The program contains a very full description of the facilities and controls in a 'Help' file. All the commands are summarised in the user guide or on the function key strip. All combinations of the function SHIFT and CTRL keys are used.

For some of the more critical operations (primarily deleting what you have just created from the screen) the choices are highlighted on the function key strip, and you are given the option to execute or abort. This sensible feature has saved me from destroying screens on more than one occasion!

The system allows the user to design a screen of text, graphics or both; and then adds this as a procedure to the end of a Basic program that displays the finished product as a simple slideshow.

There are key areas where I felt that this program performed really well.

First, Design 7 has word processing-type on-screen editing facilities. That is, inserting or deleting single letters, or lines, selecting or global changes of code and block move and delete functions.

Second, there are four sizes of text directly available, so gone are the days of having to flip between the pages in the back of the User Guide trying to work out which letter gives the shape you want!

Third, the ability to 'cut and paste' parts of old pages to create new ones. So, not only can one part of a screen be copied onto another part of the screen, but they can be saved and re-used with other screens.

Finally, and probably the best feature, was that it works directly with the Morley teletext adaptor to load screens from Ceefax or Oracle. These can then be edited in the same way as screens you have designed yourself.

This could be a real bonus for teachers who want to include this type of data for use in the classroom.

I was very impressed with this piece of software, and became quite familiar with all the various editor controls in no time at all.

The screenshot has been prepared showing some details of pixel plotting, a feature of Design 7.

To accompany Design 7 are two other pieces of software, a Fax system and a 'carousel'. These come with an editor which is fully compatible with Design 7 and gives to very different methods of presenting screen pages. The Fax system gives a random access system to all the screen pages you have created: i.e. a Videodata system.

The carousel is a program that lets the user select various screen pages (from Design 7 or the Fax system), and display them as a continuous sequence.

This gives the possibilities of an electronic notice board with many screens, or simple animation of a single image (because up to ten screens can be held in memory and quickly interchanged).

For the price of the design software and the carousel and Fax systems, this must be a strong new contender in the education market. It certainly has many of the features missing from some systems already on the market. Food for thought is that a 'patch' has been written to allow Design 7 screens to be used within Microtext.