With the release of AMX Utilities and AMX Desk, the AMX mouse comes of age. These two packages enable the mouse fan to make his Beeb even more of a Macintosh.

The AMX Utilities package comprises additional utilities that complement the AMX Art package supplied with the mouse. It could be said that this package fills in all the gaps left in AMX Art, but that perhaps is a little harsh. The AMX Utilities package comes complete with an improved AMX Art program, and an identical copy of the old Design program, that completely replace your old software. In addition to these, there is a colour sketch program, a fill pattern designer, picture border stripper, a 'slide show' generator (could it be that AMS is an ardent Beebug watcher?) and the utilities suite itself.

Like the AMX Art package, the software is supplied on a 40 track disc with a program to convert it to 80 tracks. Unfortunately, the disc used has no write-protect notch, so this is not possible. However, a pair of scissors soon sorts out that problem.

There are two changes in the new AMX Art program. Firstly, a bug in the old program that affected long term use has been cleared up and, secondly, the option of loading up different fill patterns is provided.

New fill patterns of your own design are created with the separate Design program. This is very much like the original icon design program and so you can leap into it without a glance at the manual. All good stuff. Although the old set patterns are good there is no substitute for your own ideas. Now you can, say, fill in an area of the screen with a frieze of your initials.

Another enhancement of AMX Art is the option to call up a printer dump routine in one of the many utility ROMs that you might have in your machine.

The slide show generator displays a series of specified pictures generated with AMX Art one after another, either automatically or at the press of a (mouse) button.

The major reason for buying AMX Utilities, however, has to be the utilities suite. Although these are used to operate on AMX Art pictures, the suite is self contained. It is not called from within AMX Art - a pity as this makes hopping between creating a picture and fiddling with it using the utilities much more cumbersome. It would have been nicer to have all the utilities on menu in AMX Art and overlay them from disc.

Calling up AMX Utilities presents you with a screen with three pull down menus at the top and a picture space in the centre. There are four utilities provided - Zoom, Copy, Curves, and Icons.

Zoom provides a facility that was obvious by its absence from AMX Art. Now you can enlarge a small section of your picture to full screen size and operate at pixel level. Locating the cursor over a single pixel space (now a character size) and pressing a mouse button will put a pixel in there, if there isn't one already, or wipe out the pixel already there. This allows you to put that final exact touch to your pictures that make them look that much more professional, especially in printer dump form where every slip shows up.

The Copy utility is a lovely addition. Any area of your picture can be copied onto another place in the same picture after being rotated through any number of right angles, or reflected in either axis. That's not all. The copy can either be drawn over whatever is in the destination position, inverted, or the space wiped clear first.

The Curves facility is another that was sadly missing from the original AMX Art. Whereas that program allowed only full circles to be drawn, this utility gives you arcs and ellipses, again with the invert, over or wipe options. The inability to use this facility from the main AMX Art program reduces its usefulness very considerably.

The last utility in the suite is titled Icons. This uses one or more files of icons created with the Design program (components and music files are provided as starters) to build up pictures or to add to existing pictures. If your skill with the mouse is not quite up to scratch, a 'gridlock' system can be brought into effect to accurately position the icons, aligned with an invisible grid. Again, icons can be positioned over one another, inverted, or overwrite previous icons.

Combined with the ease and naturalness of the mouse, this has to be the best method of producing technical diagrams available for the non-draughtsman.

How Macintosh can a Beeb get? With AMX Desk the answer has to be very. AMX Desk gives your Beeb all the kinds of desk-top management features that Apple is so proud of pushing in its adverts. AMX Desk is really several different programs combined together in an easy-to-use, mouse-driven package.

First up (literally) is a clock and calendar. On boot-up you are asked the date and time (unfortunately you must type it in - you can't just press RETURN if you're in a hurry) and this is remembered until you next do a CTRL-BREAK. Then the typical desk-top simulation is presented with icons for the drives, the diary/calendar, telephone number list, and memo pad. A calculator is also included but this is hidden away in one of the pull-down menus and isn't always available. If you use a second processor then the calculator is available at all times. Either way, using the mouse to position the cursor over the buttons of an iconic calculator has to be the worst way of getting your sums right, so it's no great loss. Selecting a disc icon will give a catalogue of the disc complete with icons to describe the types of file there. Selecting an item directly from this catalogue, with the mouse, will CHAIN or *RUN it as appropriate.

The diary/calendar is a lovely piece of programming. It gives you a calendar of three months starting at the present. This can be scrolled back and forth across a two year period and any day selected. Now three days are displayed, and entries can be made from the keyboard. Any day with an entry is shown in inverse video in the main calendar. The whole lot is stored to disc, so your complete appointments can be filed away without ever putting pen to paper.

An alarm is also used that enables your Beeb to prompt you at any time of any day that an appointment is due. The usefulness of this is lessened by the fact that it will only operate if you are using AMX Desk at the time the alarm is due.

Memopad is effectively a mini word processor. Up to three pages of 24 lines of 32 characters can be filled with text and saved onto disc. Simple editing facilities are provided along with centring and justification - ideal for scribblings! More advanced facilities enable you to take sections of the memo and 'paste' them into another memo or even into a diary entry.

The third major part of AMX Desk is the telephone/address 'book'. This is a simple database for brief details on al your contacts. The initial screen of this program is designed like the real thing with an alphabetic index down the side. Selecting any letter with the . mouse displays the entries for that letter which can also be printed out for a more permanent record.

As a suite of useful everyday programs AMX Desk excels. However, it is not on to stretch it to the more arduous task of providing an icon-based environment from which to use your Beeb. That is where AMX departs from Mac. To give them credit, AMS and Elliot Software have done their best to establish the AMX system at the lowest of levels, but without re-writing the OS this is not that practical. If you are looking for a genuine Macintosh, you will have to spend the £2000 odd needed. If, however, you are happy with having to know a fair bit of the 'technical' operation of a computer but still want the easy front end, AMX is the answer.

Watford's Colour Art is just the kind of program that it would have been nice to have seen in the AMX Utilities package. Using Colour Art, pictures created with AMX Art (and the Utilities for that matter) or any other similar package can be coloured in four colours. There are two clever points to this software. Firstly, the mode 4 AMX Art picture is, on loading, converted by the program into a mode 1 picture in two colours, whereupon it can be coloured in with the remaining two colours of mode 1.

The other clever trick is that, although only four colours in total are used, the package gives you a menu of sixteen shades, created with stipple patterns, to choose from. The four 'primary' colours can also be changed in the normal VDU19 type way and this data saved with the picture.

The Colour Art package, of course, uses the mouse to actuate all the options. Shades are selected by moving a (rather grotty) cursor over the shade menu boxes, pressing the Execute button, and then moving to the area that needs colouring. This area can be any part of the picture bounded with a solid line. Even an area already 'filled' with a monochrome AMX Art pattern can be re-filled in colour.

The intention is obviously to make the Colour Art package emulate (in colour) the original AMX Art. However, the operation is not as slick as the original and the presentation generally inferior. There are no beautifully designed icons on the screen in this work, only a flickering cross cursor. However, Colour Art is not a poor program and provides a highly novel and useful way in which to obtain high resolution colour pictures using the mouse. For that, at least, Watford Electronics must be congratulated.