My name and address: Stephen Boddy, BEng Computer Sys. Eng. Job offers welcome ;) 44 Corporation Road, Darlington, Co Durham, DL3 6AJ. e-mail: boddy@www.hotmail.com There just a couple of Gifs on this disk which contain three different types of art. BootPic - This is a boot screen I drew last year. I drew everything from scratch except for the word Amiga. (I sourced that from Aminet I think.) The clouds came from a fractal program (I think it was called Clouds). The text and shadows and processing of the clouds was all done in a coverdisk version of ImageFX. The rather cool shiny black onyx looking text was pretty much an accident. I was just playing around with convolutions. I used a regular paint program (DP or Brilliance) to create the boing pattern, and the subtle shading on the ball. ImageFX again to composite, convert to 256 colours, and finally did some hand retouching in the paint program again. Anyway I like the effect, and it beats some of the naf and veeerrrry cliched WinDoze boot screens that were all the rage when this was doodled. WB+SAS_Grab - Just a quick snapshot of my good ol' WB. I use DOpus 5.5 as a WB replacement. The natty icons in the main windows are again pretty much totally done from scratch. I've taken ideas from other sources of course. The folder icon is my Mac Copland look-a-like. They have a common palette which is running to about 25 colours. They do not animate for the following reasons: 1. Having a tiny bit of an icon move does not give a good indication of which icons are selected, especially if you're using a NoBorder feature. So these icons use the darkening style that you get on Macs. This makes it very easy to see at a glance which icons are selected. 2. When using animations, I tend to find that I incorporate the programs function into the animation. Consequently if I've a window open that has lots of icons in it, I find myself roving around the window clicking on them to figure out their purpose. Not allowing animation forces me to think about what I'm representing, and hopefully to draw a clearer and more intuitive icon. Anyway I like 'em. If anyone wants to help out (my time is limited, I'm trying to find a real job) I'm happy to distribute the construction pics on two conditions: 1. The design outlines must be followed. (i.e. no bastardized mutant Frankenstein icons to be constructed from my construction kit. 2. Any icons you draw with my kit must be sent to me, and will be distributed in one single archive, but you will get full credit in the docs. (This is mostly so I can make sure no one releases really cack icons and people falsely assume that I drew them. VisualE+ - Don't get excited, this is a purely fabricated graphic. I haven't written a web browser, it's just a mock up. As part of my quest for a job that pays more than £3.01/hr (Nightclub Barman), I forked out a wad of dosh for a bumper sized book on Visual Basic. It's obvious that this is a quick and easy way to code apps. RAD (Rapid App. Development) is yet another buzzword that's popular at the moment. But its a shame that we don't have something similar on the Amiga. You draw a gadget, double-click on it, select the event you want, type in the code, and allow the RAD program to worry about the rest of it. Now I'm still in the very nebulous stages of planning and tentative first steps, but here are some of the features I hope to include: * A (quick) layout method so that the gadgets are aligned and structured. * As much OO as I can possibly squeeze in. * Lots of gadgets (with possibly a way to bolt in new ones like OCX in VB) including: Basic controls Bool button (handling text and graphic buttons), Radio buttons, Checkbox, Stringbox (Single/Multi line), Proportional Slider (Horiz, Vert & Area), Gradient Slider, Colour Wheel. Constructed controls Arrowed prop, Listbox, Hierarchical listbox, Columnated listbox, Pop-up editable, Pop-up non editable. Grouping controls Frames, Click tabs. Cosmetic controls Area, Text Label, Gauge, LED, LED Bar, Common dialogs Palette, Color, Message box, Load, Save, Input, Password, Printer, Font * A number of built in drawing styles to alleviate the drab Amiga syndrome, with some attractive user interfaces. These would be set by the user, and all programs would use that same style. Note this will not be as user-configurable as MUI, but I think it will look better. Q. Why doesn't MUI remap graphics? It insists on MagicWB colours which I *personally* (no flames please) think looks like cack. * The ability to make the program a commodity.(1) * The ability to give the program an ARexx port, and within the designer, add commands very easily.(1) (1) I might use some PD modules for these bits, to speed up development. Anyway as I say this is still embryonic, so don't expect it soon, but I'm happy enough to yak about this (ideas are welcome, though no guarantees) or anything else. A small warning though. If you're going to flame me... make sure you wear an asbestos suit. ;) TTFN SteveB boddy@www.hotmail.com (in case you missed it) (You can try snail mailing me, but don't expect a quick answer.) PS Does anyone know of a way to access usenet messages without a news server. I'm using an open access machine at the local tech, but they've only got NetScape 1.2, and it doesn't have any News facilities. There is a quick access button at the top for NewsGroups, but it doesn't work! And worse still they've disabled the preferences, so I can't even see if I can fix it. (I suppose they're trying to stop any dweebs from lousing up the system, but it's a bit of a pain.)