Back to the drawing board - ClarisDraw from Claris - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, March, 1995 by Charles H. Gajeway

Rating: **

ClarisDraw

Version Reviewed: 1.0

List Price: $399

Average Street Price: $265

Publisher: Claris, (408) 987-8227, (800) 325-2747

ClarisDraw is the long-awaited upgrade to MacDraw Pro. The program has been rebuilt top to bottom, with more than 75 new features, including 256-color capability, Bezier curves (editable complex shapes), QuickTime video support, and slide shows.

Having waited over a year since ClarisDraw was first announced, we tore into the program eagerly, hoping to find that it had been worth the long and impatient wait. Unfortunately, we found we could have waited a little longer.

Like MacDraw Pro, ClarisDraw features multiple drawing layers, object libraries, and placement control that all make simple work of creating such precision images as schematics and floor plans. We especially liked new features such as the Point Guide option, which indicates the exact ends and midpoints of lines and shapes.

We also found ClarisDraw's alignment tools to be the quickest and easiest we've used. Instead of selecting alignment options from a menu, a palette of buttons pops up that align selected objects vertically and horizontally--a very smart feature. In addition, the palette lets you link objects in spatial relationships that are maintained as you edit your drawing.

Bezier drawing and editing tools make short work of creating and revising complex shapes. We had hoped ClarisDraw would feature a graceful way to join intricate Bezier and standard draw shapes, but you must convert regular draw objects into a Bezier format first.

The program also offers master pages, which let you define a constant background layer for a series of drawings. We found this to be useful in giving a uniform, professional look to slides and presentations. We also like the ability to edit a group of objects without having to ungroup its components, a frustrating procedure that can disturb the arrangement.

However, while ClarisDraw's editable color palettes are intuitive and easy to use, any variation on the standard set of colors must be created and saved as a separate custom palette.

Clip art and scanned photos looked awful unless we set our Mac to display thousands or millions of colors. Furthermore, the program tends to be sluggish, especially when using gradient fills.

ClarisDraw's new color painting capabilities are not as flexible as we'd hoped they would be. Paint objects are drawn in frames rather than as a separate layer, making it difficult to place and control combinations of paint and draw objects. We also wonder why the pencil and brush tools use the pen color palette, while the eyedropper tool selects colors from the fill palette. Because of this, editing paint objects is awkward and tedious.

Although text handling is greatly improved from MacDraw Pro, there are some surprising shortcomings as well. Only the Define Styles command provides a unified dialog box for setting font and style attributes, so minor changes require several trips to the menu to make isolated changes. ClarisDraw text frames don't offer automatic hyphenation or discretionary (meaning, invisible when active) hyphens, making aesthetically fine-tuning line endings a tedious and error-prone process. And although text can be made to follow the shape of an object rather easily, you can't adjust character spacing (kerning), so that large or stylized fonts tend to look awful.

Although ClarisDraw offers some innovative and clever features, many others are limited, and several advanced graphics capabilities are missing altogether. Other professional-level products, such as Deneba's Canvas, offer a greater range of features at about the same price.

About Our Ratings

  The One-to-four-star
ratings are based on           *          Poor
performance, features,         **         Fair
setup, ease of learning
and use, availability,         ***        Good
warranty support,              ****       Excellent
doucmentation, and price.