Innovative Graphics Program Lets You Draw On-screen as Easily as with Pencil and Paper.
Eric Taub
Reviews Graphics/
ADVANCED DRAWING PROGRAMS such as Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand boast impressive features, but you have to fuss with Bezier curves, layers, and other sophisticated tools. Now SmartSketch, a new program from FutureWave, presents some of these same high-end features, but with a unique twist: The program's interface makes drawing with your cursor as intuitive as drawing with pen and pencil.
A Guiding Hand
To create lines and shapes in SmartSketch, you simply draw them with the pencil or the brush tool. Any lines you make with the pencil tool are instantly converted into paths, as they are with Illustrator's pencil tool. But SmartSketch goes one step further: You can turn on shape recognition and autosmoothing, so if you sketch a shaky square or a wobbly circle, SmartSketch will form it into a perfect geometric shape. In the same way, it will automatically straighten and smooth jagged or uneven lines and curves. If you like using primitive-shape tools, you can configure the pencil tool to create circles or squares. The pencil tool is even intelligent enough to combine lines you draw on top of each other into a single path. And just like its counterpart in Illustrator, SmartSketch's brush tool turns your strokes into filled paths. But unlike other draw programs, SmartSketch assumes that you don't want to work in layers. A SmartSketch page is a single layer. If you draw one object on top of an existing one, SmartSketch modifies both to create a new shape. For instance, in any other program, if you draw a circle and then draw a diagonal line across it, you have two distinct shapes, one on top of the other, unless you use a filter to combine them after you've drawn them. In SmartSketch, if the circle and the line are the same color, the program will automatically combine them into a single shape as soon as you've finished drawing the diagonal line. If the circle and the line are different colors, the line will slice the circle into two filled arcs on either side of the line. If you prefer to keep your shapes inviolate, you can select them and place them into their own Group layer, where they won't be modified by objects from other Group layers. Alternatively, and more simply, you can lock selected objects to keep them from being moved or transformed by other objects.
Other SmartSketch features adopt some of the fluidity of paint programs and are intoxicatingly easy to use. For instance, you can drag the eraser tool over any object to erase a swatch of color, just as you can in a paint program. But when you've finished erasing, SmartSketch actually changes the shape of the objects. For instance, if you divide an object with a line of erasure, SmartSketch turns the object into two separate shapes. You can also use a lasso or rectangle tool to select only certain parts of objects to modify -- although this feature isn't anything new for paint programs, it has been unheard of, until now, for drawing programs.
You also have control over how your paint strokes interact with your drawing. You can paint on every surface of your page, of course, but you can also confine paint strokes to the inside of existing objects, to objects of the same color, or to selected parts of objects.
Once you've created objects on your page, simply click on the line or curve you want to modify and drag to reshape it -- you don't have to worry about confusing off-line control points. Experienced illustrators will miss the extreme precision they get with Bezier points, but average artists will be more than happy with SmartSketch's approach.
Smooth Simplicity
SmartSketch has other endearing features as well. It has automatic anti-aliasing, for smoothing objects. You can kern and track type and break it apart into editable shapes. You can rescale objects, and there's an impressive array of alignment options. You can import and export PICT, DXF, and Illustrator 88-format EPS files. You can also create multipage documents, which appear on-screen as notebooks. And SmartSketch comes with tons of ready-to-use clip art.
SmartSketch is impressive in its first release, but there are several items on our wish list. We'd like to be able to use gradient colors and fills, and response to pressure-sensitive styli would be welcome as well. Most important, we'd like a PowerPC-native version -- which FutureWave has promised for later this year. We'd also like transparency options for SmartSketch's brushes.
The Bottom Line
Novice users will be well served by SmartSketch's delightful mix of simplicity and sophistication. But even veteran Illustrator and FreeHand users may find SmartSketch a useful time-saver for object-combination operations.
SmartSketch 1.0
Rating: (4 out of 5 mice) Very Good
Price: $69.95 (list).
Pros: Intuitive interface for drawing. Inexpensive. Shape recognition, autosmoothing, and anti-aliasing. Objects interact to form new shapes.
Cons: Not PowerPC-native. Lacks support for enhanced features such as graduated fills.
Company: FutureWave Software, San Diego, CA; 800-619-6193 or 619-637-6190.
Reader Service: Circle #406.
Creating a complex design that overlaps and combines shapes is remarkably easy with FutureWave's SmartSketch, which doesn't require you to work in layers or learn the fine art of using Bezier-curve tools.
