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RISC World

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Aaron Timbrell rounds up the software directory

Welcome to another DiscWorld column. One again we are giving away a full copy of a commercial program. Regular readers may remember that some time ago we gave away a copy of XStitch2, well this time we have gone one better and are giving everyone a full version of XStitch Sovereign.

XStitch Sovereign - worth �29

The latest version in APDLs range of XStitch design products. Includes all the features of XStitch 2 and lots lots more including:

  • Support for Anchor & DMC thread colours.
  • Quicker chart generation.
  • Scale sprites to fit the canvas size.
  • Importation of JPEG, GIFF, TIFF files.
  • Make canvasses from scratch.
  • Save out designs in XSCanvas format so they can be edited later.
  • Full canvas editing and drawing tools, including boxes, lines, circles etc.
  • Undo option to recover from mistakes.
  • Copy sections of the canvas around.
  • Flip both vertically and horizontally.
  • New on screen colour manual.
  • New minimise colour option so that only the colours used in the design are shown.
  • All features are available from easy to use button/tool bars.
  • OLE sprite editing using !Paint.
  • Print out designs and reference charts.
  • Scale printed design size in units of 5% to save wasting paper.
  • WYSIWYG preview mode, shows what your design will look like when stitched including backstitch.
  • Improved canvas display with anti-aliasing.
  • User selectable grid colour, backstitch colour and symbol colour which can be changed on the fly.
  • New skein count routine, no need to guess the amount of thread needed.
  • Motif tool, use the built in motifs, select the one you want and just add it to your design using any colour.
  • Create your own motifs easily and quickly and save them for later use.
  • Add text to your canvas using any available outline font.
  • Two undo types - either undo a whole operation in one go, or undo 1 stitch at a time (up to 3800 stitches).
  • Faster canvas editing (up to twice the speed of XStitch2).
  • Much easier to resize a source image up or down without losing aspect ratio.
  • Supports paper sizes up to A3 (in both portrait and Landscape).
  • Full time on-line help available on the tool bar.
  • Customise the user experience, this alters both estimated stitching time & skein count.
  • Set the brightness of 256 colour images when imported.
  • Directly import Drawfiles (as well as Sprites, JPEG, Windows bitmap, GIFF e.t.c).
  • Faster screen redraw and faster printing too.
  • Requires Risc Os 3.1 or later, a hard disk and 2Mb of RAM. !ChangeFSI is used for some image processing.

Comments

  • "..absolutely brilliant...remarkable...highly recommended..." Archive
  • "..amazing...a class product...highly recommended!" Acorn User Sept 97
  • "...very impressive..." Mr W. Moray
  • "...clever piece of software - mother in law very happy!" Mr W. Nottingham
  • "...does a very good job..." Mr S. Reading
  • "Brilliant!" Mrs W. Herts
  • "Having used other stitching formats on a PC there is no comparison...brilliant" Mr C. Sussex
  • "Brilliant! works with an A5000 like a dream." Mr S. Stockport

The complete DiscWorld line up

As per usual we have our collections of the latest RISC OS games and applications, as well as support files for this issues articles. So the full DiscWorld line up looks something like this:

Games

All the games from this issues games world column.

PD

All the latest PD, shareware and freeware releases from the PD column.

SWShow

Photos from the recent South West 2006 show.

ToolBox

This contains two sets of Toolbox Modules. The Castle archive contains the latest 26/32 bit neutral system components, required if you want to run a lot of new software releases on 26bit machines. The RISCOS Ltd archive contains later and improved versions of a number of modules and is suitable for all versions of RISC OS from 3.1 onwards. We have also included copies of SharedUnixLib and UnixHome as these are needed by some programs.

VA

new version of the VirtualAcorn Windows Controller.

Wake

PDF document with directions and other useful info.

XSSOV

Full version of XStitch Sovereign.

Aaron Timbrell

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