`Picture yourself in a boat on a river, With tangerine trees and marmalade skies. . ."
Wow, what was he on? Whatever it was, Painter 5.0 is its digital equivalent. This program is the latest in line of almost-annual upgrades from Fractal over the last five years and to say that it is packed with goodies is an understatement.
While some of the new retouching capabilities brings it closer to another well-known image manipulation program, Painter remains firmly within the realm of its main target, digital artists/designers. There are more tools, brushes and effects than any other program of its type - for example, Painter 5.0 has more than 100 new brushes.
Images created in Painter using brushes, pencils, crayons, airbrush or whatever takes your fancy are indistinguishable from natural media artwork when they are reproduced in print. Besides the new brushes, another addition is Dynamic Floaters, which act like filters in Photoshop. One called Burn adds a burnt edge to the selected image; another called Liquid Metal lets you paint with various metals which are not only shiny and runny like mercury but also reflect the underlying image. Cool stuff.
Painter has been criticised in the past for not supporting thirdparty effects but its new open architecture should allow greater access to this area. For a long time Painter has been regarded as being somewhat "challenging" for new users. The interface looks cool - like the instruments panel on a jumbo - but if you were to take advantage of all the tear-off and custom palettes, you would need a BIG monitor with some serious memory available.
And as a high-end image manipulation program, it needs a lot of RAM. The recommended minimum is 12Mb, but in real terms you'll need far more than that - as much as you can give it. Painter also takes up about 60Mb of hard-disk space.
Having never used Painter before, I found it intimidating but it is a program that will reward you for persistence and it's great fun.
Painter is distributed in Ireland by Metacreations (tel 01450-9888)
Fran Bradley
A Checklist Approach to Managing Information Systems, Alan J. Little, Marcas Books, 204pp (£9.99)
Remember the books of lists that were popular a few years ago? In fact, there were so many that there could easily have been a book of lists of books of lists. Dublin computer consultant Alan J. Little has brought the same approach to managing information technology systems.
"Its target market is anyone who is responsible for computers, whether in a business or institution, but who has no formal training in the subject," he says in the introduction. Noticing that many young accountants, in particular, found themselves managing computer systems as well as doing their main jobs, he says he wanted to produce a "non-technical, practical guide" that would reduce a complex subject to a set of do's and don'ts.
By and large he succeeds. Under headings such as Strategy, Project Management, Computer Equipment and Implementation is a series of checklists that will help to organise and focus thinking about systems. It is self-published and the book's layout does not do its contents justice. That said, the lists are varied, wideranging and detailed enough to prove useful to those who manage systems full-time, and even more useful to people who have system management thrust upon them.
Fiachra O MarcaighMarketing and Information Technology, John O'Connor and Eamonn Galvin, 289pp, Pitman Publishing
The leap of Internet search company Yahoo from a bright idea to a $500 million company in three years, the great Hoover flights giveaway disaster, the link between nappies and beer . . . they're all here, as exhibits in comprehensive tour through the interrelationships of marketing and information technology.
"Marketing is the heart and soul of the organisation; the very reason for its existence," says the preface. "Information technology is so powerful in marketing because it is enabling organisations to build powerful personal relationships with their customers and to understand their needs."
There is also a self-defence element for marketing managers. With increasing access to information by all of us "to stay one step ahead and to anticipate the changing ways in which consumers choose to live their lives and purchase services and products, marketing managers need to embrace information technology with even more vigour than the consumer."
From this starting point the authors, who work for Andersen Consulting, move on to explain and explore marketing, IT and the connections between them. Intended as a textbook, there are copious definitions, footnotes and references. On practically every page there is a quotation from the press or from the marketing literature, plus assignment questions at chapter end. Although they can be distractions at times for the general reader, the overall impression is of clear, original thinking backed by huge research.
Oh yes, nappies and beer. In trawling through historical data in an "information warehouse" an American retail manager noticed a correlation between sales of nappies and beer, just after work hours, particularly on a Friday. Concluding that men on the way home from work were stopping to buy nappies for the baby and then picking up six-packs for themselves, the retailer moved the items closer together and managed to sell more.
Fiachra O MarcaighAnd Route 97 United Kingdom and Ireland, £30 or less
Like Microsoft's rival AutoRoute, this program sets out to do the almost impossible: apply smart algorithms to a mass of road data and come up with the best route from A to B. It's not that the task is beyond either program: but there seems to be insufficient information available to the publishers to make a product that works well for Ireland.
And Route does well in general. Asked for the route from Deansgrange in Dublin to Errislannan, Co Galway, it quickly comes up with a fairly standard one on the N4, N6 and N59, with a total of 192 miles. Its quirky way to the N4, via Sandyford and the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, can be understood as an undue preference for roads with official names. But since it feels bound to offer alternative routes it also suggests a 205-mile route via Longford, Swinford and Castlebar that would only appeal to the serious masochist.
At least it knows about Errislannan - and Derrydruel, and Lettermacaward and Fintown in Co Donegal (even if the latter is given as Fintowa). But the map symbols do not differentiate between these small, beautiful places and Killybegs, the largest fishing port in the country. Townland, hamlet and thriving town get the same small square symbol.
And knows about more roads than AutoRoute - right down to some tracks that can be recommended only for four-wheel drives and hired cars. It has fewer pretensions, however, to being a travel guide and does not include any beauty spots, archaeological sites or golf courses.
Fiachra O MarcaighIrish Business Internet Directory 1997/98, Kompass Ireland, £12.10
There are 16,000 of them - businesses in the Republic listed in a new A4 publication sponsored by the business information company Kompass Ireland, Telecom Internet and Eirtrade Services. Are there that many Irish businesses on the Net? Well, yes and no.
For each company postal address, phone and fax numbers are given, plus "email and Web site addresses where available". In the vast majority of cases there is no email address and the Web address is of the form: http://kol.ie/1234567. This points to a bare-bones site set up free by Kompass. Adverts in the printed guide offer the listed companies the chance to buy upgrades to this basic page. Companies which have their own Web sites (about 2,000 of them) have this address given too.
The listing is plain and unindexed, more phone directory than yellow pages. Unless a listed company has a self-descriptive title like "Murphy's Morticians" there is no indication of what line of business it is in. The best way to use the directory is probably to go to the online version (available at www.kompass.ie) and let your mouse do the walking.
Fiachra O Marchaigh