Freelance Graphics vs. StarImpress - by Ryan Dill

ppearance matters to all of us; when talking about any topic, your information becomes easier to understand (or at least more memorable in your audience's minds) when it's accompanied by colorful diagrams, tables and so on. These are called presentation graphics, and herein we compare two of OS/2's candidates for such: Freelance Graphics, part of Lotus' SmartSuite for OS/2 Warp 4, and StarImpress, part of StarDivision's StarOffice suite.

User Interface

Since appearance matters a lot, often the first thing people notice about any program is how it looks; the user interface. Both programs use a 'slideshow' format of creating presentations, where your entire presentation is divided into a number of pages, or slides. The main window by default shows an enlarged view of the slide currently being edited, but both Freelance and StarImpress allow you to see all slides of your presentation on the screen at once, if desired.

Both programs have menu bars which can be 'docked' or torn off the main program window and dragged around, which allows the general look and feel of the program to be customized to your preference. Unfortunately, not all of Freelance's toolbars have this feature; the Drawing and Text bar for example, which is a toolbar I'd expect to be using a lot, can't dock or be resized at all.

On customization: the two programs handle customization of toolbars differently; StarImpress lets you change the icon associated with any toolbar function, with one of the icons in its collection (These icons are actually 16x15 bitmaps, stored in the Office40\Config\Symbol directory, so you can stick your own bitmaps here and use them in your menu bars). Freelance, on the other hand, allows you to create new icons right from inside the program, but doesn't let you change the default icon for a particular function; all you can do is associate your new icons with user-defined functions.

Functionality

Although the look of the interface is always a factor, the more important reason to use a program is for what it can do for you. Both programs have the capability to draw various shapes (circles, squares, etc.), lines and 3D objects. Freelance has access to many more preformed shapes than StarImpress; things like cartoon thought balloons, stars etc., and lets you change a drawn object into a different one on the fly; if you have a square with text in it, 2 or three clicks can change it into a star or hourglass shape or the same general size, leaving the text intact. StarOffice has a nice feature lacking in Freelance, though; if you double-click on a tool button, like the line draw button, then you can draw multiple instances of that object without having to go back and click on the button again -- this is really useful when drawing a number of the same objects.

Speaking of text, both programs have the capability to insert text of a variety of fonts or colors anywhere in a slide. Text can be both linked to an object (so that the text moves if the object moves) or standalone. However, the text abilities of Freelance Graphics seem to have a major bug in this beta; inserted text appears greatly stretched out (GIF, 2K) and difficult to read, which makes creating a good-looking presentation with text impossible. (This will hopefully be fixed in the final version).

Both Freelance and StarImpress allow object animation; when you click on a slide, a new object may 'dissolve' into being, or text may suddenly 'fly' into an object already on the slide, all configured as desired. Additionally, you can add embedded multimedia to your presentation; you can arrange it so that when a certain object appears, a WAV or MIDI starts, or an AVI movie pops up and begins to play. Freelance has a number of built-in animated graphics that you can use; for example, clicking on one of the objects of your slide could cause a plane to fly across the screen. StarImpress also comes with built-in animations (animated GIFs, actually), and includes instructions on how to create your own animations using the rest of the StarOffice suite, then just pasting them into your presentation.

Multimedia objects aren't all that can be inserted, either. StarOffice supports OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), so it can insert any number of things into your presentations, including spreadsheets, charts, tables, mathematical formulas, even Java applets. In addition to inserting objects, both Freelance and StarImpress allow you to have a click on an object launch a program of your choice, for example, a multimedia player for MP3s (GIF, 5K) or other files which aren't understood by these programs. (In Freelance, this feature doesn't seem to work with command-line programs. The program doesn't launch and the system slows to a crawl)

Freelance includes both e-mail and groupware integration, allowing you to send your presentations easily to any person or group -- however, to make use of this feature, you have to have a mail system such as CC:Mail or Lotus Notes installed. StarImpress also has e-mail integration, and since everything it needs to function comes with StarOffice, you can use it out of the box.

Both programs have help functions, but the one in StarImpress is a bit crippled by the fact that its 'find' function doesn't seem to work, so you have to wade through the help files to find what you're looking for rather than jumping immediately to it. This may just be because the product's still in beta, and the help files aren't finished, but it's still slightly irritating.

Formats

Another measurement of a program is what file formats it can understand. Often a graphic, a table or even an entire presentation has been created already, and you want to use it again, just modifying it a bit. Both Freelance and StarImpress understand a variety of common image formats, including GIF, AutoCAD, PCX and BMP, and each come with their own collections of clip art and animated images for use in your presentations. Freelance also has the advantage of being able to understand Microsoft PowerPoint 3.0 presentation files (PowerPoint is one of the standards in Windows presentation graphics).

Both programs have the ability to save your presentation in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format, allowing you to easily create a copy for a World Wide Web home page. Each slide of your presentation will be saved as a picture (GIF, 9K) on an HTML page, (so any multimedia or animations your presentation may have had will not be kept in the transfer) and an index page will automatically be created, allowing web users to easily access all of your presentation's slides. Just upload the converted HTML to a web site, and you're ready to go.

Performance

Both programs seem a bit slow, even on a Pentium 120 machine with 64 megs of RAM. In StarImpress' case, this is no doubt because StarOffice 4 loads its own desktop shell in addition to the actual program running. This gives the advantage of having everything (documents, databases, web browser, etc.) right at your fingertips, but also slows things down a bit, and seems to be overkill when you plan on only using one program at a time. Screen redraws in Freelance have a few quirks which hopefully will be worked out in the next release (moving an object around a slide sometimes leaves behind rogue pixels where the corners of that object were, and redraw speed is slow).

Conclusion

Both Freelance Graphics and StarImpress are largely function-equivalent -- With a few exceptions, if you've been able to do something in one of them, you'll probably be able to do the same in the other. I have to say I prefer StarImpress' user interface; not that Freelance's is bad, mind you -- it's got a pretty good interface. However, with the polished icons and 'mouse-overs' (as you move the mouse over a button, the button raises) built into the entire StarOffice suite, StarImpress' interface is, quite simply, slick.

Add to this the fact that the text bug in Freelance Graphics makes creating a presentation with decent-looking text difficult to say the least, and my preference has to be for StarImpress. Its interface, customizability and feature set all combine together very nicely. The only thing I don't like about it is the package deal; as I said, you can't just run StarImpress, you have to run StarImpress on top of the StarOffice desktop, which sucks up more memory. Still, that's a minor nag to me, as the rest of the package more than makes up for this.

Ryan Dill is a student in Computer Science at Acadia University in Wolfville, NS and e-Zine! 's assistant editor. He is reported to be relieved that, with the advent of Warp 4, talking to your computer is no longer considered a sign of mental instability.

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