| DrawCat for OS/2 v1.0 | - by Christopher B. Wright

  rawCat for OS/2, a new vector drawing application that has just recently been released as shareware, is not on the same playing field as NeoN 2D Vector and LogoArt. However, while it is smaller in scope and in features, it is also substantially cheaper to buy -- $20 US -- which makes it a viable choice if your needs are basic and you find the extras cumbersome.

  ### Feature Set

  DrawCat's feature set is very, very spartan. It has only the most basic of drawing tools (GIF, 7.4k) -- ellipse, rectangle, straight line, and polyline -- and a blank canvas for drawing. There are no bezier curves supported in this package, nor is there a free-form pen tool, so the options you have when creating shapes are somewhat limited. However, DrawCat does have a few nifty tools that can make it useful as a flowcharting program.

  One of these tools is the circle dialog box. The circle dialog box allows you to create parts of an ellipse or circle, and gives you the opportunity to choose how you want it to be "cut".

  Another of these useful tools is the area type dialog box (GIF, 5.4k). This lets you create an object based on some common (and some less common) geometrical shapes. Using these tools with the area attributes dialog box (GIF, 8k) and the line attributes dialog box (GIF, 7.3k), DrawCat has the potential to be a decent flowcharting program some day.

  At the moment it's a bit too tricky to position the shape, line and text elements in a flowchart of any serious size, but the author has made a good start here -- and I think DrawCat could some day fill a niche that hasn't been filled yet in OS/2.

  Doing anything of any great size is, at the moment, a bit too cumbersome with DrawCat. While it has group and ungroup functions to help keep objects where they're supposed to be when they're all lined up, getting them to be positioned "just so" can be difficult. For example, I found it almost impossible to select and move text that was sitting on top of a polygon. The polygon would always be the object that was selected. Eventually, I would wind up moving the polygon somewhere else, selecting the text and moving it on top of the polygon until it was the way I wanted it, then grouping it to keep it from changing.

  ### Conclusion

  At this point in time, DrawCat is not suitable for any "heavy duty" graphics work. It was obviously intended as a very basic program, but what it does, it does reasonably well. If you're looking for the basics and aren't interested in high-end features (with a much higher price to match), DrawCat will probably work just fine for you.

  As an aside, I think DrawCat has the potential to fill a much needed niche in the OS/2 software world if some of its tools are developed further and it is positioned specifically as a flowcharting program. The author has already set up an environment where the user can create different geometrical shapes and can choose various lines and line endings. If the way in which objects are selected and modified is smoothed out a bit, and a few more flowcharting tools are introduced (automatically connecting boxes, for example, or boxes with text inside them) DrawCat could move from a basic shareware vector drawing application to something much more.

  ### Addendum

  In the last week I have received some more information regarding this program that needs updating. In the main body of this review, I stated that DrawCat had no bezier tools. I was mistaken. In fact, the line and polyline tools are handled as bezier tools internally. All you have to do is to draw your line and then click on it once, and bezier handles will appear.

  The merging of regular polyline and bezier functionality into the same tool surprised me -- I didn't find it, because I didn't expect to find it. While this is mentioned in the documentation, there is no stand-alone category for bezier (it's covered under the polyline entries) so I was fooled into not digging deeper into the documentation. (Even technical writers need to remember to always read the documentation.)

  DrawCat is still not competitive with LogoArt or NeoN 2D Vector, but its ability to handle bezier lines rounds it out and makes it a very good entry-level application.

  DrawCat for OS/2 v1.0
  by Belly Entertainment
  download from Belly Entertainment's web site (ZIP, 707k)
  Registration: US$20.00

  Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Northern Virginia/D.C. area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95. He is also a member of Team OS/2.

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