In the last few days before Wakefield 2001, Artworks plugin developer Martin Würthner has made no less than three extremely important announcements regarding the future of Artworks.Artworks is the popular and powerful RISC OS vector graphics software once developed by Computer Concepts, now in PC land with the stylish new name of Xara. With Cerilica's Vantage only just appearing over the horizon, it seems Martin is trying his best to keep Artworks as the graphics package for RISC OS users. Despite Martin's busy preparations for this weekend's show, a show which has in little over a month transformed into what could be the key RISC OS event of the year, here are the latest, sensational almost, developments direct from MW Software Towers:
ColourBar
ColourBar displays a free-floating or fixed display of all the colours defined in your current document. With the aim of changing the way you work with ArtWorks, you can apply fills and line colours by either clicking on a colour (applies to the current selection) or by dragging a colour from the ColourBar to an object in your document.
ColourBar costs only £12.50 and can be delivered via post or online.
Colour Bar: www.mw-software.com/software/awmodules/colourbar.html
AWRender update
"I have managed to add support for Hatch(Pro) fills and JPEG objects to third-party applications like Impression, OvationPro and other programs that use the AWRender module", Martin announced. "AWRender is a relocatable module that was released by Computer Concepts with Impression and the freely available AWViewer utility. Third-party applications can use it to display ArtWorks files. Unfortunatly, until now, the AWRender module only understood the original ArtWorks file format and ignored additional object types introduced by my ArtWorks plug-ins. It even crashed when encountering Hatch(Pro) fills."
By modifying and updating the AWRender modules, you can drop ArtWorks files containing Hatch(Pro) fills and JPEG objects into Impression or OvationPro frames natively, without having to export in Draw format.
Unfortunately, the update is not available yet because, until now, Martin has not been able to obtain permission from Computer Concepts to distribute the enhanced version of AWRender. He is still in negotiation with CC but Martin assures us there is always the possibility of issuing a patch.
Artworks MasterWorks Edition
Exclusive to drobe.co.uk, we can reveal that at Wakefield 2001 Martin will be offering the Artworks MasterWorks Edition. Bearing the slogan "High-end vector graphics at an affordable price", MasterWorks edition will essentially be a bundle offer consisting of the ArtWorks application itself (version 1.7), all of MW plug-in modules (there are 19 of them, discounting the free ones) and various bug fixes and enhancements.
MW Software: www.mw-software.com