Our company is called Web Creatures, and we specialize in creating graphics for the World Wide Web. The purpose of this report is to examine three graphics paint packages to determine the best one that would work for our company. We have access to three platforms on which to work, and we have choosen a graphics package for each platform to examine. For a Silicon Graphics INDY workstation, we have choosen CLRpaint; for a Sun SPARC II workstation, we have choosen XPaint; and for a 486 based PC, we have choosen Paint Shop Pro. In this report, we will look at some possible tasks to be solved, the office environment in which the products will be used, and give some background information necessary for the evaluation of these packages. Following this, we will examine the three packages in detail, including the features, design approaches, and evaluation of results. We will then put forth the best package based on our findings.
All of the graphics throughout this document were created by us (Web Creatures) using CLRpaint, XPaint, and Paint Shop Pro. This allowed us to become familiar with the packages, and perform the test that we wanted to do. How we made the graphics, as well as how easy it was, will be explained in the course of the report.
The World Wide Web has recently exploded in popularity. With the introduction of Netscape, Mosaic, and other graphical web browsers, the Internet has gained a graphical interface. The World Wide Web has the potential for a large amount of graphical content, and with the introduction of VRML, we could be exploring the Internet graphically. This is our motivation for exploring the possibilities of graphical design for the World Wide Web. The only drawback of graphics on an html document is the amount of time it takes to download the graphics. As speeds increase, this will not be such a concern. Also, Netscape has forged ahead with its own additions to html, and there is always the problem that not everyone has the proper hardware and software to view your document as you intented. For this reason we recommend for viewing this document, that you use Netscape Navigator 2.0, and a computer that supports high resolution color graphics (preferably 24 bit).
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