On the other hand, according lo Commodore's style guide, all Amiga software should operate In more or less Ihe same way anyway. The lirsl menu in any application should always be called 'project'. Ihe Iasi ilem on lhal menu should always be Quit By following Ihe rules, we end up with software which we. Ihe users, leel comfortable with. The average espenenced Amiga user should be able lo have a lair stab at running any Amiga application without consulting the manual This is a good thing. Out it also means lhal all software ends up looting the same, which can he a an Iricty when people start lo sue Although you may think lhal Personal Paint is labng it a bit lar. Especially with most ol the hotkeys being similar it is probably about as lar away Irom Dpaintn it could possibly gel without restricting its ease ol use. It is obvious lhal CloanTo have made a point ol being as unlike Dptint as they could wherever possible. Well, thal was It, But Ppaint also supports GIF and PCX files. In lacl. All the demonstration images come In GIF lormat. This may not be a great boon to Ihe home user who only ever distributes images lo other Amiga owners, but it is guile uselul to those whose work goes further aliekt II can also be handy lo be able to import these file types, as a lot ot dip-art is circulated in these formats Perhaps though a TIFF loader would have Been more uselul than the PCX one. It can gel around a lew barriers. Although Adobe's Photoshop reckons it can import Amiga IFFs. It certainly can t import them all. Even though the information in a 256 colour image is stored in the same way, the colormap header is bigger and this contuses the rather primitive loading system. Some PC applications have similar problems (apart Irom the PC version ol Deluxe Paint). PROCESSING POWER Image processing used to be Ihe domain ol separate applications, such as Pixmate. Art Department and even the excellent PictureBox which was given away on our coverdisk (amazingly we still have some November issues leltl! Order yours now while stocks Iasi). Now. With Ppaint. It has become an integrated part of the graphics package Dpaint IV-AGA HAMMING IT One ol Ihe major Innovalions on original Amigas was Ihe discovery ol HAM mode. II is a complete liddle really. The non-AGA Amigas have a maximum ol six bitplanes available lor graphics, because that is Ihe limit that can be addressed by Ihe screen registers.