Kandinsky

Kev Beardsworth takes a retrospective look at the future for Kandinsky...

Kandinsky first surfaced in the UK during August 1993 when Joe Connor described Kandinsky v1.39 as "a commercial quality shareware vector graphics application". Three years later development is still ongoing with Kandinsky v2.5e due for release as you read this.

Kandinsky reached v2 in September 1995 with the introduction of dozens of new features. Although the general thrust of development was aimed at owners of Falcon and other high end machines with new look 3D dialogs and improved colour handling there was still plenty on offer for all Kandinsky users.

The most visible change was the restyled toolbox with new icons but the most significant addition has to be mono Calamus CVG support. For the first time it became possible to convert between GEM Metafile and Calamus CVG format without expensive commercial software. A new multi-copy function made it easy to create complex "Spirograph" designs quickly by entering a few simple parameters and the interruptible screen redraw feature made it easy to abort unwanted lengthy screen redraws. The on-disk documentation was updated and converted to context-sensitive ST-Guide hypertext format. The shareware price also doubled but the previous release (v1.73) remains available as an entry level package.

One year later Kandinsky v2.5 is almost ready for release. Looking at Kandinsky v2 it's not easy to see where improvements can be made but the author has not let the maturity of the package deter him from making significant changes to in an attempt to make Kandinsky even more intuitive.

The single floating toolbox window has been scraped! Each drawing window now includes its own toolbox along with an optional horizontal toolbar. This combination is vaguely reminiscent to Corel Draw on the PC platform and if that's the direction Kandinsky is heading I'm all in favour! The toolbox has also been rationalised with some functions merged under popout icons and others available via menus and shortcuts - it sounds long-winded but really does make tool selection much easier.

The new toolbar combines visual feedback with convenient selection of common functions including save, print, cut, copy, paste, zoom and colour selection. A scrolling colour palette area offers keyboard shortcuts to set the fill and border colours which dramatically speeds up drawing construction as there's no longer any need to access the colour and fill dialogs.

Other changes are more subtle, for example windowed dialogs include a title line so there's no point duplicating the dialog title inside the dialog, this simple changes saves two lines per dialog and in a multitasking environment with lots of open dialogs scattered around the desktop every square millimetre saved helps.

Kandinsky has always supported all the popular protocols and enhanced desktop features and this version is no different with the introduction of iconification under Geneva and OLGA support. OLGA is a new protocol which offers object linking (OL) better programs running in parallel within a multitasking environment, such as MagiC, Geneva or MultiTOS. Using OLGA a bit image displayed in Kandinsky can be edited using Stella (an image editor which also supports the OLGA protocol) and any changes saved in Stella are automatically updated in Kandinsky via the OL link.


Kandinsky v2.5e exhibits Coral Draw tendencies

Other refinements include a new Abandon option in the File menu, which ignores any changes made to a drawing since the last Save operation and a new sub-menu to instantly select between any of the last ten opened files. There have been also been minor improvements and tweaks to the text editor, font and file selectors and enhanced keyboard support for MagiC Mac users, so there's really something for everyone!


Fit to curve and Multi-copy in action

My favourite new feature is the ability to temporarily lock cursor movement horizontally or vertically using the [Alternate] and [Control] keys which takes the guesswork out of aligning objects.

Although I don't have a colour printer I understand colour output via NVDI and SpeedoGDOS is now working well - there's an enhanced printer dialog and it's certainly working perfectly in mono.


The new circles, ellipses and arcs popout

Kandinsky is an endlessly fascinating program to play with yet intuitive enough to get to grips with live projects within minutes. There are many other features I'd like to cover in detail, fitting text to curves and precision object alignment for starters - I feel a tutorial coming on so look out for the release version and stay tuned!


The options dialog, including new options to call external file/font selectors


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