Experience with gradient fills in Graffle 1.2

[Jeremy Reichman]

Okay, I downloaded the sneakypeek version of Graffle (1.2 v1) and I'm 
instantly seeing weirdness with the gradient fills. They are not working 
as I expect them to, so I don't know if my expectations are in line with 
what the program can do.

I will continue to try them out, but here is my initial report:


What I'm doing
--------------

I drag a rectangle from a palette into the drawing area. I fill it with a 
color. I then turn on a linear gradient fill and change the angle. There 
are a lot of bands on the screen, so I change from thousands to millions 
in my display setup. (I'm running on an older PowerBook G3 Lombard/400, 
and since I don't get any appreciable degree of video acceleration from 
the stock ATI Rage Pro, I tend to run in fewer colors to speed up the 
whole OS X experience.)

Since that doesn't seem to help the banding, I begin playing with the 
Steps slider in the Info palette. (I don't think any of my other Classic 
applications ask me about the number of steps in my gradients. Hm.)

I then go to the Color palette and slide the Opacity slider, to make my 
object translucent. I drop a rounded corner rectangle behind my original 
rectangle and then color the new shape. I want to be able to see it behind 
my gradient-filled object, so I send the new object to the back with Send 
to Back.

Finally, I switch the first rectangle's gradient from linear to radial.


What really happens
-------------------

The gradients are okay, but not quite what I'd expect, having seen other 
graphics programs. Maybe I compare too much with Fireworks (which is after 
all a much more expensive product), but that is now my baseline for any 
sort of graphic program. I need to play with the number of steps to get 
results I find appealing.

Between switching to millions and increasing the number of steps in the 
gradient to 100, my machine is *much* slower in Graffle. There is 
noticeable lag as I drag either rectangle around. I guess this is 
explainable, but I wish it weren't the case.

The shadow definitely obscures the object behind a transparent object. To 
really use transparency fully, I needed to turn off the shadow on the 
topmost object. The Opacity slider does not appear to affect the 
transparency of the shadow at all; nor could I find a way to do that. 
(Actually, transparent shadows and natural/fading shadows would be on my 
feature wishlist; they are something I really like about Macromedia 
Fireworks and miss in Graffle.)

Switching the gradient from linear to radial ignored my transparency 
settings; I was no longer able to see the backmost rectangle through the 
topmost (gradient filled) one. The setting in the Color palette remained 
at its previous mark (say, 10%) but it didn't look like it was being 
honored.


What I expect
-------------

Please note that I'm not unhappy with Graffle when I list these 
expectations. (Rather, I think I'm getting my money's worth already.) I'm 
just listing what I, as a user, expect when I encounter an OS X program 
that does gradient fills.

I expect that, being an OS X program, the gradient fills in Graffle will 
blow me away with their utter coolness, the way most things in OS X do.

I expect that Graffle will remain as fast to use as it was before gradient 
fills came along. I don't expect it to be really fast, since I have come 
to expect very little speed from OS X. Still, running OS X is very 
appealing, and it's even more appealing to have a cool native drawing 
program ... rather than having to launch Classic all the time to run 
something like Fireworks.

I expect that I'll be able to clearly see one rectangle behind the other 
when I set the top one (gradient-filled) to be transparent -- no matter 
what gradient type or shadow I use. I expect that I'll be able to switch 
between different kinds of gradients without causing transparency and 
other effects to be lost. I also expect that I'd be able to set the 
transparency level of the shadow. Failing that, I'd like a shadow that 
wouldn't obscure objects behind its object.


My environment
--------------

Below is an Apple System Profiler report describing my environment for 
Graffle:

Report Created:12/18/2001 at 4:33:53 PM

Version of ASP that generated this report = 2.7
(note:this string only shows up in pre-final or debug versions)

Software overview
	Serial number:	Not applicable
	Mac OS overview
		System:	Mac OS X 10.1.1 (5M28)
	Note: No startup disk was selected.
Memory overview
	Built-in memory:	384 MB
	Number of empty RAM slots: 0 ()
		Location            Size           Memory type
		J3/BOTTOM   128 MB
		J1/TOP      256 MB
	Backside L2 cache:	1 MB
Hardware overview
	Machine ID:	406
	Model name:	PowerBook G3 series
	Keyboard type:	PowerBook G3 series Keyboard with Inverted-T
	Processor info:	PowerPC G3 (3.0)
	Machine speed:	400 MHz
Production information
	ROM revision:	
	Boot ROM 
version:	                                                                 
                                                                          
                                                                          
 
	Serial number:	-1-1
	Software bundle:	Not applicable
	Sales order number:	Not applicable


--
Jeremy Reichman