Once upon a time, one of my favorite Macintosh graphics programs was Deneba's Canvas. It was a clever little program that combined the painting functions of a raster program with the drawing features of a vector program. Since the days of that happy little Mac, the program became cross-platform and grew in size, capabilities, and price. Now, I'm happy to report that Deneba has released Canvas 7 Special Edition for people (like me) who need the image editing, Web functions, page layout, and other features found in the Professional version without the high price tag.

I installed the program on a Power Macintosh G3 computer with 128MB of RAM, but the SE version only grabbed 18MB and was content to work with other, more memory-hungry applications that were still active. Canvas 7 SE lets you work with four different types of documents: illustrations, publications, animations, and presentations. While some of these documents share common interface elements, specialized controls apply to specific graphic types.

The basic toolbox of my old Canvas is still there, albeit in a much more attractive and usable form. This is supplemented by a toolbar that contains the kinds of buttons and commands that a multifunction program like this requires. There are lots of palettes that, along with a docking bar, let you customize the interface to make it look and work the way you want. This new version includes SpriteEffects, allowing you to apply image-ed...

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