Slide Show Magician. (evaluation)

This program is a must if you ever use The Macintosh for its graphics. If you don't use the Macintosh for its graphics, you would, if you had this package. Slide Show Magician allows you to create cohesive presentations using MacPaint documents and to chain them together with sophistication and dramatic effect. Whether you are interested in business graphic presentations or a gallery of fine art, this package turns your Macintosh screen into a powerful communications medium.

Fades, wipes, pointers, added text, all are possible--along with a choice of buttons for user input. Once you have constructed a show, you can save it to its own disk along with an unprotected Projector file. Your show will then autorun without rebooting the protected master disk.

The Macintosh screen displays only the upper left corner of a Macintosh document, and a file called Graph Format can help you design your documents to fit. We cut out a cardboard frame to hold over the Show Page mode in MacPaint, and found that to be a help as well. We also suggest that you strip all accessories off the system folder to save disk space.

The program has some rough edges. It does not make remarkable use of the desktop metaphor, and some things are more difficult to do than might have been necessary. We also found that the program was incompatible with hard disks--both Tecmar and Hyperdrive. A pity.

But the results possible with Slide Show Magician far outweigh its faults. Remember how obsessed you were with MacPaint when you first got it? Well Slide Show Magician is the next logical step.

Products: Slide Show Magician (computer program)