What is ClarisDraw 1.0?

The latest incarnation of Claris 5 venerable MacDraw draw program, ClarisDraw keeps the easy-to-use, stylish design we’ve come to expect from Claris products and has a bevy of well-implemented new features, many clearly culled from its rivals 5 feature lists. Streamlined and simple, it’s tolerably fast on 680x0 Macs and downright zippy on Power Macs, on which it can run in native mode. But for the same price or less, Deneba’s Canvas and Aldus 5 IntelliDraw have more features geared toward more-sophisticated illustration work.

Smart Design

Many of ClarisDraw’s new features have Smart in their names — appropriate, because many of them emulate similar features in IntelliDraw, the first draw program that let you create links between objects to automatically keep alignment, proportioning, and other relationships in effect. But whereas IntelliDraw 5's brainy links can be bewilderingly complex, ClarisDraw’s are simple and spare. For example, to use SmartAlign, you select two or more objects in your illustration and use the Alignment palette to choose the way you want them to be aligned with each other. As you move one object, the other objects remain aligned to it, according to the relationship you've set up between them.

SmartAlign isn’t the only smart feature. SmartConnectors are lines that remain attached to objects — if you want to use ClarisDraw to create flowcharts, for instance, lines can remain connected between boxes no matter where you move the boxes on your chart. And if you need precise measurements, you can create AutoSize lines, which tell you how long they are. (We were disappointed, however, that you cant turn the SmartConnector lines into AutoSize lines.) SmartEmbossing and SmartShadow, just as their names imply, let you create rudimentary 3-D effects and drop shadows.

The PointGuide cursor, which changes its appearance when it's over an object’s center or corners, and Guideliner, which provides guidelines that show you how objects align with other objects, are handy features for positioning items. ClarisDraw’s Object Info palette lets you precisely reposition, rotate, and resize objects, using numerical values.

ClarisDraw ships with 2,400 pieces of clip art, called SmartSymbols. You can drag a SmartSymbol out of a library palette and drop it right into your document — repeatedly if you wish. You can replace any SmartSymbol with any other by using the Replace Clones command. It’s somewhat like a Find/Replace command in a word processor, and although it’s not as fast and elegant as IntelliDraw’s method of automatically updating your documents, the Replace Clones command does get the job done.

Creative Writing

ClarisDraw has drastically improved texthandling tools compared with MacDraw’s. You can bind text to a path on the inside or the outside of a closed shape and convert type into outlines, which you can reshape by using Bezier points and fill with gradients or patterns. You can link text boxes to each other and wrap text around objects, both of which can be useful for simple, artistic desktop-publishing tasks, even though you can’t kern or track type at all.

Although it’s no substitute for Microsoft PowerPoint or Aldus Persuasion, you can also use ClarisDraw to prepare simple business presentations and slide shows. The program lets you use as many as ten different on-screen pointers and create fades between slides.

When it comes to color control, ClarisDraw will disappoint more-demanding users. It can import and export 24-bit-color images, which MacDraw never could, but it still has the 256-color palette that dates back to the days when most Macs had only 8-bit color, if any. It still doesn’t support CMYK mode or popular color systems such as Pantone. Not surprisingly, ClarisDraw can’t output color separations, although you can save documents in EPS for placement in, and printing from, more-color-savvy applications.

Besides providing the basic manipulation tools we’ve mentioned, ClarisDraw can lighten and darken images, distort them vertically or horizontally with a new shearing feature, and scale them by percentage. But unlike its competitors, it doesn’t have envelope warping, shape extrusion, or cropping.

The Bottom Line

ClarisDraw is a versatile and easy-to-use draw program, but we found ourselves wishing it had more of the tools its rivals have. If you need to create basic graphics quickly and don’t have the time to learn to use new tools, invest in ClarisDraw. But if you want more-sophisticated tools, other draw programs will give you more to work with for a similar price.

Taub, Eric. (March 1995). ClarisDraw. MacUser. (pg. 48).

Download ClarisDraw 1.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• Macintosh Plus
• 2 MB RAM (4 MB if under System 7)
• Hard disk drive
• System 6.0.7 (Some features require System 7 or later)

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II