Not too long ago, MacPaint was the nonpareil of Mac graphic programs. Since then, color packages such as Canvas 2,0 and Studio/8 have moved to the top. But there are still a lot of black-and-white Macs around, so there's a lot of interest in monochrome paint programs — witness the recent releases of SuperPaint 2.0 (only nominally a color program) and Siudio/1. With this in mind, Cricket Software has released Cricket Paint, a monochrome paint program with a few new tricks.
WHAT IT IS Cricket Paint offers much the same functionality we've come to expect from MacPaint, but it does sport some new ideas. FreshPaint is the best of these. Until you click outside a newly drawn object, the paint remains “wet,” and you can edit or move it using standard draw techniques — you can resize the image or choose a different fill pattern or line width. Clicking outside the object “dries” the paint, for editing with standard paint methods.
Cricket Paint creates documents at seven resolutions ranging from 72 to 300 dots per inch (dpi), on pages of 8 x 10 inches through tabloid size. It saves them in MacPaint, PICT, TIFF, or its own format. Resolutions greater than 72 dpi or pages larger than 8 x 10 inches require a hard disk or RAM buffer. RAM buffers are faster, but Cricket Paint requires 1 megabyte just to open, which may rule its use out for some people.
Cricket Paint uses two palettes and a painting window. The tool palette contains the usual paint tools plus several special ones. The pattern palette is for selecting line widths and fill patterns.
All the tools are responsive, except for the Paint Bucket, which is painfully slow. The Regular Polygon tool draws equilateral polygons with up to 16 sides. Another tool lets you draw nested polygons (you choose the number of repeals and their spacing). Shapes are drawn either from the center or the corner.
The Smooth Polygon, although similar to a standard polygon tool that draws a shape from specified vertices, makes objects with rounded comers rather than pointed ones. The Rotated Polygon repeats and rotates the finished shape, creating a complex pattern. You can control the number of repeats and degrees of rotation, as well as the fill pattern. The Spyro Polygon draws Spirograph-like patterns.
The Block tool draws 3-D boxes that change perspective as you drag them around the screen, and the Background Lines tool draws parallel lines across a page. The Ellipse and Reshaping Ellipse are similar, but dragging the handles of an object created with the latter affects only an area near that handle rather than the whole object, permitting unusual shapes. The Freehand tool automatically smooths tree hand shapes, and the Pen is similar to a Bezier-curve tool but without a Bezier tool's extensive manipulation capabilities. The Texture tool is like the familiar Spray Can but paints two selectable patterns (or shades of gray) simultaneously, creating the impression of a texture, it's an interesting effect. Each document can also have 18 custom tools that can be Texture tool settings or bitmapped or Fresh Paint shapes you've created for other graphics.
Text handling is not standard. Clicking on the text cursor in the painting window brings up a new window in which you type text. Pop-up menus provide font, size, and style choices, and the text can be made to appear in the currently selected pattern. There is no Edit menu, so you must use the keyboard command equivalents to cut, copy, or paste. Clicking on the OK button places your finished text in the painting window as a FreshPaint object. Unlike with most paint applications, you can mix fonts, sizes, and styles within the text block.
HOW IT WORKS Cricket Paint is a well-thought-out application, and FreshPaint gives it the best of both object-oriented and bit-mapped applications. The tools are familiar and make complex shapes easy to draw. But accessing the required disk or memory buffer for page sizes larger than 8 x 10 inches or resolutions greater than 72 dpi makes it slow. The Paint Bucket tool is also extremely slow. Dealing with an extra dialog box for handling text is clumsy, and the Free Rotate command works only on certain FreshPaint objects and not on bit-mapped selections.
I can't understand why Cricket has chosen to introduce yet another incompatible proprietary file format. SuperPaint 2.0, for example, is a similar program, but its native format is PICT. But the final blow is the 1-megabyte minimum-memory requirement. Canvas, which provides comprehensive bit-mapped and object-oriented graphics capabilities in full color, requires less RAM. Cricket Paint is better than MacPaint or DeskPaint, but even with its special tools, it isn’t special enough to rate it above Canvas 2.0 or SuperPaint 2.0, which also offer color at only slightly higher prices.
Lewis, Darryl. (October 1989). Cricket Paint. MacUser. (pgs. 82, 84).
Indeco
Applications
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Cricket_Paint_1.0.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
