by Andrew Mactavish (andrew.mactavish@ualberta.ca)

Once upon a time adding flair to Web pages meant including a few colourful bullets, a matching divider, and possibly some nauseating blinking text to a grey background. Those ancient times are, thankfully, far behind us. The current rage in Web design is high colour, 3D objects, magical buttons, and, of course, animation, glorious animation. With all these new design elements and the consequent issues concerning user bandwidth, Web-page designers need a diverse set of tools to create multiple, efficient effects. Ulead's WebRazor 1.0 lives up to its claim to be that set of tools, all for the small investment of $89US for Web delivery, $99US for postal delivery.

A mixture of PhotoShop-compatible plug-ins and stand-alone utilities, WebRazor includes seven tools for creating, editing, optimizing, and viewing Web images and animations:

1. Web.Plugins
2. GIF Animator 2.0
3. Animation SmartSaver 3.0
4. GIF SmartSaver 3.0
5. JPEG SmartSaver 3.0
6. PhotoExplorer 4.2
7. PhotoViewer 4.0

Although PhotoExplorer and PhotoViewer wouldn't stand out in a crowd, the PhotoShop plug-ins, GIF Animator, and SmartSaver prove that WebRazor is indeed "a box full of time-saving web tools for anyone who works with images and the web." For once, the boast on the box is no hyperbole.

Installation of WebRazor was quick and painless, almost to a fault. Taking less than two minutes to complete, the installation procedure assumes that users want to install all of the utilities. If you don't have PhotoShop or an image editor that accepts 32-bit PhotoShop plug-ins, you can skip that part of the installation, but you aren't given the same luxury for the other six utilities. In this age of objects, modularity, and user preferences you might expect to have the option to install only those utilities you want. But there's no need to fret too much over this, because the entire installation takes only 16MB of hard-disk space. Unless you're particularly squeezed for space, this shouldn't be too much of a concern. Besides, the utilities are worth it.

Andrew Mactavish is the Managing Editor of Mixed Reviews @ Chorus and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Copyright © 1998. Andrew Mactavish. All rights reserved.

Publisher:
Ulead Systems, Inc.

Price:
$89US (Web delivery)
$99US (Postal delivery)

Distribution Medium:
CD-ROM

System Requirements:
Windows 95/NT; 486DX2/DX4 or Pentium compatible; 16Mb RAM, 16Mb Hard Disk Space; High Colour or True Colour Video Card and Monitor recommended.

Test System:
Pentium 166MMX, 64MB RAM, 4MbVRAM Video Card, running MS Windows 95

Date of Publication:
1997