LView Pro... Send me a Disk!

The LView Pro program itself had some great tools and it was comparatively cheap. Only $50. Compared to Corel and whatever Microsoft offered of the same, that was an incredible bargain. I even paid the extra fee for them to send the software on a disk. I didn't know much about the software game, but I sure didn't quite trust some tenuous string of code to be sent through e-mail. If I was gonna pay 50 bucks, I wanted a solid piece of plastic that I could store in a box on my shelf. If I ever needed it again, I'd know where it would be. You couldn't lose it by hitting 'delete' one too many times. They couldn't log you out of it and refuse to recognize your password. Besides, I knew I could reinstall a really old disk even after software manufacturers called it obsolete and quit supporting it. I didn't trust their judgement on deciding when my property was obsolete. My machine was an obsolete dinosaur. So was I. And I was getting cagy. It was me against Bill Gates. I had been the victim of one too many Microsoft upgrades.

Trying LView Pro

I agonized over the decision of whether to download LView Pro. The problem was, I could find nothing in the documentation to tell me whether my antiquated system could handle the imaging software. All other graphics editors called for superfast processors. I was short on something: RAM, megahertz, CPU... who knew? These terms were always a little fuzzy in my mind. I took a chance when I downloaded LView Pro. I liked it right away, though. First, it changed the graphical settings on my computer to a much finer resolution. I didn't know how it worked, but I did know that even Windows Paintbrush was suddenly capable of handling tiny little pixels and a blue million colors. I was in graphics-hog heaven. It was Bugbones makeover time!

The perils of Bugbones.

Aspiring for Better Images

LView Pro came into the picture when I'd just about had enough of Windows Paintbrush. The excitement of using Paint to make big, spidery squiggles was long past. I had conquered the computerized crayon. By hook or crook, over a period days, if not weeks, I had scraped out my flat, ugly little cartoon bug. Bugbones wasn't perfect, but he'd do in a pinch. I uploaded him to my site, rough and unfinished. But I aspired for better. What Bugbones needed was beyond the capability of Paintbrush, default settings or no. My little bug didn't have the polish of nice icons that I saw on other sites. And logo or no, if I meant to have an art site, even a cartoon one, then images were everything. Clearly Paintbrush wasn't gonna cut it. It was time to get down to brass tacks. I needed an art editor. Freeware and shareware were everywhere, but I knew nothing about them. Oh, I had played with shareware that came pre-loaded on my computer. But none of it would work to really tweak and fine-tune images. Through my friends at The Artist's Exchange art forum, I found out that new programs were on-line and free for the taking. LView Pro was the best value, they said.

The perils of Bugbones.