MICROANGELO TOOLSET
http://www.eclipsit.com

Reviewed September, 2006

What’s it do?

Microangelo Toolset provides a set of tools to allow the user to explore, view, search, extract, edit, animate, and replace icons.


Does it do what it promises?

Reviewer 1: I have no idea, as even after installing and finding the appropriate files with great difficulty I was unable to get the software to function.

Reviewer 2: In spite of the fact that the company promised to supply us with a fully-licensed version of their latest product, including both the Toolset and On Display, they did not, in fact, do so. Early on in the project, I did successfully install the program, at that time version 5.5. However, I suffered a major computer crash, and in the process lost the MicroAngleo installation. I needed to do a reinstallation, but the codes that I had been provided did not work. I wrote to the developer requesting that the codes be reactivated, or that I be provided with new ones, but my messages were not answered, or even acknowledged. I am therefore reviewing an alpha version of 6.0 instead of the current version. "On Display", part of the set we were to review, is not included.

Reviewer 3: I am reviewing Version 6.02b. While this program does the functions promised, I found Microangelo Toolset to be lacking in user friendliness, guided workflow, and features not obvious as they should be. For example, this program supports the new Windows Vista 256x256 icon format. When you go to open a new file in Studio, you are only given default file sizes ranging from 16x16 to 48x48. After coming up dry on searching the help file for "Vista", I accidentally discovered that you need to click on a box, not a drop-down menu like other important features, to select the Win2k-WinVista template, and then select 256x256 in another box in that template's features. Another example is the set of the "fly-out" options in some of the tools in Studio. There is a small arrow in the box corner of some of the tool icons that gave me a clue that there were options available for features such as different brush sizes or lasso tools. The fly-out option is mentioned in the Help file but no mention was found about how to activate it. Right clicking on the box did nothing. Left clicking opened the current feature. Hovering the cursor over the box gave a pop-up box with a simple description of the tool ("Brush" for example). It wasn't until I repeatedly played with the cursor over the box that I discovered that holding down the left mouse button without releasing it caused the buried options to appear. Using this program felt a lot like playing "Where's Waldo"; I knew the information was in there, but finding it was a challenge.

Reviewer 4: Yes, it does -- in a well-designed, functionally comprehensive package.


Was it easy to install?

Reviewer 1: No! It was a sizeable 7.1MB download for such a superficial piece of software and then it installed files but created no desktop icons or gave any option to create shortcut icons, nor did it place itself in my start folder. I had to spend over an hour hunting for the program in the program folder where I installed it. Even then, after locating the file and clicking to open, I was faced with even more non-descript files. Only after several hours and contact with technical support was I able to actually find and open the executable in order to begin to try and examine the software and place icons on my desktop for future use.

Reviewer 2: The installation was not as seamless as would be expected from a product such as MicroAngelo, which has been on the market for over a decade. For no apparent reason, the "progress bar" stopped for about 45 seconds at the 99% mark, then suddenly continued. Perhaps the computer was having trouble accessing the Internet at that time. I was able to choose the location where I wanted to install the program and the Start menu location. However, there was no choice to put an icon on the desktop. Just before the installation was completed, an advertisement of their other products popped up. In my opinion, this is not an appropriate time to advertise. Oddly, the installation I did on Windows ME was perfectly normal, although I still was not able to have icons installed on the desktop.

Reviewer 3: Installation was quick and simple on my system. One nice feature was that it offered to check for updates on the Web site before installing the current version. Updating to the latest version after that was impossible because, apparently, the publisher inactivated our reviewers' ID/password.

Reviewer 4: Yes, very straightforward. its installation script contains a caution to close other programs, something I usually ignore, but here strongly enough worded that I felt it necessary to heed. Microangelo's installation script also encouraged the User to check for newer versions, which in my case there was (6.3 vs. 6.0), but Microangelo declined to make it available, the reasons for which I understand but something I've rarely encountered in my years of reviewing programs.


Good points

Reviewer 1: I was able to uninstall it.

Reviewer 2: MicroAngelo is to be complimented on keeping this program "backward compatible" on all versions of Windows, from 95 on. They claim that it will even run on the now ancient 486. I cannot attest to that, but it does function on an Intel Celeron using Windows ME.

Reviewer 3: This toolset is divided into four programs: the Librarian, the Explorer, the Studio, and the Animator. The publisher explains that this breakup will allow each module to run faster than if they were combined into a single larger program. The Explorer is designed to be the central program which can be used to launch the others via icons on the bar below the toolbar. This program is based on Internet explorer but it is modified to only show icons within the directory structure and opening the file opens the icon in Studio. The Librarian is the "search" component of this package. Studio is the "Paint" program which allows you to design static icons. It opens with the following windows open: There is a box where you can choose your icon size ; 16x16 pixels is the smallest and 48x48 is the largest. There are sub-choices for whether the icon is displayed as "16 colors", "256 colors" or" XP" You choose your colors by clicking on a color palette. There is another box that allows you to blend colors to produce a custom color with variable opacity. Various tools such as brushes, erasers, pencil, text, line drawing, ellipse and rectangle drawing, and color select are represented by icons on the left of the screen. The "Add XP Drop Shadow" tool is easy to use to give a professional 3D effect to your drawings with a single step. The "Animator" allows you to draw a series of pictures that are then displayed in rapid sequence to give an animated effect to your cursors or icons. It was fun to play with but unfortunately it is not natively supported in Windows.

Reviewer 4: Microangelo provides free telephone support over a generous, if limited, schedule during the week. There is an extensive, detailed set of Help files that thoroughly explain the features and functional choices available on the panels of its various components (Explorer, Librarian, Studio, and Animator). Its Help files also include many very useful Tips to the user for each of them. Something that I would have found very useful in reducing the learning curve for Microangelo would be an example scenario of a typical start-to-finish icon creation project -- something much like the one on its Web site devoted to Windows Vista.) Microangelo's single user price of $57(including $7 for shipping the CD) is reasonable although at the upper end of what any general-purpose user or hobbyist is likely willing to pay. For professional developers, it is a very attractive price, but I'd expect any professional developer to be looking only for some capability not already in Adobe Photoshop. The printable EULA sets no limit on the number of copies that may be installed or concurrently in use on different computers at any one time by a customer. There is a 21-day free trial use with full functionality, extended on request for an additional 10 days..


Weak points

Reviewer 1: Microangelo has one of the sloppiest and most confusing installation procedures I have ever encountered in my over twenty years of working with software. The help files are obtuse at best, and at worst meaningless; there is no step-by-step tutorial to guide you through a relatively complicated program (it would seem); the FAQ on the Microangelo Web site consists of three questions (maybe those three questions are simply asked over and over since they are so "frequently asked"!); the Community Forum is nearly comatose as it averages around three posts a month with answers to even those few posts taking an average of seven days; and the only support, if you can call it that (see below), is by email with no promise or even "tease" as to a turnaround time! You are provided a meager 21-day trial for software that is complicated, and are only granted a single use license for software that is ridiculously and non-competitively overpriced at $49.95. I could uninstall it but not without leaving 41 junk HKCK, HKLU, HKCR, and HLUS entries in my Windows registry.

Reviewer 2: I found it very difficult to work with this program. The help file is one of the worst that I have ever seen. Parts of it simply do not function. For example, If you open the Help file, there is a Welcome screen. The first item is "What can I do?" Clicking on this hyperlink produces no result at all, although if you click on the next two items, you are brought to new screens. Oddly, they do not necessarily change if you go to the Contents Window pane on the left, and choose some other item there. In that Window pane, the first Chapter is "Start Here" The first topic is "What can I do?" Item 1 is "Improve my computer's icon display How?" Click on the How and nothing happens. Go back to the left Window pane, and try several more items. On the right, nothing changes, but suddenly a new pane appears. So some hyperlinks work, or some topics have content, and some do not. For a program with a decade of development behind it, there can be no excuse for this haphazard "help" file -- helpless help in fact. Incidentally, I was surprised that the F1 Key, which has been an access key to the Help files of most Windows programs "forever" is not a part of this program. Of course, some do not use this convention, but that may be because the F1 key is used for some other program function. That all said, once you do get into some of the Microangelo help items, they are not really helpful. For example: under "Browse for Icons", here are the steps: 1. Launch Microangelo Explorer Click on this hyperlink, and you get: "1. Click Start 2. Point to Programs 3. Point to Microangelo 4. Click on the Microangelo component you want to launch." Well, yes. i) if you have let Microangelo set up the Start Menu the way it likes; ii) the only way that one can get here is via the Start Menu in the first place; iii) item 4 should say "Choose Explorer". But the exact same module pops up for "Launch Microangelo Librarian" and "Launch Microangelo Studio" and "Launch Microangelo Animator" It seems inexcusably lazy not to have each item relate to the specific program module. However, let us continue. Explorer has been launched. Now: "2. Select a view filter (see below)" Following (below) I select "displays ICO files". Next: "3. Using the left window panel of Explorer, navigate to and select the computer, drive, or folder that you want to browse." OK. I select "Drive C:\" Now: "4. In the right window panel of Explorer, the icon file(s) will display." No, they do not. There is no indication of anything iconic. I may as well be using Explorer itself instead of MicroAngelo. In fact, I had to "drill down" into individual folders, and their sub-folders, and their sub-folders, and on and on, then double-click on specific individual files, before I began to see icons. Very tedious. Not at all what is promised. Not at all what I expected. The same happens if you use Librarian. You have to drill down to individual files before they will display the items you are looking for. Freeware programs I have used in the past do better than this. Worse yet, this happened over and over again in the program: the Help file was inadequate. Or sketchy. Or worse, it was actually wrong. Suffice it to say that once you get into the more technical parts of the program, the same holds true. I have spent several days with this program, and have accomplished very little. I am not a professional graphics artist, but I am a very competent computer user. Given the claims on their Web site, particularly about ease-of-use, and how it is appropriate for novices as well as professionals, I was looking forward to this program. I have come away utterly disappointed.

Reviewer 3: When the Help section was activated, it was always "on top" of the program from where it was called. This meant that it was impossible to use Studio, for example, until the Help section called from it was closed. This prevents the user from using Studio while following the steps described in Help, unless the user was to print out the help instructions. The drawing tools were rather crude in my opinion. While there was the ability to draw lines, ellipses and rectangles, there was no apparent way to draw curves or other complex shapes except by hand. Even Microsoft Word, a word processor, has a more robust library of customizable shapes. The gradient tool would apply a chosen color transition over a selected area. If no area was selected, it would overwrite the entire icon space. If you drew a shape and then selected it and applied a color gradient, the entire shape, including the original lines, would show as having been overwritten by the gradient. Saving the icon and reopening it revealed that the gradient had actually only been applied inside the originally drawn lines. It seems to me that it should have also displayed like this immediately after the gradient was applied. To their credit, the program is able to import vector graphics from high-end programs such as Adobe Photoshop When you are creating a cursor, you want to designate a "hot spot" which is the active point, typically at the tip of the arrow, which will trigger a desired action when the mouse button is pressed. I found it strange that the only way to do this was by clicking on a tiny icon under the toolbar. There was no text-equivalent command in the toolbar text drop-down menus. When I would add text to an icon and then remove it, the program would consistently crash with the following error message: m6studio.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. The help section was good at giving you an overview of the general functions of the program, but weak at giving specifics. Too much of my learning about the features of this program was based on trial and error. I would not have minded this as much if the functions of the program had been more intuitive. However, they often were not. For example, there were two rectangular tools. One would draw a rectangle and the other would select a rectangular shape cut out of the existing picture. There were a few clues about which one did what, but I found myself applying them to an icon to discover the extent of their functions. There is the ability to create animated icons, but then they state that the only way they know to display them is to use "Microangelo On Display". Then there is no description of what "Microangelo On Display" is. A hyperlink to a description would have been very useful. While the Librarian seems a useful search tool, its user friendliness is compromised by interruptions to the search. I searched my C: drive for Program File icons. Rather than searching through the requested folders and sub-folders to completion, the search paused many times to give messages such as File Opera.dll has an icon with 6508 image formats. I fail to see why such messages are of such importance that, in order to complete the search, I have to click OK on each of many popup messages individually. As the above-mentioned search continued to run, the hard drive ran audibly hard and the video screen in all of my programs began to flicker in random blocks. The flickering ceased as Windows Task Manager indicated that the Librarian.exe process ceased to consume CPU cycles Apparently this search was too large for this program because the final results never displayed.

Reviewer 4: Microangelo writes: Why four programs instead of one? Almost all other icon utilities available today consist of one, very large Visual Basic program that attempts to provide everything. We believe that the individual tools designed and integrated into Microangelo Toolset provide a better solution. I think this is more of a convenience to the Developer, and I doubt that many users or designers would prefer this approach. While I appreciated telephone support, requests made via their problem-reporting template was not responded to in the "two to three business days" they claim as their objective. Further, the template does not provide a copy of the problem report to the originator. Its EULA states Eclipsit Corp. makes no representations about the suitability of this software or about any content or information made accessible by the software for any purpose. Eclipsit Corp is not required to support or issue updates to this software. Statements such as these raise questions about depending on the product in my personal or business use.


Other comments

Reviewer 1: I have been a working professional as well as academic in the computer field for over 25 years. In addition to my professional training and university degrees, I am a Microsoft Certified Technician with additional certifications among which are MCT, MCDST, MCLC, and MCSE and never have I found a more unintuitive program. Worse, however, is the fact that the technical support/developers are the most arrogant, rude, unprofessional, and unhelpful individuals I have ever encountered. These people make AOL support look like saints and computer gurus. I contacted support initially due to my above described installation problems and was told where I could find the programs and how to open them-advice which was idiot-like in its over-simplification and lack of thoroughness or completeness. I then wrote support a second time merely to ask, for the purpose of this review, what might be the best way to advise our readers how to install the program so that they might avoid the problems I had experienced. I received a five-word response: "Install it to the desktop," as if the installation location would make a difference (well, I suppose having a program folder sitting on my desktop would make it easier to find!). The developer then contacted the NNT's editor to suggest that, since I did not understand how to install their program, I was unqualified to write a review and they no longer desired NNT to review their product. Now, so that I haven't wasted our readers' time by providing no usable information, I will make this recommendation: IconXP at http://iconxp.com/index.htm does everything Microangelo intends to do, with much more ease, a tiny 800KB file, and at approximately half the price. I just spent the past two days working with this program and it is far superior to Microangelo in every way. The support is friendly and helpful and thorough; they too have an FAQ of over fifty questions and a 30-day free trial period.

Reviewer 2: More important than a software program itself is the support given to customers who use their products. Here, MicroAngelo falls down totally. Many freeware authors provide better support than I received from this company. This review was postponed many times, apparently because the developers kept on changing the date that they were to supply us with license codes. When I needed help to revitalize the one I had which did not function, they did not respond to my requests on this matter. On that point alone, I would recommend that our readers approach this program with considerable reservations before investing in the program, in spite of all the advertising on their Web site. As with many other programs today, there is a user forum. Often in such forums, people send in their questions or comments, and others reply. I did not find a reference to the forum on the Web site, although it may be there. When I clicked on the "Community" link on the site, it brought me to the infamous "404 Page Not Found". I was able to find the forum through Google, and checked in. It is strangely inactive, quite unlike most other user forums in which I participate. Most of the questions are not answered by other users, but by Microangelo staff. Even then, it takes several days for answers. Programs that have passionate and dedicated users normally have passionate and dedicated contributors to the forums devoted to that software. That does not seem to be the case here.

Reviewer 3: In years of doing reviews for Neat Net Tricks, I had never seen a publisher attempt to block completion of a review once it had been started. That happened in this case.

Reviewer 4: Microangelo is a great product; but before I would recommend it to the casual user, I would hope its producers add additional Sample Development and How-To scenarios to its documentation. One shortcoming I noticed in its presentation is its dominant focus towards Windows Vista. This is a legitimate target for its development team, but, for now, that focus is well over the horizon for most of its customers for years to come.


Will you continue to use it?

Reviewer 1: Absolutely not.

Reviewer 2: No, I will not. It has already been uninstalled and I have deleted the original program downloads.

Reviewer 3: No.

Reviewer 4: I wouldn't use this program to develop icons, but I might for searching, archiving, and minor modification. These tasks often arise and I often come up empty-handed in finding the right program.

Eclipsit's Response To This Review: The software producer was provided a copy of this review and asked to make any desired responses and/or provide the Panel with an updated version and technical support as needed to write a more current review. Len Gray, Eclipsit's President, declined, writing "I do not see any reason to continue down this path."

OPERATING SYSTEMS USED IN THIS REVIEW
Windows XP Pro, XP Home, XP Media Edition, ME

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