"This is why Leonardo's late. It (Creative Sparks) saw this and it went away to re-write its own."

Even allowing for friendly rivalry and artistic licence, Tim Langdell of Softek could have a point. Softek's The Artist, due for release any time now, is an astonishing piece of work. The race to turn a humble Spectrum into a Macintosh clone could be over when The Artist reaches the shops, and at a humble £9.95 nobody will have to start an "Our kids can wait" campaign a la Apple.

The Artist is a design package along the lines of MacPaint, with plenty of scope to incorporate and manipulate text. Langdell says that it was begun 18 months ago, before anyone involved had seen a Macintosh - but the result is very similar in many respects.

It is driven by menus at the foot of the screen rather than the pull-down type, and it uses a straightforward cursor rather than icons. But there is a Mac-type choice of brushes and patterns, and the cut-and-paste facility looks better than the Mac's.

You can design on a number of different scales, from the grid for character generation to the full screen with zoom and stepping functions. Text can be located from any pixel point, and 64 columns are another option. The Fill function is startlingly fast.