Steve Harman has produced a very deceptively simple little graphics app - gone through various name changes - from Harm's Tile and Harm's Wave, to sTile. It's distributed as freeware - the program is free. It's a Delphi product. And it's what freeware, shareware and commercial applets should be like, in an ideal internet world. Like another freebie - IrfanView - this Harm's Tile is one of the gems of the web. That'll sound like an overstatement, surely - until one reads on.

The program is designed, it seems, really to concentrate on tiling for backgrounds and textures so that they remain as seamless as possible. And the power of this program lies in a couple of things. One can take for granted that it uses the clipboard. So one can cut from another program, without saving anything to a file, and just paste to Harm's, and vis-versa. Some programs, like Kai's Photo-soap II, surprizingly can't do this. Those like Adobe's Illustrator, say, will auto-rasterize before cutting. So - runs the gambit.

Another thing is the fine adjustment panel that automatically pops up when starting the program. Called the - Toolbox - it allows for fine control over basic things like saturation, contrast and brightness. This is essential when fine tuning an image to be suitable for either a light or dark background. Sometimes you can't get it all in one shot, and have to try the adjustments a couple of times in a row. But it's neat to have it right there. True, again in something like Kai's Photo-soap, you have finer control over these basic parameters. But Harm's is just fine in this. And it's useful to have it.

The Harm's filters, of course, are the heart of the program. And as can be seen, here, the parameters of various filters may be changed to something else, in this Toolbox; which really gives some power to the whole program. Add to that a little D, default, button (on right side) which sets the particular filter back to 'factory specs', and it's a very slick design. All one has to remember after changing things is to hit the Apply button, with the little lightning bolt (mid left side); or if you move any of the 6 sliders, below, you have to press a green checkmark button which appears, as shown here, or press the red X to cancel. But it becomes automatic, after awhile.

In addition to that, and apart from multiple UNDO levels (I have mine set to 30, sometimes still not enough), recent versions of the program have also included a macro record, called the - LOG - if you remember to switch logging on. Every undo, every false start, everything gets recorded. But if you just can't remember how you created that Rembrant of a tile, you can read through the recorded macro and see just how. That's really also very useful, and should be standard for any program.

While I don't use the asteroid (thought there's a little tutorial just on this filter in the help file) or mosaic type filters, and rarely the laplace, or something like erase-to-black, I often use most of the filters. Again, with an eye to seamless tiles apparently right behind the very design of the whole program, a couple, like the sinewave filters, specifically have a wraparound option that you can even disable if you prefer (as seen in the Toolbox graphic). Other filters, without this specific option, still maintain the seamlessness, like the water filters, which I also quite often use. He has taken care to try and include seamlessness wherever he could. And there is the edge merge, found in most graphics programs, now, as well as a very basic 'kaleidoscope' 4-way flip.

Here would be a quick example, then, of an experiment with Harm's - all hypothetical.

1. Load some graphic, any graphic,
2. Expand the tree (hit the "E" button, so that a "C" shows up just over the scroll bar, as here),
3. Scroll down to Size/Aspect - Smooth Resize - to something smaller, and perfectly square,
4. Try Distortions - Sinewave L/R - and . . . nope,
5. Ctrl-Z - UNDO,
6. Try the Distortions - HarmSwizzle - nope, too much like any other swizzle,
7. Ctrl-Z - UNDO,
8. BC button, as shown here - Copy Image to Buffer,
9. Under Distortions - Map Texture (Use Buffer, Brightness=18 default (hit the D button in the Toolbox for default)) - which will emphasize the relief,
10. Draw - Merge Buffer - @ 30% in the Toolbox, hit either Apply button, and . . . twice,
11. Color - Negative,
12. Color - Rotate, and . . . again . .
13. No, nothing - Rotate again and Negative to reset,
14. Little more Green in the Toolbox and hit the 'check' button,
15. Distortion - Water with Buffer - hit D, first, then Apply,
16. Interesting . . . but, UNDO,
17. Rotate 90 degrees - alt-ctrl-X - and Water with Buffer (L/R amount=100), Apply,
18. Press D to reset filter,
19. Blur three or four times before a - Water with Self,
20. The ever ubiquitous alt-ctrl-S (you'll know it by heart) - Seamless Rotate,
21. Go negative, etc. . . .
22. and . . . just . . . so on.

And I think that pretty fairly describes the method, or insanity, of my efforts with Harm's. Lots of shortcut keys. Lots of undoos (undoes? nah). Seamless Rotate here, a Water with Buffer there - typ. with a different image in the buffer - and seeing if a Map Texture with a bump in the buffer might not really start to liven up the pattern or image. Just have to play around with it, and try different things - maybe 'smush' the keyboard for extra measure, just to see. In a way, it's not all that unlike playing a musical instrument, once you really get into it.