Peng., I agree that OS wars are senseless, and my mentioning the Apple was only to show that I had no such prejudices (and didn't mean to imply that you had any either) For coding, I use what works best for the purpose, I have used assembly, Basic flavors, C flavors and Delphi. Since I don't make games anymore, I nearly always work in Basic, I don't need the direct access to low-level stuff when all most of my stuff does is process data, and I do need speed of developing, I can't spend hours looking for memory leaks and unreleased pointers. I have written 12000 lines for CR2Edit6 in the past 2 weeks, in addition to my regular work, and I know I could never do that in any other language. If I went back to game writing? C++ all the way. As for text editors, as I said for the ocassional user that's fine, just be VERY careful, one bracket left out in the middle of a 20MB file can spell disaster. Much safer and faster to just click a button. Jim, you got a typo there for sure with "graphics" twice, but reguardless, graphics files vary in the way they store their data, a TIF for example has values that are 8, 16, 32 bit plus 4 and 8 byte IEEE, plus regular old text-style 1 byte. For this last, you just read the byte as an ASCII value, for say a 32 bit value, you read each of the 8 bits in 4 sucessive bytes. My records say you have 4.02, which is 13 builds behind the last ver4 release, more than 2 years old. You won't have much luck with today's big files with it, Vicki 1 at 10MB was the biggest thing around then, by a huge factor. I can send you the last ver4 update, but it won't help much for those biguns. There are tutorials at http://www.zenwareonline.com/cr2edit/tutorials/tutorials.html ,but they're really for ver5. As for the interface, you can blame Daz for that, they designed it, LOL! What they wanted was speed, not ease of use, so yes, it can take a while to learn how to use it so you can take advantage of that speed. Their philosophy -- 2 years ago -- was that no one but pros would be messing with Poser files, and so ver4 and much of 5 doesn't even have confirmations before overwriting a file. (They hated the idea of MS's "Are you really REALLY sure??") I have been sneaking in more safeguards ever since, tho. No one then envisioned that things would be like today, where everybody and his brother is out there hacking away -- I don't mean this in a bad way, where would we be without ERC and other such things brought to light by file hackers? Anyway, ver6 is now bigger in file size than poser itself, largely because of the builtin help, tutorials, wizards for walkthrus, in an attempt to make this power easily accessible to all (All the help stuff can be turned off, of course, can you imagine Word if you couldn't make Mr Clippee shut up?!) I think the old ver4 help and tutorials are still at Arcana, not sure, but as I say, you won't be able to do much with ver4 with the sort of complex stuff that you make. cheers,Dan http://www.zenwareonline.com for CR2Edit, ZenPaint, ZenTile, VueMaster and the complete line of Zenware graphics apps