Hi
Apologies if this reads like a promotion for Adobe, but I thought
some people might be interested.
If you need to make custom buttons for your programs, it can be a
real time-consuming task to edit them and then re-import into
Metacard.
Adobe's ImageStyler program ($100 +) has some features which make this easier.
The program is basically for producing web graphics, particularly for
the artistically challenged like myself. It comes with various
editable styles that you can apply to graphic shapes (bevels,
embossing, shadows, glows, metallic effects, and so on). So you can
make a a bunch of buttons using basic shapes and then change the
style of all of them with a single click.
It also allows batch exporting of the documents to html files and
automatically creates the image files (in gif, png or jpeg) for the
graphic elements. Because you can specify the file names for the
images, it's not too difficult to create a script in your stack that
automatically replaces current icon images with the new set generated
by ImageStyler. So when your client tells you that they would like
the lighting angle for your 157 carefully crafted rippled wax effect
buttons to shift clockwise by 7 degrees, you open the ImageStyler
document, change the lighting angle on the style in question, and
click export. In Metacard, you run your update script and it's done.
(Well, that's the theory.)
The program is not without its quirks. It's slow and RAM hungry. But
generally it works. The important thing is it saves time. It also
makes cool looking graphics, which is probably a bad thing in the
hands of someone like me. :)
You can download a monstrously huge demo version from Adobe's site.
I'd be interested to hear about other tools that do anything similar.
Cheers
Dave Cragg
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The LACS Centre (Business English Training Resources)
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.lacscentre.co.uk
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