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BuonRotto
Not sayin', just sayin'
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2005-04-21, 09:01

Funny, I have a slightly different take. First, I actually prefer having a small armada of specialized apps instead of one huge bloated one that serves too many functions. There's a balancing act of course too. You could separate the illustration appplication part of Create from the DTP/web publishing part of it. This is what another Cocoa company does. However, the other company's product is aimed at more high-end/professional installations. Create is meant to be for people who want more control than the color-by-numbers approach Pages primarily uses, but who can't justify the expense nor take advatage of all the advanced features of something like Adobe's Creative Suite. So it's illustration/publishing in one place.

Having said that, Create does have an animation tool for simple .gifs inside the app, and considering that GIFfun is another gif animation tool, that animation palette in Create could be moved outside into GIFfun, and expanded upon. Well, I suppose you could go either way with .gif animation -- either just roll the thing into Create since it's fairly small as it is, or pull it out and enhance GIFfun, maybe adding other animation formats and changing the name. Is there an aNimator.app?

I do agree that SliceAndDice's features could be rolled into Create though, though I can see why Andrew pulled it out as its own thing. Handling rollovers inside a layout can be tough. You're either hiding it, or creating special page layers, special editing modes, or using pages for graphics that aren't supposed to show up as a layout per se. Anyway, I think theres a good solution out there that will let you slice and add rollovers inside Create without mucking with Create's structure too much.

StampInStone is actually one of my favorite apps, and I like having it outside Create since you can use it on any document. Maybe it would be good to rolll its features into PStill though. PhotoToWeb could use more integration with Create, but IMO should remain separate. We really need to come up with better preset layouts in that app though. Like Create's clipart, the preset layouts are rather dated, lots of dithering and stuff. I think maybe there's an issue with doing something like that because PStill is simply a front-end to a *nix distillery tools developed under the GPL by a guy named Frank Seigert. Intergration might not be viable for that reason.

PhotoToWeb is sort of the stepping stone to Create in a way, though it's sort of chopped off at the knees by iPhoto and Homepage now. Andrew showed off P2W to a big group of Apple folks some years ago, and news of Apple's iTools and its Homepage tool came out not long after. Like the Create clipart, the preset layouts in P2W are rather dated, made in an earlier age of the internet. I (or someone else) really need to update and expand on those things.

PStill could go a little further in integrating with the print architecture. It will set up a special print option to distill the image in create (aka, "repurpose" the image) using the print services feature of Panther and beyond, but it could use a few more quick options at print time like the preset options in its main window. While I might say that a lot of Stone's presentation of stuff could be more visually-oriented, I'm not sure how you would do that with PStill without using extraneous graphics and such. I rather like the setup now, though obviously all its distilling features can be quite advanced and difficult to track. The one thing I think could be better automated is the font handling, but still eaving control for those who want the advanced options in place now.

Anyway, a lot of these smaller apps from Stone, and a couple of big ones I never use (TimeEqualsMoney and LicenserKit). iMaginator is another one of these small apps, and they're really experiments. It's one of the reasons why they're separate to start. He creates them fairly economically, sees how people take to them, and he can either move on or continue to improve them depending on people's interest.

Please mention this stuff to Stone either via email or in the stone forums! If I keep relaying this stuff, it sounds like it's one person's opinion. If many people say it, then the opinions have more clout.
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