Article Preview
Buy Now
| Print: | |
| PDF: |
Review
Iconographer
Issue: 1.6 (June/July 2003)
Author: Brian Jones
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,531
Starting Page Number: 8
RBD Number: 1602
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.mscape.com
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
With the advent of Carbon, adding application icons to your application has become a bit more complicated than it has been in the past. Many developers find the added convenience of an icon editor to be a worthwhile expense for precisely this reason. Iconographer allows you to build icons that satisfy the new Mac OS X icon format, along with many others, and addresses its niche purpose with admirable success.
Iconographer offers an extensive set of icon building features. All of the potential icon sizes, color depths, and masks applicable to the various Mac icon formats it supports are available. An icon can be completed automatically from an incomplete set of member icons, member icons can be easily pasted from the external editor of your choice, or a selected member icon can be opened in an external editor from within Iconographer itself. Iconographer will generate masks, dither to lower color depths, and save to standalone files or directly into the file, folder or application of your choice. Any icon building feature a user could desire is available.
Iconographer also includes an internal graphics editor. The basic feature set is there, but many users will most likely find they need to use a more robust image editor for more sophisticated images. For example, Iconographer has a paintbrush, a pencil, a gradient tool, and a polygon tool; however, there is no layers support, and therefore no transparency support or other features that users of more sophisticated graphics programs have probably come to expect. The graphics editor is a limitation; however, the ease with which the application can be coordinated with an external graphics editor makes the process relatively seamless, and many users would probably prefer the familiarity of using their favorite image editor anyway.
The strength of this application lies in building icon suites. Member icons can be added or generated automatically, and your progress can be checked using the preview window that shows the desired member icon coupled with its mask displayed on a variety of backgrounds and in a variety of states. The weakness of this application lies in its image editing abilities, which, while perfectly capable of living up to their stated features, have quite limited goals. A developer already proficient in another image editing program and looking for a quick solution to building OS X icons would do well to check out Iconographer. Someone looking for an icon editor with a robust image editor might choose to look elsewhere.
In Brief Product Iconographer 2.4 Manufacturer Mscape Software Price $15 System Requirements Mac OS 8.x/9.x or Mac OS X 10.x Contact Info info-at-mscape.com
http://www.mscape.com
Pros Variety of icon building features Cons Limited image editor Rating (1.0-5.0): 4.5
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
|
