Stone Design Forums

Hi everyone,

This is a tutorial that shows how to use both Create and iMaginator to make web buttons, such as the common "Save", "Open", "Cancel", and so forth.

This one includes audio (though the audio here seems quiet to me, I'm not sure why), and hopefully opens up worlds of ideas for you to use the two programs together, at a small fraction of the cost of the usual software used to do this kind of a graphic. Here's a link to the tutorial:

http://homepage.mac.com/russconte/gelbutton.mov

The file is some 12 MB in size, so it may take a little while to load.

By the way, the software I use to record the movies is SnapzPro 2.0, and if you are interested, it's here:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Not only can you see the clock second by second on the menu bar as proof of the movie, you'll also see my PowerBook's battery go down from 80% to about 72% as this movie was recorded! The video was recorded at one frame per second.

The audio is through my audio gear, which includes a nice mic and mixer, it's not just the built in mic on a regular Mac. I hope this is helpful.

The little red circle you'll see around the pointer (which makes the pointer much easier to follow) is a program called PinPoint, and it's available here:

http://www.macchampion.com/pinpoint_features.shtml

Enjoy!

Russ Conte

Russ this is the best so far and I'm sure this will give people the incentive to grab a copy of the Stone apps and be Creative.

You have a clear mellow voice which is great for this sort of tutorial please keep adding audio.

It was great that you pointed out just how easy it is to change background colour of the button, this is so useful for rollovers. The next stage, and I hope Russ will add it, is to drag images into Slice and Dice for rollover buttons. You can build all your nav buttons together then have them work separately by using Slice and Dice. Simple and quick to do. You can make animated giffs and have buttons that flash at you or change colour, the animated giff can be the rollover image. All of this becomes so simple because of the non destructive natrue of iMaginator. Give Slice and Dice a try.

Andrew can we have animated giff building directly in iMaginator?

Someone should look at the QT applescript dictionary and figure out how to make a movie via applescript - that would be the cool way to add the feature.

BTW: I'm providing a space on stone_design for these cool movies:

http://homepage.mac.com/stone_design/gelbutton.mov
http://homepage.mac.com/stone_design/multipleimages.mov
http://homepage.mac.com/stone_design/dropshadow.mov
http://homepage.mac.com/stone_design/cooltexteffect.mov
http://homepage.mac.com/stone_design/mu ... etwice.mov

OK - here's the one-stop shop permanent home for Russ's tutorial movies:

http://www.stone.com/iMaginator/Features.html#MOVIES