Stone Design Forums

Okay, how about we list what Create's advantages are as well as what's missing from other apps it's competing with. This isn't to suggest that Create go tit for tat (i hope that's the correct way of saying it ) with theh other apps.. but, we may get a clearer idea of where it stands.

I saw Create reviewed and compared once (maybe twice) in MacAddict.


I'd like to see It show up in MacAddict again, as well as MacUser, MacWorld, MacDesigner even MacHome! MLayout looks like a GimpyQuark which is cool.. but, it's not as simple as Create, or Quark for that matter (INMHO)


CREATE is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery user friendly! That's the biggest plus, i think. Drag n drop everywhere?!?!? who can beat that? If images are kept on a server, Create is even more amazing... Xserve and Xraid and Create make great bedfellows!!!! (same would go if a new/old 3D app would show up in the Stone Studio Suite!!!!)

That's Post #1.

Startyger your post has prompted me to say the following.

When I try to explain to my friends what exactly Stone Studio does and how fantastic it is they always reply with a list of things that it can not do. I then take an hour explaining how everything on their list can easily be handled by Stone Studio. I'll give you an example, last weeks argument was over Freeway, in the end I downloaded the demo version to try it out. In my opinion it is no where near as good as Create. My friend was adamant you could not embed multimedia in Create until I explained that you could and how it was done.

So where am I going with this post and what do I think the problem is. In my opinion it is the first point of contact, the web site, people I have spoken with have come away without understanding what exactly Stone Studio can do and how powerful it is.

What I propose we do is, while Andrew is adding new features to Stone Studio and getting things Tiger ready for us, work out the best way of getting Stone Studios features across to the rest of the world. It's the least we can do, we are getting free updates for life.

I'll lead of with a few ideas to get the ball rolling.
1. I love the Stone Pebbles (icons), could we have a little animation with them in?
2. Could we start the site with "This site was entirely made using Stone Studio"?
3. Animation, Movies, Quicktime VR are all things that we should use.
4. Should we have a section to explain how relevant this software is for small business.

That's a start now let your imagination run riot.

Mark.

Another idea, we could have a ? with a stone pebble as the . against different elements of the site which when clicked would tell you how that element was constructed and included in the site. Put another way when you see within the Stone Site what you want to achieve in your own you just click the ? icon.

whoops i got carried away and posted to another thread what i should have posted here. Sorry. That post can be found in the tread on interface enhancements.... um... go create! wait!


Illustrator can do gradients along a path.
would be nice in Create.



MLayout can save to XML...
okay, don't know if that was worth mentioning.. Create does this already.. but, it's interesting to note that a Create art file(spline) looks like it should work in an XML capable Browser.. or perhaps one day.. i do nt' know.

iDraw can save as .swf and i think svg i'll check on the svg.....
Create can't.. yet. but, can embed them into websites made in Create.

Just in case I was misunderstood my idea is to turn the forum on its head with this thread. Instead of asking Andrew for a new feature we could give him some ideas as to how best to present Stone Studio on the web. Which parts of Stone Studios abilities did you not understand or find when you visited the site for the first time?

Just look at it like this, WE are marketing Stone Studio for Andrew now what's the best way of doing it?

I don't know if you guys have this in your area, but here I have done presentations showing off Stone Studio to user groups. Further, I have done How Tos in forums on using Create for page layout. I even have pages devoted to Create (the Rhapsody versions) on my site showing it's page layout and web design abilities.

Still people are hard to reach. Convincing Mac users how great Create and the rest of the Stone Design apps are is just as hard as convincing the rest of the computer world how great Macs are.

As for answering the question What can you do with these apps?, I still have quite a few Stone Studio fliers so I just hand them one of the fliers.

Also, it can't be taken to lightly the influence of the recent transition to Mac OS X of many Mac users. One of the first things I noticed while moving people to Mac OS X from Mac OS 8/9 was a clinging to familiar app names as almost a security blanket. Getting these people to try Cocoa apps is an up hill battle... specially in the first few months of using Mac OS X.

New users (specially to computers) seem very open to Stone Studio. So getting them while they are buying a new computer would be helpful. I noticed that Stone Studio isn't being sold at the Apple Stores around here anymore and that the Apple experts and sales people have never even heard of it. The day The Incredibles opened I spent almost an hour in an Apple Store showing off what can be done with Stone Studio to one of the employees there.

I've thought about offering to show the Apple Stores in my area what can be done with Stone Studio so that they can tell new users/buyers about it.

It is difficult to grab peoples attention, that's why we need a hook/strategy.

Looking around I found this and I thought it might be useful for movie tutorials or even on the forum.

http://www.verticalmoon.com/products/sc ... graphy.htm

There's an old saying in both writing and marketing... "Don't tell, show".

One of the best ways to demonstrate the power of Stone Studio would be to have samples of great looking websites for example that were designed using only Stone Studio.

Second would be to have quicktime tutorials showing how easy and fast it is to say, lay out a newsletter, or a website or book... Just quick movies demonstrating those features live.

The biggest hurdle Create has to get over is that of Positioning.

The human mind works in categories: web design, graphic layout, etc. Create encompasses all those categories. That puts it in the position of having to compete against speciast products like Freeway for web design. Never mind the truth that Create can do everything and more, you have to overcome the consumer mindset that a specialist product can do it better.

This creates two broad directions for Stone Studio here. One, package the product as different products to different markets. Call it the Stone Webanator and market it purely as the easiest, most intuitive, website building system on OSX ever created. Include lots of templates, detailed instructions, sample video tutorials and feature sites built using it. Now do the same thing with the program in the other categories. A step back from completely re-packaging, would be to focus the marketing messages tightly in each of these categories.

The other alternative is positioning it as the Swiss Army Knife or Multi-tool. But then you have to target people looking for a multi-tool, not a website design program. Here, you have to demonstrate all the different products Stone replaces - and overcome the natural belief that people have that a specialst product can do the job better than a generalist.

Kind of the ... "Stone Studio: so you can get a great looking website up, create a logo, design a newsletter, without busting your budget and get back to running your business program"

With this strategy, it is important to look at segments of users who need a Multi-tool and then show them how Stone is the tool for them. For example Entreprenuers and small business owners using Macs are one obvious segment. I'd then craft a segment by segment marketing messages and samples on the Stone Website... Entreprenuer? Cllick here. Design Student? Click here. Etc.

Anyway, just food for thought. I love Create and would love to see folks here chip-in their ideas and concepts to help make it one of the brightest stars on OSX.

What are your thoughts on...

A) The different categories that Stone Studio excells in? (web, design, etc?)

B) Who are the natural segments of customers who NEED a Swiss Army Knife, not 5 different software programs they have to master?

That is a well thought out reply Robert, I very much agree with "Don't tell, show".

I read with interest how you might divide the site by the categories of people who would use Stone Studio. The good thing about this is that all these different types of user post on this forum. So with this diverse user base we should get some very interesting posts.

I think we can take a "first easy step" by gathering links to sites out there that were built with Stone studio. Then a committee of users or Andrews own taste can determine which get listed on his site under the new "Website design" category.

I'm not a designer or a web guy, but I've built two sites. One for my business, the other for a hobby...

I'll post them here and let the committee decide if either would make the cut as examples.

Here's my Bus. site
http://www.strategymatters.com/

Here's the rough of the hobby site. I've only got the video's link working right now as I'm waiting on content.. but if you want to see a 75 year old beat someone up, take a look.

http://homepage.mac.com/robertstover/Silat/Silat_1.html

And here's a rough I'm laying out for a friend.. Full of jibberish, but design is finished.

http://homepage.mac.com/robertstover/Me ... rds_1.html

Now, who keeps track of all these and who decides what is good enough to profile on Stones website?

What about revising the badge on a web page, the "Created by Create" thing? I think some people pass this thing up because the current default is a bit large IIRC. Robert Curtis and I made up a few trial badges that were more like the little geek badges (CSs/ RSS/HTML/ Apache, etc.) you see on some other web sites. A minor point, but I think insofar as the point about highlighting these pages as being created in Create, a simple thing like that can get the point across.

This also is probably a relatively small issue, but perhaps a more visual diagram of how Create can be used for web, print and drawing can be made and placed somewhere prominently in the stone.com domain? I think the text description is clear enough, but a lot of us visually-oriented folk might absorb the point better if it were made graphically. This kind of visual diagram could easily be used in presentations about Create, a single image intro to it, a snapshot or summary of the app. Naturally, it would have to leave ot some important details and gloss over some aspects of the app. another diagram could cover how the other Stone apps dovetail with Create, again, a visual diagram of an interoperable suite. (I guess there's a third diagram to show how it works with iLife, Photoshop and such too, but that might be overdoing it.)

From more of an illustration side of things, I've been slowly trying to put together visual elements and layouts for the resource library in Create. The idea is the same as what you're saying about web pages: to show not just quick examples of art, but also more advanced examples to show its range. We've already seens ome examples of this in more recent included artwork, but I wanted to expand on it, show a few different vocabularies and styles. It's been very slow-going though. I was hoping to have some art ready for the Holidays, but I don't think I'll get far enough.

I want to sort of remind everyone that Create is excellent for print work too. While I always meant to use Create for a personal web page, I never got artound to it. But I did use it to get my portfolio together, and I use it between bigger personal projects for things like quick birthday cards (I usually whip up some artwork on the spot). So I feel that presenting Create as the "webinator" restricts it and doesn't really address its biggest strength IMO, the ability to go from print to web so easily.

There are already some resources avilable from the stone.com front page to show some of this stuff, but it's not been advanced in a while, and it's a bit tucked away I suppose.

http://www.stone.com/tutorials/

How many people are close to an Apple Store or some other Apple reseller with an interest or ability to have in-store demos?

I'll be out of town for a week, but definitely collect cool websites we can show off - and the badge could definitely be smaller and reworked.

... that was me as "guest" there...

Andrew

This is ugly, very ugly, but it gets the idea across of positioning Stone Studio, not by the bundled products, but by typical uses. And showing how all these objectives can be handled by Stone Studio.

If these were clickable.. you'd click on websites and see a page of thumbnails of great looking sites and copy that reinforced the ease and power of a Stone Designed website. As well as a quick video tutorial with voice over. Same with print and design and other major reasons people buy stone.

I could target the copy better if I had a better sense for 1) the major use categories for Stone and 2) the major user segments (business owners, designers, design houses, families, etc.

The good news is these changes require mainly time, not a major investment in marketing. The bad news is that they require time...

A schematic type diagram? I tried to draw one to help my own understanding so I like this idea. I have found I am often trying to explain to people how the different parts of Stone Studio interact, things like:-

Design instruction manual in Create, output to PStill for web then e-mail to client. Back to Create, output to PStill for print, burn to disk and post to client.

Drop a graphic into Slice and Dice, slice it up, drop in another graphic the same size as the original, set links, save for Create and then drop into Create document on a master layer and have a rollover nav bar on every page. (People gaze at the screen awe struck when they see this one and when they ask to see it again I say no you can do it this time).

For anyone interested this is a site I put together for my Father and Brother.

http://www.westenhangercastle.co.uk/Wes ... _Home.html

It is a little rough at the edges in places but it was only intended as an idea platform from which to get a professional to build something better.