It has been 3 years since the first public version of RealWorld Icon Editor was released on April 17th 2005. RWIE is still one of the youngest, but is has already managed to establish itself and has positively influenced the whole industry.
To answer this sneaky question will become much easier in future versions of RealWorld Designer applications. As you might have guessed, this short post will be about improvements to the handy but sometimes overlooked “drag and drop” technique.
I spend a good portion of my time developing software and only a fraction designing. Still, after a couple of years, I have hundreds of files with images and 3D models on my computer. And to tell you the truth, it is a mess…
I had it coming…I should have never unleashed it. The scripting interface in RealWorld Designer took a sharp turn and became a lot more than was originally planned. Do you want to rotate pictures by EXIF tags? Generate thumbnails and code for html galleries? Watermark and decorate pictures? Or… do it all in one step? Bah, why should I care? You can do it yourself using scripts.
The ability to customize a tool does not seem like something worth more than a short notice, but after using it for a while, you would not want to live without it anymore. Photoshop has a similar feature, but RealWorld Designer takes it to the next level.
There used to be an extension for RealWorld Icon Editor 2006.1 that allowed thumbnails in open file dialogs and in Windows Explorer for U3D and R3I files. It was nifty but incompatible with later versions (because it required a lot of entries in registry and that was especially hard to do under Vista). Today, the thumbnail extractor is back in it has all the bells and whistles that you would expect from a RW tool…
Buttons are ugly. Even buttons with nice images on them can become ugly. Especially if they are small and you have to click them every few seconds. Future versions of RW tools will utilize mouse gestures to fight this problem. And once you get used to them, there is no going back.
It is boring to do the same thing over and over again. Or isn’t it? … Anyway, in case of photo editing, repetition gets boring pretty quick and many editors solve this problem with a scripting subsystem. And so will RealWorld Photos.
RealWorld Photos would not be a real photo editor without some kind of batch processing capabilities. Let’s have a look on what to expect.
Things have been quiet since March, but the development has not stopped. We have been busy improving the raster image editor user interface control and building a brand new application focused on photo retouching. The improvements in image editing will of course make it into future versions of currently available products.