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.
Everybody has heard about the famous “plug-ins” design pattern. Allowing third-party extensions to one’s software was a key feature that took applications like Photoshop or Mozilla where they are today. But let’s not stop there. With a few minor improvements, this design pattern can be much more usefull - I call it Cooperating Plug-Ins.
A drop shadow filter is a crucial part of every web or application graphics editor. If you need more convincing that drop shadow is your friend, read the article about the role of shadows in icon design. The good news is that the old JScript-based filter will be replaced by a new one. A better one. A faster one.
Upcoming versions of RealWorld Designer-based applications are going to have a much needed feature: the ability to run a filter and display a preview of the outcome.