Last moment features

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Last moment features

Published by on April 26th 2008.

Time before a release is both stressful and boring. No exciting large-scale functions are being added, bugs are being found and being fixed, praying that a fix does not destroy anything else. But, occasionally, a small step for a developer can be a giant leap for the end user.

Need a tip?

It is not a generally known fact that the current version is capable of providing context help for a lot of user interface elements. In dialogs, click the question mark button in the caption and then the area of interest. In the main window, click the “Context help” toolbar button or menu item and then again the area. Or hit F1 while the control of interest has keyboard focus.

Version 2008.1 will simplify the use case and directly display context help as tooltips for almost all the user interface elements. The tips may eventually become a nuisance for expert users and therefore the feature can be turned off in the application options dialog.

Quick icon assembling

While not a typical scenario, there are people, who want to take a group of pictures of typical icon sizes (16×16, 32×32, 48×48) turn them into one icon. Performing this action in current version would require a lot of clicking. The new version will be able to perform this task in a single step. Create an empty icon and drag and drop all the images in question on the icon directory window and voilà. You have an icon. The application will automatically determine the color depth of the dragged images.

More retouch effects

The retouch tool was extended by 2 more effects:

  • Desaturate - lower color saturation of the retouched area. Saturation can also be increased by using negative weight for this effect.
  • Colorize - replace hue and saturation of the retouched area using primary color.

Easy to do yet useful.

Summary

The release date is getting near and these are most likely the last functions added. Back to bug fixing.

Recent comments

user icon Anonymous
I wish there were...
Select background
What about ICL files?
Vista & Win 7 icons