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 March 30,2004  
 
Announcements - Web Studio 4.0 Released
Web Studio 4.0...  with over 150 new features and enhancements simplifies professional website design like never before. With the new 4.0, you’ll find a treasure chest of new features to speed your website design tasks.
Full MultiMedia Support: With one click add Flash, MP3, Video, MIDI, QuickTime, Real Media and more.

New Text Features: Import fully formatted Word .doc files, and just about anything else you can open with Microsoft Office! Search and Replace. New Heading Styles help improve readability and your search engine results. Insert text files with graphics, copy and paste HTML from web pages, paste an entire page from a browser! You get fully justified text, indents, insert special characters like these © ®. And much, much, more.

The Web Studio Shopping Cart:  With iHostStudio hosting you get the cart, catalogs, customer registration, credit cart transactions, shipping calculations, online and offline purchasing, comprehensive reporting, and much, much more. As easy to use as using Web Studio.

Drag and Drop Anything: Drag and drop PDF files, Zip, Excel, PowerPoint, anything, and Web Studio figures out what to do with it.

Faster Page Layout: Laying out your pages is lightning quick when you use the new Design Grid, Constrained Object Movement, on-screen Page Guides, and the new Page Layout toolbar!

Improve your Search Engine Rankings: With new file naming rules, HTML Headings, page based Meta Tags and Title Tags.

New Link Features: Links that download files to a visitor's computer. Links can open New Windows. Link descriptions popup on a mouse over. Enter links directly into text and graphics without using MyLinks. Create new Link categories.

New Graphics Features: Crop photos; Copy Protect; re-use graphics and upload once. Choose what file types and adjust compression to your needs; Proportional Resizing to one pixel accuracy; add Special FX to selections of graphics.

New Documentation: Included in the Help Menu, it shows how to do everything Web Studio can do! You’ll find previous features you didn't even know about! It's reorganized to facilitate easily finding exactly what you need to know.

New Look: Web Studio 4.0 takes on its new look with Windows XP! And we retained the look and feel of Web Studio 3.01 as well

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Web Studio 4.0 Features in Depth...
Flash, MP3, Downloadable Files

Besides Uploading, the most frequently asked question about Web Studio 3.0 was, "How do I add a Flash (or MP3 or Downloadable File) to my site. That FAQ on our site was the most used!

Now, 4.0 simplifies the process outlined in the FAQ to the point of just dragging a Flash file onto a page, Inserting it from the Insert Menu, of adding them to the MultiMedia gallery for use throughout your site or with multiple sites.

The new Sound Architecture simplifies adding MP3's in the same way. Just drag an MP3 file directly on to an object and the object becomes the button that plays the MP3. Drag it onto a page and audio controls are added to the page to play the MP3.

The new Link Architecture enables you to add any file to your site so visitors can download them. You can add them to the Links Gallery via the Insert menu, drag a file onto a page or onto an object like a button. If Web Studio can't make a graphic, text, Flash or other object it knows about from the file, it will automatically create a download link, attach the file to it, all ready for downloading by your visitors.

Proportional Resizing.
When you bring your digital photos in to WebStudio they are almost always too big and you have to resize them to suit your page design.

Previous versions required you to repeatedly resize them with the mouse, which was time consuming and tedious.

Now you can double click on the photo, and use the new Proportional Resize feature in the Properties dialog to instantly resize the photo without distortion. Just click the Proportional Resize button and type in whatever height or width you want for the photo and click OK.

If you're adding multiple photos all at once, just use the Proportional Resize on one of them then, select it, and holding the Shift key down select the rest of them. Then choose Make Same Size from the Object menu, or just press the Same Size button in the new Layout Toolbar. This will result in all of the photos be the right size.

For even more coolness with photos, see the next section on Batch Special FX and the Thumbnail feature!

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President's Corner

Welcome to the resumption of the Web Studio Newsletter series. If you don't know why we discontinued the series last October, we were hard at work creating Web Studio 4.0!

Having released 4.0, the newsletters will resume on a more frequent schedule -- every week or two weeks. This way we can keep you more up to date on what's new in the product, new releases, new website features.

For example, we have an announcement to make about the Web Studio 4.0 Service Pack 1 availability. Service Pack 1 was released on March 28 with both new features and fixes for reported problems. It is available now on our website's Downloads page. If you purchased your 4.0 prior to March 29 you should install the service pack. You can tell what version your Web Studio is by going to the Help menu and choosing "Web Studio Version Info." If the dialog does not mention Service Pack 1, you should download and install it.

Steve Cochard
President
Back to the Beach Software, LLC

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Site of the Month Contest Winner
DR's Capt. Don's Fishing Charters

Congratulations to DR, creator of the Capt. Don's Fishing Charters site, our Cool Site of the Month Contest winner for February!

DR's site is the business site for a charter fishing company.  Our judges said, "I like the design and the fact that it loads fast. No time wasted on frills and furbelows. A prospective customer has all the information they would need to make a decision to go fishing with Captain Don, and the information is presented in a manner that makes it easy to find and easy to read. All in all, a very good example of a small business website."

Make sure you check out DR's site and  remember you can ask him how it was all done in the WebStudio Forum!

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Did You Know
...Web Studio 4.0 Service Pack 1 is available
Web Studio 4.0 Service Pack 1  was released on March 28 with both new features and fixes for reported problems. It is available now on our website's Downloads page or click here. If you purchased your 4.0 prior to March 29 you should install the service pack. You can tell what version your Web Studio is by going to the Help menu and choosing "Web Studio Version Info." If the dialog does not mention Service Pack 1, you should download and install it..
...Web Studio 4.0 and Batch FX

4.0 enables you to perform Special FXs on more than one object. Just select all of the graphics and then drag the FX onto any one of them.

So, you can Rotate photos that should be vertical in one step. You can drop the Thumbnail FX onto a selection of photos and have all of them become thumbnails at once!

If you do it with the Photo Enhancement FX (the Camera) it will bring up the Wizard for each selected graphic. This enables you to quickly adjust a series of photos, for example, without repeatedly dragging the FX onto them.

...New Layout Features in 4.0 
Have you ever wanted to move an object vertically but were afraid you'd also move it left or right and ruin your alignment?

Welcome to Constrained Movements. If you hold down the Shift key and then click on a object and start moving vertically, it will not move horizontally for as long as the Shift key is down.

The same goes for horizontal movement. The feature looks at which direction you initially move the object and prohibits movement in the other direction. It is really great when editing columns of text with multiple text objects in them, such as this newsletter itself!

 
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