Web Studio 4.0 Newsletter

With the holidays around the corner, take a look at our Gift Certificate for that special someone. And while you're at it, the Video Tutorial CD is a great gift also!

This month's feature is unusual, we're recommending not using two features in Web Studio! We want to move everyone away from Java and into Flash for slide shows and text effects. Read the feature for our reasons why.

And for all you educators, don't forget "The Student Web Awards"; the nationwide version of our Site of the Month contest for high-school students. Your school can get Web Studio free for a year.

Slide Show Alternatives!

There is an ongoing fued between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems over Sun's Java language. If you use Web Studio's Slide Shows you are in the middle of the fued. It seems Microsoft decided that Java wasn't in the best interests of Windows. They decided remove it from Windows XP. Sun didn't like that, went to court and the judge told Microsoft to put it back... sort of. The bottom line for all of us is that this affects all sites using Java, including the people who visit your sites! The result of this is that they don't see your slide show.

We're replacing the Java slide shows and Text Effects with new, cool, Flash based effects you can drag and drop on your pages. However, they aren't available yet. But, we do have a solution for the Slide Show problem: the Ani-Maker.

The Ani-Maker enables you to create Animated GIF files. By using it with photographs instead of clipart, you can make a very nice slide show. Some of the bells and whistles from Java slide shows are missing, but they will work on all computers. To create an Ani-Maker slide show, follow these instructions:

Add the photos to your page.

Make them all the same size. You can use the Make Equal Size command from the Objects menu to quickly do this.

Press and hold down the Shift key and then click on each of the photos in the order you want them to appear in the slide show.

Click on the Special FX gallery's tab.

Drag the Ani-Maker onto any one of the selected photos. The Animation Studio dialog will appear.

Enter a number for the delay between slides. The number will be in tenths of a second. So, to have 5 seconds between slides, enter 50.

Click OK. Preview your page and you'll see the slide show working.

We are recommending that Web Studio users not use the Slide Shows and Text Effects in the CoolStuff gallery from this point on. This is so you can transition from Java slide shows to Ani-Maker slide shows, and to Flash slide shows in the future.

A few questions:

Why don't we remove the Java slide shows from Web Studio right now?
Answer: That'd break the web sites of everyone who used slide shows.

What can we do to use Text Effects in the short term? Answer: there are some programs out there that enable you to create Flash based text effects. They are cheap and create files you can add to Web Studio 4.0..

Question: When will Web Studio have its Flash based slide shows and text effects? Answer: It won't be until next year, 2005.

...Web Studio versions know how much they cost?
When you purchase Web Studio, you buy an upgrade version, a retail, or an educational version. Each of these knows how much it costs. What does this mean to you? If you have downloaded and installed the 30-Day-Trial version of Web Studio, it thinks it is the Retail version. When you later purchase an upgrade version and register it, it will tell you you haven't paid enough money for it. This happens because it sees you've paid the upgrade price, not the retail price. The solution is to un-install the 30-Day-Trial using the Add/Remove Programs feature in the Windows Control Panels, and then download the correct version. You do this by following the To Re-Download instructions on the Downloads page on our site.

...You can add text captions and even other graphics to your thumbnails?
Thumbnails are a very popular feature in Web Studio. A thumbnail is a small image of a larger graphic that, when clicked on, opens a window with the full size graphic. Thumbnails are usually used for photographs. The big advantage is that the size of the page is smaller when using thumbnails that it would be if the page contained all of the full sized photos.

Many people have been asking for the ability to add text to a thumbnail. An example of when this is necessary is when you have a photo of a product and you'd like to put a product description and price below the photo. This is actually quite simple to do with Web Studio, but not immediately apparent.

All you have to do is create a text object that has the text you want to add to the thumbnail. Format the text as you want, and then place the text object next to the photo. Most of the time you'll see such captions below the photo, but you can put the text anywhere you like.

Once you've created your text object and have positioned it where you want, select both the text object and the photo. Do this by holding down the Shift key and while it is down, click on the photo and then the text object. Next choose Merge Selected Objects from the Object menu. This creates one graphic from the two objects. You can now drag the Thumbnail maker from the Special FX gallery onto the resulting graphic and make the thumbnail.

When a visitor to your site clicks on the thumbnail, a new browser window will open containing both the photo and the text you've added to it.
Here's an example: