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Issue 6.5

FEATURE

Picture Packer

An easier way to embed graphics in your REALbasic projects

Issue: 6.5 (July/August 2008)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 19,221
Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 6508
Resource File(s):

Download Icon 6508.zip Updated: 2008-07-01 11:42:38

Related Web Link(s):

http://developer.chaoticbox.com/
http://www.truenorthsoftware.com/Realbasic/FormattedText.html

Excerpt of article text...

Recently I was working on a personal project that included lots of pictures (icons and other graphics). Because I wasn't sure what I was doing, I first created temporary placeholder graphics. I figured it would be an easy matter to replace them with the real graphics later. Boy, was I wrong!

As I got into the project, I realized the icons needed to support transparency, which meant I had to save a separate mask file for each graphic as REALbasic can't import pre-masked pictures. Masks doubled the number of pictures in the project. Later, I kept thinking of additional graphics I needed. Each additional graphic needed to be dragged into my project file (along with its mask) and I had to add code to apply the mask to the first graphic to create the final masked picture object for use in my project. That was a lot of busy work and every time I made changes a lot of it had to be redone.

Throughout this project, for various reasons (most of them stupidity and short-thinking on my part), I had to completely redo my graphics several times. As I updated the graphics, I grew extremely frustrated with picture management. For instance, renaming or moving pictures broke REALbasic's link to them. Couldn't there be an easier way?

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.