ajbezark
User
plasqalicious
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Preliminary Thoughts & Suggestions - 2008/06/02 02:28
Hi, Plasqers -
I've been a long-time Comic Life user, and just upgraded to Leopard specifically so I could try Comic Life Magic. It's a wonderful app with much promise. So, after just a few hours of poking around, I thought I'd offer my initial comments.
STRENGTHS
- I love the snappiness of the app. I particularly like how much more "stretchy" the Lettering effects are.
- Love the ability to stretch and warp just about anything, including balloon outlines and stems.
- I like the dark gray "pro" interface - it feels like Aperture, etc.
- I love the "quick snip" feature. Combined with "Pop Out," it's a wonderful, addictive little trick.
- I can copy and paste lettering effects directly into Keynote and Pages now! Whee! (I use this as a quick cheat to make logos and titles in Keynote... but it always required a complex trip thru Illustrator first.)
WEAKNESSES
That said, the UI does feel a little undercooked in this 1.0 release. Here are a few quirks I'd like to see cleaned up in the near future:
- Documentation. CLM is a little more complex than its predecessor, so it'd be great if there was a simple tutorial video that walks thru the app's major features. (The current sales demo doesn't actually show you how to use any of the features.)
- Styles. I like the ability to quickly save/modify styles. But where is the huge list of pre-made "starter" styles we came to know and love in Comic Life? There actually seem to be quite a few styles scattered around the different templates, but there doesn't seem to be one place to view/use them all.
- Balloon/Font Styles. It seems that when I save a balloon style, it saves only the shape... but not the font. This means I have to manually change the font every time I create a new balloon.
- Balloon Word Wrap. Very weird right now. CLM breaks lines in the middle of words, apparently for no reason. It takes a bunch of balloon manipulation to get the "stranded" letters to rejoin the rest of the text.
- Image Editor. I don't mind the oversized palette (but I have a big screen). However, it would be really nice if we could resize the image frame. And is there any way to get to the image editor apart from those goofy little floating buttons around each image? Speaking of which...
- Those Goofy Little Floating Buttons Around Each Image. Apart from their being completely undocumented (it took about 20 minutes to figure out that this was the only way to get into the image editor), there's another problem: if a picture is too close to the edge of a page, the button on that side disappears completely! There should be a standard menu item -- or a toolbar button -- to launch those effects in addition to the floating buttons.
- Wandering Menus. The "Selection" menu (bottom right side of screen) has a tendency to drift off the bottom of the window, and I have to keep pulling it up. (I think this only happens when I open a new comic document or relaunch CLM.)
- Tool Tips, please! (Iconized elements like the Style tabs are really hard to figure out without some text support.) Speaking of which...
- Style Tabs. These require a lot of clicking around to format a single element. In Keynote and Pages, we can open multiple Inspectors to alleviate the problem, but there's no such option in CLM.
Whew! Guess that's enough for now. Sorry about the long post, but I'm excited by CLM and want to see it improve quickly. Keep up the great work!
Post edited by: ajbezark, at: 2008/06/02 04:43
Adam J. Bezark
The Bezark Company
www.bezark.com |
