We are delighted to offer a beta of our upcoming Comic Life Magiq 1.0.3 update.
It has numerous stability and significant performance improvements over 1.0.2.1 - so we would love previous users to download and let us know if you come across any issues.
A free update for Comic Life Magiq is available for all users.
Identical to 1.0.2c in all but version number, which has been changed to ensure 1.0.2 users are made aware of the 1.0.2c update via the menu: Comic Life Magiq > Check for Updates...
This 1.0.2.1 update is recommended for all 1.0.2 users and fixes a serious saving issue introduced in 1.0.2 that caused images to be left out of the document.
If you're already running 1.0.2c (v10939) you can "Skip This Version".
Head to the plasq downloads page to get the 1.0.2.1 update or update from within Comic Life Magiq.
Comic Life is great for sharing those funny little moments from school, in the office, or while on worldwide progressive-rock-legends tours.
Robert Fripp and Tony Levin have been sharing the day-to-day stories of touring within one of the most influential prog rock bands - on King Crimson’s 40th Anniversary Tour.
Ever wished you had the fun of Comic Life handy at all times? Ever been out at a party, family gathering or on public transport and wished you could add your 'comic touch' to a photo? Now you can!
We're giggling with glee to announce Comic Touch for iPhone and iPod Touch. Add various speech balloons and captions to your photos. Choose a fun special effect to warp and bend your family and friends, then email the results to them!
Give me some advice here, guys ... - 2005/04/20 19:18Robert and the crew,
I'm starting out on what will be quite a large project with Comic Life, and I'd like to get some advice on the best way to handle a few things, before I get myself into 'trouble'.
The project is an extensive tutorial - the same kind of thing as the one I showed you last week - but quite a bit longer, and with a difference - it will be published in a print version as well as on the web.
It will contain well over a hundred images, and the start point for these will be 1.3Mb jpegs from my digital camera. Considering that I want the best resolution possible in the .pdf output file, I'll use these images 'as is' rather than make reduced resolution 72dpi versions. So of course, the .comic file is going to get rather 'heavy', to say the least.
I have plenty of memory in my machine, but is this going to cause any problems with the software? Can it handle files this large, or am I going to find that things get slower ... and slower ... and slower ... as the numbe of pages increases?
Re:Give me some advice here, guys ... - 2005/04/20 22:33Hi Dave,
It should be fine as long as you have plenty of RAM. When making changes Comic Life only redraws the current page so the number of pages you have should not affect performance. As you work through the project Comic Life builds in memory low-res versions of the images you use so that redrawing them when they're moved on the page is as fast as possible (note that these low-res version is rebuilt whenever an image is resized). As in many applications these days lots of RAM will help if you're making a bunch of pages so that cached images will not be swapped to disk by the system which will slow things down a lot.
Coming in 1.0.1 is the ability to drag individual pages from 1 comic to another so you could build up the project in smaller pieces and then drag them over to a final comic for publication - but that might be more laborious actually (for a very large comic!).
So I guess my advice is still: it should be fine Dave.
Re:Give me some advice here, guys ... - 2005/04/20 23:05Robert wrote: So I guess my advice is still: it should be fine Dave.
I've run up a short version with a couple of sample pages; Comic Life seems to handle it OK, although it works a bit more slowly than usual, to be expected.
What is disturbing though, is the export. The .comic file is 8.3Mb (6 images on two pages), but when I do a 'Print to .pdf' the resulting file is more than 64Mb ... !!
Re:Give me some advice here, guys ... - 2005/04/20 23:47Hi Dave,
My theory on that is that the PDF file is embedding uncompressed TIFF images (and it's using PDF clipping so the full images are in there!). I searched the web and Mac OS X Hints had a tip for reducing PDF file size by using the ColorSync options in the Print Dialog and choosing Reduce File Size as the Quartz Filter.
However my tests here indicate that this seems to harm the quality of the resulting PDF file - gradient fills for example disappeared! And it looked like the image quality went way down too!
1.0.1 should be coming out today and that will have 300 dpi TIFF (LZW compressed) export which should be much smaller than the PDF file you're getting.
Re:Give me some advice here, guys ... - 2005/04/21 00:05Robert wrote: 1.0.1 should be coming out today and that will have 300 dpi TIFF (LZW compressed) export which should be much smaller than the PDF file you're getting.
Re:Give me some advice here, guys ... - 2005/04/21 01:29Robert wrote: 1.0.1 should be coming out today and that will have 300 dpi TIFF (LZW compressed) export which should be much smaller than the PDF file you're getting.
