cybrpunk
Visitor
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Re:Download Comic Life Windows beta - 2007/05/09 11:14
Hello and thanks for creating this program for Windows. First bug is not about the program but about this forum. I typed all this up and it didn't like my Spam Code thing and when I went back like it said, it had deleted everything I typed. Seriously bad.
OK back to Comic Life. I installed and registered the program with no problems on Windows XP SP2. I've found a few problems and have a few suggestions that I hope you are willing to entertain.
When you first use the Explorer view it lists C:, Desktop, Documents & Settings but when you choose one of those options, all other previously selectable options disappear. With no navigation available, this is bad. This is an expansion of the "no other drives listed" bug. The Explorer view seems to be Thumbnail view only. This is OK although a Detail View would be nice. Either way, you really need to add in some tool-tips so that when you mouse over the thumbnails, it tells you the full file name. If you have lots of similarly named assets, this view is currently difficult to use. Please add some Right-Click functionality in the Explorer View. Being able to Copy, Paste, Create New Folder and especially Delete would be very useful. No TGA or PSD file type support, although this may be intentional. When dragging in a picture from the Explorer view, the picture is quite blurry compared to viewing it outside of Comic Life. This is even more noticeable when using line and pixel artwork which is what I was using. Details are even missing (like a few straight lines) in Comic Life bit are crisp and clear in a basic picture viewer. I tried this with JPG, GIF, TIF and BMP all at normal and then the highest quality settings and all came out the same. Blurriness in photographs were not nearly as noticable but you can still easily tell the quality is not the same in Comic Life. The same quality problems were visible when exporting to image a finished comic. This one is a dealbreaker for me, so I hope this is fixable. When dragging in pictures from the Explorer View or from My Computer the image inside Comic Life seems to be either zoomed in or zoomed out but never the original size. This seems to be fixable by either zooming in or out, but importing as it's natural size and letting us resize would be much preferred. The Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons need a field inbetween them that lists the zoom percentage amount. If you are working with pictures that may be different source sizes, we need to easily be able to know that we are zooming them all the same way. Same goes for the Bigger and Smaller buttons. Please add a field between them that shows the current font size so there is no guessing when just eyeballing the project. There doesn't seem to be any support for SHIFT or CTRL click selecting of assets in the project. I'd like to be able to CTRL-click all the speech balloons for one character and change the Style, Font, Size, etc all at once. You can't use the mouse to drag a window around multiple speech balloons unless you aren't using a background as that just ends up moving the background. Once I finished my first comic I realized I needed to move it all over to fit inside the white project frame for the export to work correctly. To do this I drug a window around everything using my mouse. I then proceeded to use the arrow keys (and then Shift+arrow keys to speed it up) to move everythig to the right and up a little. I wasn't paying attention while I was doing this and when it was finished, I realized that all the speech ballons were all way off from where they started. I started using CTRL+Z to undo ( and I am very impressed with the seemingly infinite Undo levels) and fixed the placement. I then selected all with the mouse again and then moved everything using the mouse. This time it worked just fine. If possible, please fix the keyboard controls. I use them all the time in other graphics programs to have finer control over placement.
This is all I have for right now. I plan to run this again tonight and will let you know if I see anything else weird.
Thanks,
cybrpunk
http://cybrpunk.com
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