The next splash image

That last splash image was just a little too childish and I needed something a little more bold to represent the market I think this program fits in. High School, College and Adult students needing to memorize any type of information. Here is the image.

The actual drawing went something like this. I found an image of a charging elephant online and used my favorite image editing software Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (usually less than $50) to draw a black and white sketch of a charging elephant. I also recommend Gimp which is free and have used it in some of the computer classes I have taught.

I used a Wacom Intuos3 6 x 8-Inch Pen Tablet to do the actual drawing. The original image is 8x10 inches at 200dpi good for use if I ever need to do any package printing.

The charging elephant picture was placed in it's own layer and given a lot of transparency so it was just sort of an outline. A less technical trick would be to use a Lightbox. I did the tracing and added the rotated rectangle as a flashcard representation. I then got rid of the original charging elephant and selected all the black lines. I inset the selection and filled that selection with black in yet another layer. I then filled the various sections with primary colors and ran an Effects/Illumination/Sunburst effect centered on the light bulb (which was primary yellow). I then tried a ton of different trial and error effects to get the final rendering. I think the one I finished with was either Artistic/Hot Wax or Artistic/Enamel. I don't fully remember, but it took a hundered different tries. I went back and made the center of the lightbulb a lot more yellow to help the bulb stand out after one of my reviewers made that suggestion. The original drawing in the layer above this was then turned back on to give the distict black lines over the colorization.

After years and years trying to come up with a new elephant, this one was drawn in about 30 minutes and colored in about an hour.

Good Progress

I made really great progress last week on the new version. Remember, if you think you should wait to purchase because you just learned I'm working on a new version, don't. I offer free upgrades to anyone who purchased in the last 6 months and everyone else is $10. Compare that to the minimum $199 for Adobe Photoshop which seems to only be available to people who purchased on the sixth Tuesday of the previous month. The $299 price is for those who purchased on the fifth Tuesday and everyone else is full price. I spent way to much time trying to upgrade a version 4 copy of Photoshop and it was a very unpleasant experience. Dealing with Adobe always seems to been unpleasant (and very expensive) to me. Okay, I'm a little off topic.

Also, this upgrade has been in progress for at least 4 years now, but the past six months have shown that it is finally going to happen. Last week I made extremely good progress on the new edit window. Even so, don't hold your breath, I still have a lot to add. I finally saw a hint of light at the end of the tunnel last week.

Last week I added fixed card sizing. The previous version tied the size of the card to the size of the edit window. This had problems when people maximized their screens and the cards were huge. This was not a problem until they went to print and a small font on that giant card was resized to a microdot when printed on a 3x5 card. Now you can fix the card size to 3x5, 4x6, 5x7 or the existing full window size.

I'm also almost done with a system that puts ALL the information for the card on the edit window. Previously the title and category were on a separate dialog box and required a few extra clicks. Having this all on a single window will help speed the card creation process.

I changed the card sides to use tabs above the card edit area. Previously this was a pull down menu box and required two clicks to change the card side. With tabs it only requires one click.

I changed the card style choice (Honor System, Multiple Choice, True/False, Type-In and the not yet released Scrambled Multiple Choice) to use radio buttons to choose the card type. This was also a pull down menu box and now only requires one click. Every click counts and this release is going to offer a lot of stream lining.

When I get the edit window done I will post a screen shot. Then it will be on to the list window and another new feature called an image library which I can explain later.