Tomorrow I will be releasing my new app SnapShooter. It will be Twisted Ninja’s first application.
What is SnapShooter?
On MacThemesForums.net, people like to take screenshots of things (I’m sure this is true of other forums, but this was designed FOR MTF). Sometimes, those screenshots are huge. So huge that they stretch and distort the forums in your web browser. So the good people over at MTF came up with a unique idea – create “borders” for images that fit nicely into the forums, and when clicked, load to full size.
So this went on very nicely, and the people were happy. At least the people who had Photoshop, which is what was required for such a border to be applied. Even then, you have to deal with loading up Photoshop, pasting in the image, scaling it, exporting it to web, blah blah blah. And if you have a lot of different borders, you have to keep the PSDs lying around. It just took too much time and was just too much hassle. And you could only play if you had Photoshop.
SnapShooter fixes all of that. It starts up with a simple interface. Click around the table and choose a border from the thumbnailed previews. Drag an image into the full-size border. A sheet that looks suspiciously like iChat’s buddy icon sheet will let you manipulate it a bit. Then, save it as a PNG. Simple as that. You’ll probably spend less time in SnapShooter than you will waiting for Photoshop to load.
Does it use PSDs?
No. SnapShooter uses a proprietary file format to store borders. This is done for a lot of reasons. Since PSDs are so flexible and can have many, many layers, SnapShooter can never be sure of where to layer your picture in between those of the artist. SnapShooter’s file format is closed, but artists can make borders with it with my companion app, SnapShooter Builder, which I’ll also be releasing tomorrow.
Will there be a place where I can find new borders?
Yup. I’ll be hosting Borders on my site.