First of all, I sincerely wish you are having a great holiday’s days and an amazing 2012! For me, 2011 was an interesting year, with Kwik reaching downloads that I never expected when I stated to code it. Thanks to you all, the product is maturing and (I hope) getting better and better each version. Due your support and recent comments that your apps are sometimes bigger than you expected (especially for Android markets), I decided to give you a end of year gift with version 1.8.1 (just uploaded): a new feature under the Tools panel, called Export layer as JPG. Any time you have a layer that does not…
Archives for 2011
Welcome, bienvenido, bienvenu, willkommen Kwik 1.8!
As announced last week in the newsletter, version 1.8 is live now! As part of my commitment to all of you, I have announced the features and even blogged about some of them. Here goes the final list of new resources you have now into Kwik: Multi-language: The past blogs showed how to use the new feature. This is a major one, requested since the beginning of Kwik. It took a while to me to figure out how to design it in an easier way (please send me your feedback) but I am pretty confident this is as simple as possible to do in Photoshop; Canvas interaction: The simplest way…
Creating a multi-language project with Kwik – Part 3
In the past tutorials, we checked how to configure a multi-language project and how to setup images and audio. In this posting, I will cover how to defined animations and buttons. Working with animations First of all, I created a simple linear animation for the kwkwitch layer (the witch in black, which needs to appear only in the English version of the storybook. These are the parameters I set: Still in the same layer, I used the Tools->Set language to a layer button and created a new group: After that, I selected the layer witchspa (the witch in white, to show up only in the Spanish version). Without creating a…
Creating a multi-language project with Kwik – Part 2
In the past tutorial, I setup the project for a multi-language experience. In this posting, I will teach how to configure images (layers) and audio to just show up when the corrected language is selected. Adding audio files to the project In page2, there is a line of text (for each language) that needs to be associated with an audio file. In order to enable multi-language to audio, name it audio with the same name. For example, if you have an audio called narration.mp3, name it eng_narration.mp3 for the English version and spa_narration.mp3, for the Spanish version. After renaming my audio files to the correct setup, I am ready to…
Creating a multi-language project with Kwik – Part 1
Multi-language ability is one of the top requests from (mostly) international Kwik users. As the development goes on for version 1.8, I would like to provide this tutorial, enabling the interested ones to get ready for this new useful resource (design once, have it in multiple languages with a few clicks). Remember this is not a final version yet so, minor changes may appear before the beta-testing and final version launch. At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to have a project like this: Analyzing the project First I created a regular Book project and designed page1 like this: Checking the LAYERS panel you see: kwkcover is…
Understanding the Sync feature
Few weeks ago I blogged about how to use the Sync feature (new in version 1.7). Since them I got several feedbacks for improvements, which will come with release 1.8 (at this moment a few users are testing it). They are: better highlight (not blinking as the current version anymore); option to define if the language used reads from left to right (default) or right to left (this is critical for languages like Arabic and Japanese, for example); I would like to take the opportunity also to clarify a few things while using this feature: the text layer is exported as text, not as an image. It means that the…
Interview with “Sparky” Mark Newell
You probably have seen (and I hope bought) it already. “Sparky, the Shark” is in my opinion the most amazing app made with Kwik so far (I hope other authors don’t be offended with my humble comment here but, I really think Mark and his team nailed it). Saying that, of course I need to chat with Mark, from Biscuit Interactive in Australia. Mark is also kindly preparing another guest post with a few tips and tricks from his arsenal. Alex) Tell a little bit about you and your company Biscuit Interactive® is a design, web and interactive studio located in Australia, 1hr from Melbourne, owned and operated for over…
What is coming?
Few weeks ago I released another survey to understand Kwik’s users and their most required needs. Lots of things have changed since the previous research in August. For example, now, almost 90% of the users are using the plugin for more than a month. Almost 27% of them are using Kwik to build an app (not a storybook). 44% are not coming from Ansca’s premises anymore (the news are spreading from word of mouth), and most of the users are from outside the United States. Path animation is the favorite current feature and several apps are going to be released in the next weeks. However, most people probably want to…