Glyph Designer Submitted
So tonight is the night. After weeks of coding, bug fixing, testing, more bug fixing, polishing and then a little bug fixing just for the hell of it, Glyph Designer is being submitted to the Mac App store.
Tom and I are really pleased with v1.0 and hope you guys enjoy it as well. We’re not sure how long approval is taking at the moment on the app store, but as soon as we hear anything we will of course post about it.
We are just finishing off the website for Glyph Designer which we will again post about, but for now I’ve posted a video that I created that demos v1.0 of Glyph Designer.
We hope you enjoy it
Mike & Tom
30 Comments
mike on January 16th, 2011
Thanks RogerDoger.
Great question on kerning. Kerning has almost caused me to loose my hair. We’ve been struggling to get decent kerning info out of fonts without using the normal OS X layout features which don’t lend themselves to our needs. It’s not something we have given up on by any stretch and we have more ideas to try, but it didn’t make it into v1.0.
This is something that we will be working to get added to the next version.
Mike
P.S. and there was me hoping no one would notice ;o)
George Sealy on January 16th, 2011
Looks like a great tool. Just a couple of comments:
- Will this be App store only? Given a choice, I’d rather put more money in your pockets than Apple…
- In preview mode, it’d be nice to be able to drag and drop an image behind the text, and possible drag the text around a bit. This would allow the user to test the font over an in-game screenshot, for example.
mike on January 17th, 2011
Hi George
Totally with you on the money ;o) but for the moment we are going App store only to see how things go. We will review this going forward.
It’s actually spooky how you mention the screen shot and moving text around in preview mode. This is something Tom and I spoke about this evening and it will be going into the very next release.
Mike
David on January 17th, 2011
Looks really good Mike, hope apple get it approved really fast. I can’t wait to get my hands on GD.
Maybe you could add a feature to add/read gradients from photoshop, pixelmator, fireworks or any other popular App in a later update.
Extrude would also be nice or any 3d-ish feature.
Be able to load a background .png file so you would get to see what it really looks like.
Anyways, awesome work!
David
Tweets that mention Glyph Designer Submitted | 71² - The ramblings of two 30-something developers -- Topsy.com on January 17th, 2011
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Nick. Nick said: RT @mikedaley: Glyph Designer submitted. Going to bed now, but check out the video at http://t.co/MtZ6OZC [...]
Thomas on January 17th, 2011
Great. I will use this for our fonts in the coming ZombieSmash Campaign 2 Update. Bye bye Hiero…
mike on January 17th, 2011
Hi Thomas
Both Tom and I are big fans of ZombieSmash. It would be great to see Glyph Designer used in your new campaign :o)
Mike
jboydon on January 17th, 2011
Hi Mike, that is a very good tool with nice and usable GUI.
Did you use some custom GUI Frameworks (like BWToolkit for example) or only Cocoa Frameworks?
regards
boydon
–
John Boydon
mike on January 17th, 2011
Hi John, thanks for the comments.
We did use BWToolkit for the bottom bar on the GUI, that was all. The rest of the GUI uses just Cocoa. We created the gradient controls and shadow control ourselves, using the standard Cocoa API :o)
Mike
Sumaleth on January 19th, 2011
Looks great. Impressive attention to detail.
It’ll be nice to uninstall Hiero. :)
Features to consider for future versions might be some more filter-like effects; noise, bevel, blur, and so on. And support for bitmap fonts, with anti-aliasing on/off.
Rowan.
Mic on January 19th, 2011
Not so sure about the font list tableview having a background colour … especially that background colour.
What lead you to make such a decision?
mike on January 19th, 2011
Hi Mic
It’s funny you bring that up. Tom and I went round and round in circles on the font list, trying all sorts of different colours as well as just white. In the end, the texture we are now using, which is actually a parchment texture, seemed to fit OK and seeing as the app is about fonts and glyphs, parchment seemed to fit.
As always, we’ll continue to review the design and take feedback from users to evolve and improve it over time. Honest feedback such as this is always appreciated :o)
Mike
CC on January 19th, 2011
Looks good; looking forward to the release on the App Store.
Some suggestions for future versions:
* I’d like to see the outline control allow you to choose between an inner, center, and outer outline. In the demo you show, the @ symbol looks pretty bad because the Arial glyph for @ has thinner lines than the rest of the font, and so, applying an outline almost cuts the glyph body off in places. An outer stroke would avoid this problem.
* I’d like to see an “emboss” option, so that you could add light strokes along the “top” of the glyph (relative to a light source), and shadows along the “bottom” of the glyph.
* I’d like to see shadow and glow separated out as separate options, since you might want to have, say, a slight inner glow but also a drop shadow.
* Allow us to add, remove, and reorder the effects, including multiple versions of a particular type of effect. For instance, you might want both an inner and outer glow. Or an inner glow and a drop shadow. Or an inner stroke and outer stroke. Or two outer strokes of different widths. Or two outer glows of two different colors. Etc.
* And finally, I’d like the ability to export a “reference image” that simply shows the rectangular areas for the different glyphs. This would be extremely useful for post-processing the glyphs to, say, add our own dingbats or effects, while making sure they conform to the .fnt file exported.
Good luck on the app; hope sales make the effort worthwhile.
mike on January 19th, 2011
Thanks for the great feedback CC. This is helping solidify ideas we talked about during development. Your suggestions fall in line with where we want to take Glyph Designer. We are also working on the ability to add CoreImage filters to glyphs as well, which we think would be a nice feature.
We are also hoping that GD does well. It does take time to create something polished but it’s important to use as those of the kind of apps we like using. If its as popular as Particle Designer then I see a good future for GD in terms of features :o)
Mike
cybergreg on January 21st, 2011
Mike – do you have an email sign-up or notification once GD is ready? If not, why not? :-)
Thanks
Greg
mike on January 21st, 2011
Hi Greg, great question with a bad answer. The answer being no, we’ve not set anything up. Too busy working on the code and not enough time spent on things like that, which is an opportunity lost :o(
We will be announcing it on the blog and in the comments.
Note to self, spend more time working out marketing and communications strategies….
Mike
cybergreg on January 21st, 2011
No worries Mike – know the feeling… I’ve started following you so IF I remember to open up Tweetie I’ll hopefully catch the announcement.
Any feel at all for the approval cycle times for the Mac store?
:-)
mike on January 21st, 2011
I was hoping for approval by end of today, fingers crossed, otherwise I’m thinking about middle of next week e.g. about 7 working days. I’ve not seen anything which suggests that it’s longer.
Just eager for it to become available now. You know what it’s like, We’ve been knee deep in GD for about 3 months and just want everyone else to play with it now :O)
Mike
cybergreg on January 21st, 2011
Very cool – good luck in the store, although I can’t imagine this not doing well.
I have been looking / waiting for a Hiero replacement and GD is like Hiero on steroids! SWEET!
mike on January 21st, 2011
Thanks :O)
We have a bunch of other features to add around how you can edit the glyphs appearance as well as importing your own graphics to use as glyphs.
Last night I managed to also get Kerning working as well, so that will be appearing in the first update once GD is live on the app store. It’s something we know people want but has been a pig to get done, but working now :O)
Mike
Anders on January 24th, 2011
This is awesome! Will there be bundled source code with the app as with the particle designer? Is the bitmap font class stand-alone or does it require your image class from the tutorials? I’m just asking as I have modified mine rather heavily.
How much are you asking for the app?
tsaintthomas on January 26th, 2011
Dang, I remember reading about GD awhile back and I just hit a link with this video (and watched the whole thing) thinking “I’m buying this the second the video is over”) is it out yet???!! :)
mike on January 26th, 2011
LOL, it’s still awaiting approval on the Mac App Store, but I’m working with Tom right now on making it available on the Glyph Designer website. All being well it should be available in the next hour or so at glyphdesigner.71squared.com :O)
Mike
tsaintthomas on January 26th, 2011
I’m totally sold. Just finished the book, and I’m gonna pick up PD as well. You guys rock! So ready to hit delete on Hiero…
Zebulon on February 3rd, 2011
Thanks guys! Great work! Byebye Hiero :) This is exactly what I need right now!
Neural_Echo on February 13th, 2011
Glyph Designer is absolutely brilliant!
I was going to wait for it to go live in the App Store, but couldn’t hold out any longer, so I bought it through your site :).
I haven’t tried doing this yet, but is it permissible to install the same licence of Glyph Designer on an iMac and MacBook at the same time?
Kudos 71^2, you’ve created a first class App!
Adiós Heiro!
mike on February 13th, 2011
Hi Neural_Echo
Sorry about the delay to the App Store. We have had a few issues but working to get it up ASAP.
As for the license file, you can load it on as many machines as you need. The only restriction is that only one instance on one machine it used at a time :o)
Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad you like the app and hope it helps you with your projects.
Cheers
Mike
miiifan on March 16th, 2011
Hello! Sorry if this has been mentioned elsewhere… but any word on the Mac App Store release? And are there plans to release the other 71squared apps to the Mac App Store?
Cheers,
Guest on October 11th, 2011
Hello Mike
Any news for Glyph Designer or Particle Designer availability on Mac App Store?
It’s been long time. I’m waiting for it.
Regards
RogerDoger on January 16th, 2011
This is looking amazing, I can’t wait to use it. I’ve been putting off adding some fonts to my game waiting for Glyph Designer.
One thing you don’t mention is kerning. I hope that it’s supported. Most of the fonts I need require kerning to look nice and the Angle Code file format supports it along with BMFont.
Super job!