[Krusty]

Hey all, just trying to gather some opinions from people who may have used Stone Studio for any length of time. I've downloaded the demo and it seems reasonably nice for what I want to do (NON-PROFESSIONAL Web pages for a personal web site). Its pretty clear to me that I don't need something as high end as the Adobe Web collection or Macromedia's web tools (well, maybe I'll get Flash later if I start getting in to it). Stone Studio seems like a nice mid-level program that would include most of the tools I would need from designing graphics to creating web pages as sites.

Anyone have any gotchas with this suite (eg. an absolutely essential function that is missing and would have to be supplemented with another product -- other than Flash, I know about that one. Oh, and I have BBEdit Lite for manually alterining any HTML that it generales). Any horrible bugs that have popped up on you ??

On the other side, any raves ?? Any especially cool thing that the Studio can do that I should make sure to try out? All in all, it seems like a pretty good bundle.-- I'm thinking it might just be the ticket.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts

[ 05-04-2002: Message edited by: Krusty ]

I recently bought Stone Studio for the same reasons: I don't need an illustration/layout app with all the whiz-bag features, and it works well. I'm using it to create a print mini-folio and full portfolio of my work, plus since it's fairly well-integrated, I'm planning on doing a major revision to my website with it. None of the stuff I've been doing is very fancy. I have only limited experience with Freehand, Illustrator, Pagemaker, etc. and have looked at Quark once or twice. So I'm not the prefect person to make a comparitive analysis among all these programs. I also tried Canvas, but found it slow, kind clumsy in OS X and I already have Photoshop in Classic. Corel didn't have a trial version of their suite, and I really wanted to get my hands dirty on the apps before I made a decision.

Create is what I'm mostly using, with some Photo-to-Web and Slice-and-Dice on the side (oh, plus Stamp-in-Stone for the downloadable PDFs I plan on adding to my site). I'm planning on having the large format porfolio work go to a printer, which means I'll be giving them .pdf files. Unfortunately, that means that some of Create's transparency features won't turn out corectly. I have to lighten images in Photoshop (actually, I'm testing TIFFany right now too), save others as .pngs and import them, which helps with the transparency issue, etc.

Overall, I like the interface, though I wish it had a zoom cursor (not just zoom buttons) and the guide-creation widgets eat some extra screen real estate, at least the horizontal one. The info panel is indespensable, and I quickly was able to make use of the resource library to create standard page layouts for my folio, CD covers, web buttons, scales, north arrows, etc. The new test styles panel is pretty good though I haven't done enough text layout to make serious use of it.

Right now, I'm starting to work with gradients/blends, and perhaps there could be more flexibilty in that department, but I've never done that kind of thing (beyond a simple linear gradient) in an illustration program before. Also, I've found that the Apple-supplied color panel is a lot more versatile than I realized at first.

Thwe web stuff seems pretty straight forward and well-organized. There's ample opportunity to do custom work in the javascript and html code, and like the illustration aspect, linking and importing stuff is easy to track and maintain.

Since I'm a pretty low-end user (but higher-end than using AppleWorks), I've fired over a few bugs and questions to Andrew Stone, who is quick to respond. That's probably the nicest part of using it: support comes directly from the Stone in Stone Design.

One feature I liked about Canvas (and Corel has this too) was its .pdf creation/export dialog. Create will save a pdf basically using the Quartz model, so there aren't any settings really. It does handle lots of file formats to import and export to, and PStill handles .eps and .ps files pretty well.

Any specific questions?

[Fink-Nottle]

Hi Krusty,

I've worked with Create quite a bit. I have a freelance business building websites etc and at one point I considered using Stone Studio as a replacement for Claris Homepage, which I was using then. I found though that the programme wasn't high end enough for my webneeds and I eventually went with GoLIve. However, I later purchased the Studio as a graphics tool and there's no doubt that as a creative tool the Stone Studio is unsurpassed. I 've used it plan my sites and then converted into GoLive for tweaking. If your needs aren't too complex then the Studio itself may be enough. Be sure not to overlap objects... you need to group them to have it output wysiwyg. Also there's no easy way to do wysiwyg forms.

As a graphics tool, Create is awesome. I use it to do graphic work and I find the imagewell is INCREDIBLY useful. You can create a single document with all the graphic used on a site... and then save it and export the graphics as needed. This is opposed to saving tens or hundreds of individual files.

The helper apps with Studio are very good too,,, I've use 'Slice and Dice', 'Phototoweb' and 'Time is Money'. All good. Finally, the support from Andrew is second to none... if I e-mail him I usually get a response within an hour. And every month or so he updates the applications and often throws in new features.

If you shoot me specific questions I'd be happy to answer anything I can.

[FXOLeary]

Create has been a lot of fun to play with and learn. I'm sorry I don't have more use for it because every time I do use it, I find something new, simple, powerful and interesting. I think I like turning things into splines the best.

I did a simple Web page with Create and am happy with how that went. I've used Homepage and Dreamweaver in the past. Create's got very little in common with those apps and it took a little while to get comfortable. In the end, for my purposes, it was a great alternative.

As folks have said, support is unparalleled. It's been interesting to witness a few exchanges (on the emailing list) between Andrew Stone and some of the heavy users. The guy's a hoot. One time someone made a suggestion for a new feature (I can't remember what it was for) and a couple days later there was a beta version available with the new feature built in. Makes for a real sense of community somehow.

I mentioned your request for opinions to the mailing list. (I hope I used the right address.) Hopefully that will get you more opinions soon.

Bottom line: buy it.

Cheers

[MsKatie]

OK, I'm a bit biased - I've used Create since the NeXT days and am still hooked. I use it for just about all of my simple word processing, all of my personal flyers and invitations (and thank you notes and other correspondences), I use it for making groovy web pages as presents for friends complete with animations and 3-d looking graphics. So I've been using it for long enough that I feel like I know it pretty well, but I'm always surprised by new features and features I didn't realize it has. The other apps in the studio bundle I'm less familiar with, aside from Photo to Web, which I use exclusively. I wouldn't bother with some immitation like iPhoto.

Create isn't like Dreamweaver or GoLive in its interface but has it's own look and feel that might take getting used to for a new user. One of my favorite tools is the "datawell" which allows you to drag images out of Create in a variety of formats. Most useful for me on a routine basis is using it in conjunction with photos - I can scale them easily in Create, crop them and drag out the jpeg into an email message for someone (like a doting grandparent!) all in a matter of seconds (no joke).

I'm a weaver and I use Create to help me design patterns which I then turn into fabric creations. I do this by playing with the pattern editor, which is a pretty cool little tool too. I can make a design and plunk it into the pattern editor, then since I work in the "real" world with yarns and looms and such, I take the image and turn it into a functioning pattern....hard to make this make much sense in words, but it works wonders for me.

It's true about Andrew Stone's responsiveness to bugs and feature requests. I should know since I've known him since long ago in the NeXT era - he's obsessed with making his apps the coolest on the market, and he's not interested in making them clones of Adobe products. One time I had a simple request for a "star" tool for use in making star patterns for my weaving. Within two days there was a beta online with MY star tool. I still think of that tool as "mine" !

Anyway, for $299 you can't go wrong with Stone Studio. There are plenty of professional designers who use it too - just check out the user feedback page at the Stone Design website. And, you can always download a free version for 30 days and give it a whirl yourself.

The stone site is: http://www.stone.com

MsKatie