You Can’t Fire Me, I Don’t Work In This Van

Gluestick 1.1 is the next free update to Gluestick we’re working on. It’s probably about a month away, but we’re already made substantial headway on it.

One feature that has been requested is the ability to change the transparent color of an image. This is helpful for dealing with images that come with some sort of background, like JPG’s that have a white background. We’ve already written some custom CoreImage code that does this, and we’ll be integrating it into Gluestick 1.1.

The second thing we’ve been working on is AppleScript/Automator support. This is one of those obvious things that just didn’t make it into 1.0.

Another issue we’re working on addressing is bringing in images with different aspect ratios into Gluestick. When you use a template, you can replace images in the composition by dragging a new image onto the appropriate layer in the layer list. This works great if the original image and the replacement image have the same aspect ratio, if you don’t, there is some awkward stretching. This can make things rough if you want to do something like badging folders with pictures from iPhoto. To address this, we’re adding a sheet that drops down when the new image has a different aspect ratio. It will let you size to fit, or adjust the bounds of the layer to the right aspect ratio.

Which also reminds me. We’re adding support for proportional scaling of images in layers.

I’m also looking at the bundled templates. In 1.1 we’re going to push user created templates more. User created templates are available in 1.0, but they aren’t well documented, and you can’t add user created templates to the templates menu. All the templates in Gluestick are also icon related. I’ll be adding some more templates for more vanilla tasks, like framing photos.

I’d just like to thank everyone for holding on through 3 updates this week on Gluestick, plus the registration system being temporally down. I’m very pleased at the response and the download numbers on Sparkle and other locations. It’s been a success, considering there has been zero marketing effort on Gluestick. But, we’re already hard at work on the next version, which will be a free update, but won’t be shipping for a bit (more on that next post).

The icns export added in 1.0.3 has a special feature I just wanted to write about real quick. It’s something that we had identified as something we wanted to be part of Gluestick from the very beginning, we just didn’t get a chance to throw the switch until 1.0.3.

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The registration system is now working. The delay had to do with getting Kagi’s servers to talk to our server, but it’s all fixed now!

Some of you may have noticed Gluestick has been released today. The registration server is running a bit behind, I apologize in advance. We’re working with Kagi to get it up.

In the meantime Gluestick runs perfectly fine in unregistered mode. Enjoy!