|
and a couple of tips from experience |
| |
2.1. CARD LAYOUT
2.2. FILE SIZE
2.3. STACK ORGANISATION
2.4. USING LINKS with mother cards:
2.5. STAND-ALONE STACKS UNSTABLE?
2.6. LOCKED STACKS
Breakable locks? - Navigating locked stacks - Locked and Stand-alone
Simple Card centres anything you paste in, right? So what if I want some asymmetrical layout, or to position a small item in one corner, for example?
You can drag the picture after you've pasted it by holding down the option key.
[SimpleCard Manual | Pictures | Placing Pictures]
I notice that sometimes if I paste a PICT-image into SimpleCard, it comes up at the bottom of the screen rather than in the middle - any ideas why that might be?
Perhaps you are selecting some small object at the top of the page in addition to the object you are selecting.
I thought that the size of the card in bytes was related to the area it covers: but adding a background - transparent or coloured - only added 100 bytes to the card size - is that consistent? Does it mean that there's no pixel-by-pixel information to be recorded, just "x-y-z space of xx.yy.zz colour", so it takes up rather few bytes?
That depends on which application you are copying from. SimpleCard uses Mac Pict-files which can contain both object graphics and pixel graphics (and also JPEG-compressed pictures). It all depends on what the program you are copying the picture from puts into it.
(David's thoughts)
I was making some changes to cards, by copying the picture from SimpleCard - text boxes and drawing graphics - and pasting it back into ClarisWorks, where they were made: when I pasted the result back again into SimpleCard, having altered some of the items but not all of them, I saw that the card had doubled in size. It seems that when you copy from SimpleCard, text comes back as a picture sometimes - though I'm not sure when it does and when it doesn't. But at least I've learnt to ungroup everything, check - by clicking and resizing - that words really are still in a text object, and redoing them if they've become pictures...
(David's thoughts)
I copied a JPEG graphic from the Photoshop window, and pasted it into a ClarisWorks drawing document - 69K:
I inserted the same image via the ClarisWorks File menu, so that the program picks the JPEG up from the hard disc and converts it to 'Picture' - 5K.
Similarly, when I'd pasted a page which included a 5K image into SimpleCard, and copied it back to correct something, the image was suddenly - and silently - 75K.
So it's worth keeping an eye on card size when you're in 'edit' mode, since it can mean you can get 5 or 10 times more cards into your stack for the same space.
I suppose it's obvious, but I had to work it out - you said "put mother cards at the front to make things faster", and "a locked stack always starts at the first card" - so I guess it means you put mother cards after the first card if you're going to lock the stack, and give a link from the first card to jump over them...
That's right. Actually putting the mother cards first may not increase the speed much unless the stack is very large.
When you use a mother card which has a link, the link is included in the daughter card... but if, on the daughter card, you cover the mother card's link with a new link, it overrides the mother card's link just for that daughter card - right?
Yes, if it is positioned at the same location.
I made some changes to a stand-alone stack and it didn't stand alone any more - what happened?!
If you save [changes to] a stand-alone document it will become an ordinary document. This is a bug that will be fixed later on.
[For the time being, you can save your changed stack as a stand-alone under the same name but in a new place - on the desktop for example - and then drag it to the right folder to replace the old stack]
I understand that "There is no way to unlock a stack once it has been locked... Once you have locked a stack it cannot be changed by anyone": but then I read "...a computer-savvy user could break the lock" - how's that?
Ordinary users could not force the lock, therefore they should be careful about when to lock their stacks. But they should on the other hand not trust the lock to keep corporate secrets, because a computer-savvy user could break it if he really wanted to.
I made a simple sequence of pictures, and locked them without making any links, thinking there would be a simple way of navigating straight through - but there isn't is there??!!
No, there isn't. The reason is that sometimes you create a stack where you do not want the user to be able to walk straight through all the cards in sequence. For example an adventure game stack.
I'd like a stack which is both locked and stand-alone. But if make it stand-alone first, and then lock it, saving the change will mean that it no longer is stand-alone [Q.2.5]: whereas if I lock it first, I can't then change it to a stand-alone... Is there a way out of this maze?!
(David's thoughts)
When you lock it, the change is only stored in current memory, and you can still make changes to it while it's there - so you save that version of it as stand-alone, and give it a new location on your hard disc: it's after that that you can't change it again.
Remember to save an unlocked copy before you lock...
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|