July 7th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
After using WebAssist’s Menu Writer for a couple months now, I’ve learned through practice that the program likes to get hung up on itself from time to time.
It doesn’t ever seem to recover. 
Since the program has no save button, you have only one choice to end a hang.
Close the program and lose your work.
However, if you want to curb your work practices to fit with the tool, there is a goal that you can shoot for when using this prima donna software program.
Race through your menu creation and hit the finish button. Once you finish you can not edit the menu again (that will screw things up seriously, even though they make it appear that you can edit menus through the program, you have to go into the menu.php file generated by the program and edit menus the old fashioned way in html and css).
Tip for Tempermental Tool!
You can however, save your current menu as a new preset, just before you hit the finish button.
Then you can delete that actual menu file set that is generated, and start what menu writer will believe to be a new menu, choose your newly saved preset, and pick up the pieces of work where you left off.
Repeat this as often as it takes to get your menu right.
Its a pain in the whazzoo, but until they come up with a more stable version, a save button, or an option to edit menus from the program, I think this is your only choice.
July 3rd, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
I have been playing with a Menu creation tool from Web Assist for a month or two now. I initially bought it hoping to find a solution, but rapidly learned that it was not a solution, just a tool, which would require my own genius to figure out a solution.
Since then I have made a good deal of progress learning how to apply the tool to various tasks, but was stumped today on a problem when I realized that the menu tool seems to have a natural limit at about 7 menu items or horizontally about 750 pixels give or take 50 pixels.
I had hoped to create a lengthy menu, with drop down buttons below it, but the 8th menu item wrapped down below the first so the drop down menu displays behind that last menu button.
The problem is with this tool, is that there does not seem to be a setting to expand the dimensions of the menu, or set a contingency for browser windows capable of handling say 800 - 1200 pixels of width.
Now I do realize that I’m dealing with a tool and not a solution, so I have been deep into the css trying to find the point at which this is set, however, since the css is auto configured for me with the tool, I can’t find the point at which this is controlled, as such I’m stuck like a person trying to mount an old fashioned TV to the wall with a plasma tv mount.
It just doesn’t work when you have the wrong tool for the job. 
I did find however, that if I change the pixel width of the individual buttons to something smaller (moved it down from 100 pixels down to 80) then the buttons all would fit on the same line.
Now in my particular effort, this worked as the text still fit on buttons of 80 pixels of width, but if the buttons had been larger this could have been a problem.
January 28th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
One of my least favorite tasks to do when creating a website is to generate an icon. Icons are those little 16 x 16 bit images that appear next to a URL in a browser address bar or these days with tabbed browsing the icon also appears next to the page title name in the tab, just to the left.
Example of Address Bar with Icon
Example of Tab with Icon
Now, let me just say right off the bat, that I suck at creating icons for websites. That said a bad icon can sometimes be better than no icon at all.
So here are a couple tools that might help you create better looking icons than I can create.
- EasyApps
- PixelToolBox
I have been using PixelToolBox for about a year now and you can tell by the results above that I am not terribly great with the tool. I did find EasyApps a little easier. With EasyApps, I was actually able to create an icon with Illustrator and then copy the image into EasyApps, where it is converted into a pixelated icon.
Best of luck, this is just one area where I can never seem to get it right, but I do wish you the best with your own efforts. Every time I give this a try it makes me want to pack web design in and go install TV’s or tv mounts or something.
