| Jacquelin Vanderwood March 15, 2001  Gliftic 2 is a tile maker standalone program, a very easy and engaging one to use. I sat for quite a long time playing with the tile maker features to see what variety I could come up with--the variations are endless. This program is so easy to learn and use that you'll be an expert in no time. The two blue buttons in the upper left corner are Total Experimentation and Tickle Me. Total Experimentation will give you unexpected results each time. Tickle Me will take the tile you have made and rearrange it while keeping the basic color scheme and design. Form dialogue box, when selected, gives you three choices: Full Auto which gives the program full command of the design, Auto Settings allows you to select various designs such i.e. Grid of Polygons, Paisley, Stripes, Trellis, and so on. Tickle and Set has a popup dialogue box with options for adjusting horizontal, radius, number of sides, angle, check and grid, and vertical. The next dialogue box, Color Scheme, just below the first one in the upper left corner, again gives you the three main options of Full Auto, Auto Settings, and Tickle and Set. The selections include: Colors from an image, HSV selected colors, and Random colors. These choices allow you to stick with the colors you have chosen, or you can easily change them with Fix and Vary Colors. Actually, you can vary the colors anyway you want, whether to keep them the same or form new ones. The last box in the left hand side is the Interpretation feature. Again, as with the other boxes you have Full Auto, Auto Settings, and Tickle and Set. In the dropdown box there are selections such as i.e. Tipsy, ZigZag, Arabesque, etc. All of these design categories allows you to keep the artwork you have created but gives you the capability of redefining how the design will look. So if you have a square for instance, you can give that square a zigzag look, or an Arabesque look. The boxes on the left hand side from start to finish have three steps: 1) design, 2) color, and 3) modify. You can have the program draw the picture for you by telling it to Draw me a picture! Or, use the Wizard to generate the tiles for you. 
 
The polka-dot icon on top is the Quality, Size, Tiling selection which when clicked will bring up the dialogue box below. You can pre-define how much tiling you want, the size you want, and image quality. The dropdown boxes have various selections to choose from. 
The male/female icons at the top of the program allows you to paste the mother image as color scheme, paste the mother image as a new sequence, or merge two different tiles. 
And finally, by pressing the icon with the 3 little funny boxes in them, the Image Sequence Thumbnails dialogue box will popup up. You can have up to 100 tiles to choose from. Just click the arrow to see your designs. 
If you're interested in using your own predefined designs or photos, etc., just press Control-V and paste into the program. When saving you are given five options: BMP, TGA, JPG, PCX, and PNG. To see a variety of designs you can make with this program, check out their website at www.GLIFTIC.com The program is easy to learn and can give a wide variety of tiles to work with. You can even create animations with them. Because I have a fast machine, the tile creation goes fairly quickly, but my concern is that people with less energetic machines may have to wait and wait the tile creation process. I would also like to see the artwork for the buttons on top reworked for a more professional appearance. They really don't represent the features they are highlighting. It's a good program with a future. Just needs some refinement. System Requirements Pentium PC with Windows 95 through 2000 including NT and ME Copyright 2001, J. Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved |
