Shoebox is intended mostly for software designers and developers. It is a set of tools based on Adobe Air, which helps you perform various tasks related to designing interfaces and games. In this regard, it lets you pack various images into a texture Atlas, export individual sprites from a sprite sheet or bitmap font set as well as generate font sets. Other uses of the tool include splitting PSD layers into different PNG files.
Since this is definitely not one of those apps you can use from the start without asking yourself what to do next, it is excellent there are several resources to guide you, including an online manual and various YouTube videos. What is more, there is context-sensitive help, which shows tips on the usage of every tool.
Luckily, there is a sort of dashboard from where you can access the different tools, conveniently arranged in tabs. It is good that it supports dragging and dropping the source files onto the desired feature. For instance, you can drag a file and drop it onto the Extract Sprites tool, which is in turn available from the Sprites Tab. Likewise, it is possible to simply copy an image or text to the clipboard and then click on the desired tool.
The product is highly configurable. In this regard, there are separate settings for each of the tools in the package. There are even configuration templates that do most of the job for you. Moreover, settings can be viewed in two different modes: Basic and Advanced. more
Comments