Rage MapDesign: Full Review and Giveaway
Posted by Daniel Greg on 11/29/07 in Development, Featured, Giveaways, Graphics, Internet, Web
Image maps. We have all seen them dotted around the net. If you are a Facebook user you will be more than familiar with “tagging” people in photos. That is a particularly clever form of image mapping.
Essentially image mapping is adding different links to different parts of an image that you select, which link to something relevant. For example, if there is a particular building in an image you could make it so when someone clicks it, it takes the user to the building’s website.
However, to accomplish the effect, you need to be a bit of a wizard with HTML/Javascript. This is the problem: it is essentially a very visual task so it’s much harder to accomplish through code than say a graphical editor. RAGE MapDesign is such an editor, and it does the job beautifully. Its best feature is its simplicity; here is the main interface window and its hovering inspector:
As you can see it’s a simple toolbar based design and I can find no fault with its interface. The inspector is a great way to add links to your shapes as well as effects, although the effect choices are limited to highlight and raising a picture. There is a nice preview button that, when pressed, shows a dynamic preview of what your image map would look like in a browser, which gives you some reassurance that the end product is what you are expecting.
I have a couple of gripes with the shape editor, like how just clicking somewhere with one of the tools selected adds a tiny polygon as opposed to ignoring it until it is dragged, but this is minor. Any complaints are more than made up for by the outstanding export feature which allows you to export the map with a variety of image types and qualities as well as a choice between basic HTML or a hybrid of HTML and CSS (if you have effects on your map you need CSS).
Again, simple but functional, as well as flexible. With this you can place the map anywhere you like on your site. Overall, MapDesign is an outstandingly simple program that does one thing, and does it really well; I am struggling to fault it. If you need an image map created, or think that it would make a good addition to your site, have a look at MapDesign; you may just find you can have it done in 5 seconds flat.
MapDesign is shareware and available for $19.95 at the RAGE software website. The good news is that 5 of you lucky readers won’t have to part with your cash as RAGE has very kindly given us 5 licenses to give away.
To enter all you have to do is comment on this post with a feature that you would most like to see in RAGE MapDesign. Entries will close at 10PM EST on 5th December. Good Luck!
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