DesktopX 2.4 Developer’s Guide
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The final option allows you to vary opacity as the object animates but we will discuss that in the
appropriate section.
Shadows and Glows
The ‘Shadow/Glow’ tab allows you to apply either a drop shadow on the object giving it the
appearance of floating above the desktop, or a glow surrounding the object.
If you click “Enabled” button you can specify four parameters to customize the shadow.
Setting the offset defines in which direction the effect goes. Setting the two offsets to ‘0’ will
create a glow, whereas non zero values will create a drop shadow in a direction dependant on the
positive or negative values.
A low 'Sharpness' value gives a crisp edges shadow whereas a high value makes it softer. The
higher the 'Darkness' value the darker the shadow will be.
You can also specify what color you would like the shadow or glow to be by clicking on the
appropriate button.
This feature can be effectively combined with shadows to create great special effects.
Color
One of the coolest features of DesktopX is the ability to change the color of things without
replacing the image. In the 'Color' tab you can adjust the objects hue (color) by selecting a value
between 1 and 255. Experiment until you find a shade you like! Setting the value to 0 will set the
object color to that of its original image.
You can further fine tune the color by tweaking its brightness and contrast across the specified
ranges.
We will come onto additional states later but note that there is a button here to quickly apply the
change you have made to all different states of the image.
Sound
The final tab that we will cover in this section is the 'Sound' tab. Here you can specify that a
sound is played when the state occurs simply by browsing to it on your hard drive. You can
Browse for or select an existing WAV or MP3 file.
Although we will discuss animation later, you can see options for looping the sound when the
state is animated. You can choose to repeat the sound once with every loop of the animation,
loop continuously irrespective of where in the animation you are, or not loop at all.
