Product Reviews

After 17 years of development, Stone Design's Create has finally hit its stride. A fraction over six months after the release of Create 13, its successor has appeared. And while you could be forgiven for expecting a modest update, Create 14 includes a host of improvements to all areas of the program.

Create has reached this point with little fanfare from designers, but it's a surprisingly powerful object-oriented vector illustration and desktop publishing program. With a full complement of Bézier tools, it enables you to mix vector and bitmap artwork seamlessly over multiple layers and pages. It provides facilities for object transparency and shadows, and its unique features include an image well that lets you translate between file formats and image types.

The most noticeable improvement in Create 14 is that it takes advantage of several features in the newly released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It's the first illustration program to include plug-ins for 10.5's Quick Look feature, so you can preview the contents of a Create document in the Finder. A side benefit of Leopard's unified slate-grey windows is that Create's document windows look much smarter than before.

Two other new features are Leopard-only. A promising Photo Browser holds images, which you add to it by dragging images or entire folders over its open window. It doesn't serve as a browser for all images on your disk - you have to add images specifically to the browser window to access them. This makes it easier to add images that you use regularly to documents, but as titles don't appear beside the image in the browser, its search field is of limited use. Create 14 on Leopard also introduces a Video Snapshot feature that lets you grab an image from an attached webcam, with full access to Leopard's new image filters and effects, and place it on the page. Practical? Probably not - but undoubtedly fun.

A measurable enhancement is the program's speed. If launching a Create document isn't twice as fast as before, it certainly feels like it. Saving files is quicker too. Credit for this can be given to the way Create files - XML documents linked to related assets and resources - are now put together. Images pasted into documents are no longer included in the central XML file, which means quicker launching. You can also opt to generate smaller files - and better responsiveness - by selecting a 'Smaller & Faster' option in the program's preferences. The

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only caveat is that if you choose this option, your files won't open in previous versions of Create. Instead you have to export the application as a pre-version 14 document. It's a trade-off that most users will be happy to make.

A second practical improvement is automatic saving - at least if you're using Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. For users of these systems, Create saves a renamed backup copy of the current document at user-defined intervals (between one and 20 minutes).

We've been fans of the way Create deals with text for a long time. It supports powerful style sheets, which you can apply to a text selection by dragging the style over it. Adding text to a document is simple, too: you can add text files by dragging them into a document from the Finder. Version 14 now offers another handy feature: non-contiguous text selection, which you use by Command-clicking discrete parts of a text box. You can even apply styles to this text by dragging a style from the Styles palette.

Improvements have also been made to the layout tools, including the introduction of alignment guides that appear when you drag one object near another. Their appearance is only fleeting - it can take a bit of fiddling to place an object accurately, but it's nonetheless a welcome addition. It's also much easier to resize multiple objects simultaneously: adjusting the dimension of one object in a group adjusts them all, while new alignment options let you space objects more accurately.

Although it is primarily a print design tool, Create can also generate web pages from a layout. Hybrid tools such as this can often produce impenetrable HTML, while the accuracy of reproduction can vary, particularly where page elements overlap. Create 14 goes some way towards solving both problems. You can create layouts governed entirely by cascading style sheets (CSS), rather than tables. This brings two practical benefits: page elements overlap happily, and with positioning information delegated to a single CSS file, the code underlying the main page is much easier to read.

Create doesn't pretend to be a direct alternative to XPress or InDesign, so feature comparisons are perhaps unfair. But while the chunky Info inspector provides a consistent way to adjust objects, it isn't quite a replacement for a Control or Measurements palette when it comes to modifying text and objects quickly. There is also limited scope for configuring PDF export, although a new menu option enables you to export to high-quality PDF.

We'd like to see further polish added to the interface. In particular, layers still don't float properly, so it's easy to lose them behind document windows. The documentation is also disappointing as it hasn't kept up with the new features.

But these are minor gripes against what is in all other respects a huge improvement to an underrated product, particularly for Leopard users. As Stone Design has also stuck to its 'free upgrades for life' policy, even if you're not using Mac OS X 10.5, this upgrade is a no-brainer.