We use Opacity for everything, everything. It's fucking fantastic. I'm torn between telling everyone how great it is, and trying to keep it my secret to give me a competitive edge. Way worth it for the expensive version.
Integrate it with Xcode and treat your vector artwork as source -- when you build the project it will spit out all the little PNG files you need at all the different sizes. Your artists just tweak the opacity files, and when you build the PNGs get made. So awesome. We had to buy an extra copy for the CI server, but it was worth it to never again need to sit around and export png files.
Plus, if you need to draw something with Quartz, you can mock it up first in Opacity, and then have it generate the source code for your drawing, which you then integrate into your class. We quickly made classes that implement dynamically blurred drop shadows, customized numeric "badges" of any size, shape and color, and so on, just by drawing the effect we wanted, generating the source code, and combining the drawing code into a custom class. So awesome. Feels like cheating. (You have to work around Quartz's lack of Unicode support, but still.)
> Integrate it with Xcode and treat your vector artwork as source -- when you build the project it will spit out all the little PNG files you need at all the different sizes
Whoa, really? Badass. How do you set this up? Have a link?
"Opacity includes opacityutil, a command line utility that can convert images between the formats supported by Opacity. You can use this functionality in Xcode to create a Build Rule that will dynamically convert .opacity images in your project to TIFF files (or any other supported format) at compile time."
>Plus, if you need to draw something with Quartz, you can mock it up first in Opacity, and then have it generate the source code for your drawing, which you then integrate into your class.
Wow, that's worth the price of admission alone. Writing drawing code by hand takes forever and is the worst kind of time sink: the almost-but-not-quite mindless kind.
Integrate it with Xcode and treat your vector artwork as source -- when you build the project it will spit out all the little PNG files you need at all the different sizes. Your artists just tweak the opacity files, and when you build the PNGs get made. So awesome. We had to buy an extra copy for the CI server, but it was worth it to never again need to sit around and export png files.
Plus, if you need to draw something with Quartz, you can mock it up first in Opacity, and then have it generate the source code for your drawing, which you then integrate into your class. We quickly made classes that implement dynamically blurred drop shadows, customized numeric "badges" of any size, shape and color, and so on, just by drawing the effect we wanted, generating the source code, and combining the drawing code into a custom class. So awesome. Feels like cheating. (You have to work around Quartz's lack of Unicode support, but still.)