As of right now, build 38 of our favorite online design application is online! Build 38 further improves delicious:designer with these features:

• A “saving your art” progress bar, giving you much more valuable feedback, basically letting you know that Yes, your art has been saved.
• An artboard size tool allows you to change the pixel size of your finished file.
• Change your embed preferences to allow people to either create a new design off your embedded artwork, edit and overwrite the original design, or not allow them to edit it at all. These can be set across all your designs, or on an art-by-art basis.
• You can now browse through your artwork by tags.
• We’ve improved the bitmap rendering in order to reduce jaggies on rotated images.

And many other minor interface tweaks to make your world a little more delicious.

So, what are you waiting for? Start designing!

Within the delicious:suite I often have the need of calling a function at an interval. But I need a two step timer to call that function at a slower interval the first few times, and then call it at a faster interval.

I wrote a custom class to mimic the Flash ActionScript 2 built in setInterval() and clearInterval() functions, but with the addition of this two-step timer. The sample swf demoed here shows my stepper that increments a number up and down. When you press and hold either arrow button the number increments slowly for the first 10, and then increments faster until you release the button. Another example of this class in action is the nudge function in the delicious:designer — the user can nudge art objects using the arrow keys. The first nudge occurs at a long interval, and then, if the user continues holding the key down, the nudge continues at a faster interval.Here is sample ActionScript 2 code showing how simple it can be to create a double interval function call. This example will call the function myFunction 10 times every 200 milliseconds. Then it will call the function myFunction every 50 milliseconds until the user clears it.

import mx.utils.Delegate;
import delicious.doubleInterval;
intervalNumber = doubleInterval.setDoubleInterval( Delegate.create( this, myFunction ), 200, 10, 50);

For more advanced uses you can also pass parameters to the function called on the interval. The class can be downloaded here, and the documentation can be viewed here.

Build 37 of the most delicious:designer around will be released by Friday, and this version has some rather impressive new features we’re really excited about.

• By popular demand, you can now set the size of your embedded artwork.
• Add a title, description and searchable tags to your artwork.
• A cleaned-up interface uses reworked tool palettes to give you improved control while sacrificing far less screen real-estate. Trust us, you’ll notice it when you see it.
• Help tips within the designer give you valuable feedback and information about selected tools and objects.
• A new Tips and Tricks section of our website contains verbose tutorials about the designer.

Also, we’re using some of Mark James’ fabulous Silk icons for many elements, so it should be a bit easier on the eyes.

Build 36 of the delicious:designer is rather special — it is to include one of the most important (and most requested) missing tools — Arrange. As of Monday, June 4, Users will be able to arrange their selection up, down, to front, or to back. Build 36 will also include some miscellaneous improvements and fixes.

Of note for the near future: we are building in support for Cut, Copy, and Paste, so look for those tools soon!

We’ve set up a Flickr group! Check it out at

flickr.com/groups/deliciousdesigner

Thanks for the feedback we’ve received so far, but definitely keep it coming! If you have a bug report, take a screenshot of the wackiness and add it to our Flickr pool. That’ll help us out quite a bit.