Making a remote control with Blade Pro


Blade Pro is often used for buttons, occasionally for text, and rarely for anything else. In this tutorial I wanted to cover the making of something different using Blade Pro to explore some of the wider possibilities.

Step 1:

  1. Create a new image, 300 high, by 100 wide.
  2. Fill with white
  3. Apply Greg's Pool Shadow, or use a bit of airbrush to provide a little texture to the white.
  4. Select All. Now this leaves us with square corners, we want to round out the corners of the unit.
  5. Choose, Selections, Modify, Contract. Reduce the size by 10 pixels. Still square corners right?
  6. Now choose Selections, Modify, Expand. Increase the size by 10 pixels. Got round corners now!
  7. Invert the selection (Ctrl-Shift-I) and delete the extra corners
  8. Invert the selection back to normal again.

Step 2:

  1. Next, we have to cut out the rectangle buttons from the selection.
  2. While holding down the Control key, draw rectangles where you want the buttons.

    The Control key means that the selection you now draw is removed from the existing selection. Similarly, holding down the shift key adds it.

  3. Use the status line to help you position the buttons.

Step 3:

  1. Fire up Blade Pro, select the effect/colour scheme you want. The trick here though is:
    1. Set the texture bit map to blank (smooth)
    2. Set the button style to a simple raised edge
    3. Bring down the radius and height controls, these need to be low values (1-10)
  2. Apply it once to set up the main unit

Step 4:

  1. Invert the selection, trim off the corners (use the Control key with magic wand) so you just have the rectangular buttons.
  2. Apply your same Blade Pro effect. (You might need to bring the radius or height down a little more).

Step 5:

  1. Set the foreground to black
  2. Use the text tool to add your text item
  3. Position in correctly
  4. Re-apply your Blade Pro setting to the text item

Step 6:

  1. Repeat for all the buttons
  2. Add a little icon or dingbat symbol at the bottom (these icons don't need to do anything, they just finish the look off).

Step 7:

  1. Want a different colour? Convert to grey scale
  2. Then use Colourise (Shift L) or Adjust RGB (Shift U) to set the colour you want.


If you are unsure of how to code the HTML sequence to use this kind of remote control on your web pages then see Button Bar HTML.


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