Lincoln Beach Software

Lincoln Beach Software has been around for a number of years. Though small, the company has had a pretty good reputation for making reliable products that fill the needs of computer users without breaking the bank. Keeping things light and fast, Lincoln Beach has make one of the best web authoring tools ever... originally called "Web-It", today it has evolved into "FlexSite32". We use "Web-It" to create all the sites at Tricorn Publications. It you have any knowledge of HTML code, FlexSite 32 will be a fantastic tool for you and if you'd love to learn HTML, there is no better tool for the task.

With the rise in popularity of digital cameras, people are taking more pictures. Managing their images or sharing them in digital form is one of today's challenges. Either they have to print them to share them, or find another solution. One way to work with them is Lincoln Beach Software's ThumbBuddy.

ThumbBuddy is an image cataloging tool that helps you create web pages of your images in a fully automated manner. It is a great utility that will build photo galleries for home and online use in minutes. It creates the webpage code for you, with the click of a mouse. You just feed it the images and ThumbBuddy does the rest.

ThumbBuddy fully automated the process of making a great looking photo gallery at the click of a mouse. There were images displayed rank and file that were hot-links to the full-sized pictures. The program even gave them all drop shadows to give them a three-dimensional look.

One little glitch that I found was that ThumbBuddy made all of the thumbnails in horizontal format. So, the first shot in the screen capture above, a picture of Ash Cave in Hocking Forest, Southeastern Ohio, is actually a vertical image compressed into an horizontal. Since ThumbBuddy is being tweaked and updated as this article is being posted online, I'd expect to see that little quirk fixed in the coming update. The full-sized image is perfect, it is just the thumbnail that was in the wrong format. Since most amateur photographers seldom turn the camera to a vertical position, many people might never even encounter this glitch. Even with it, this program is worth its weight in gold.

In addition to ThumbBuddy, Lincoln Beach also publishes an application called "Easy Web Buttons" that we used to create the link buttons on Tricorn Publications' ScrapShot Magazine website. You can use this tool to create embellishments for your online gallery featuring all sorts of combinations of text and colors. You can even make them look three-dimensional. In fact, there are settings to make the buttons look like glass, like Microsoft Windows Vista's new icons.

You can modify the size of any button you create and there are lots of standard sizes in easy-to-use templates at the bottom of the application's work space. The great feature of the program is that once a button has been created, you can use that same design again and again or just change the text on it and export a bunch of them to give your work a theme... like we did with the buttons on Scrapshot Magazine.

Another great little program from Lincoln Beach is the "Life Poster Maker" and this one is really slick. You can make photo collages that look as though you have pinned a bunch of polaroid snapshots on a bulletin board in your office at work. You can tilt them various angles and give them captions to remember the moment. Just arrange your images on one of several templates. You can print the full poster using one of various frame choices built into the templates. This is a really easy way to make great posters without having to buy an expensive desktop publishing application. I have not seen another program like this one on the market, one that is made specifically to create collages with an almost scrapbook or bulletin-board look and feel them.

"Life Poster Maker" will give your images a really cool "retro" look that is very fashionable and trendy. The program is a snap to use and the final result is a very slick, professional looking poster that you can print and hang, or frame it as though it is a photo collage frame.