Cyotek Spriter

Behind all the glorious content that pops up when accessing your favorite web pages are an abundance of requests and supplies of data packets between your computer and the host server. The more transfer processes that occur, the slower your page loads.

However, modern technology evolved through minor tweaks, such as CSS Sprites that combine into a single file multiple images of a single object in different instances to mimic animation, so that content is retrieved as a whole and not one image after the other. Since modern web pages are packed with animations, enthusiasts are sure to enjoy creating CSS Sprites with Cyotek Spriter.

In terms of visuals, the application sports a clean and intuitive design, with most of the space representing your canvas as an image layout, pure CSS code, as well as a preview of your project. A side panel is responsible for holding most properties, while functions are triggered from corresponding toolbar icons.

Images are the main ingredients you use with this application. File support in this regard is staggering, with types like JPG, TIF, PFM, RAS, PPM, PNG, ICO, BMP, being only a few worth mentioning. Once loaded, it's automatically processed into three types for different situations and events.

Most task that falls into your hands is choosing the right images. This is because functionality can barely be touched at all. Every bit of tweaking and interaction needs to be handled with external tools. Even though the CSS code is instantly generated, you can only analyze it, since it's not editable.

All of your effort is reduced to the visual aspect of images. As such, you get to use an abundance of effects, each with a real time updating preview and various dedicated controls to specify strength. The list of presets is decent, with effects such as color blend, emboss, grayscale, invert, pixellate, resize, rotate and possibility to add text.

To compensate a little for the lack of thorough editors, you can add quick launch menu entries to external programs. When all is done, export options give you the possibility to generate a simple image file of the sprite layout sheet, or export as a compatible component for HTML and CSS.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Cyotek Spriter is a simple solution to creating sprites compatible with modern web site creation tools. The design is sure to get you up and running in a jiffy and file support makes sure you can use nearly any image on your computer. Implemented effects keep you busy for a while, with the first result pushing to try out more projects.