Software Review of Scrippy v 3.01

By Larry Anders, Librarian, Tampa PC Users Group
Larry@AndersNet.com


A few months back I wrote a review of an email program with a lot of bells and whistles called IncrediMail. While this is an excellent program to spice up your emails, a lot of people do not wish to change email programs. So, if you are using Outlook Express 5 or later, Outlook 98 or later, or Netscape 6.1 or later and have no desire to change, there is a way for you to add a little life to your plain old text messages. It’s called Scrippy.

Scrippy is a stationary editor/creator that lets you add graphics and sound in the form of embedded borders, backgrounds and sound files to your emails. And best of all you don’t need to know a thing about HTML coding. You can use multiple backgrounds to create a layered effect, your borders can scroll and you can do just about anything you want to your fonts. I had no idea that email was capable of all these effects.

You really don’t need to do much of anything to get up and running and creating email stationery in a very short time. There are 16 samples pages included in the program. Just choose any one of them and use it as it is or change it to your delight. Then, once you get the hang of it, open a blank new page and create your own. It’s not rocket science. The interface is really simple to use with all kinds of pop-up help items throughout the program. If you forget to do something or do not follow the parameters correctly, most of the time Scrippy lets you know immediately. At any time, while making the changes to the samples or designing your own, you can click on Preview and see your results immediately. If you don’t like what you see just undo and start where you left off. When you’re done Scrippy automatically saves the file to where you can access it in your email program. Not very difficult and not much of a learning curve at all.

Graphics supported are: JPG, GIF, animated GIF, and PNG formats. Sound files supported are: MID, WAV, AU and AIFF, as well as streaming audio formats.

The creators of Scrippy explain the concept this way:

Scrippy stationeries are composed of objects, which you select and customize. The following objects are available:

  • Background. Multiple backgrounds can be used, overlapping each other to create layered effects.
  • Message. Text message and/or graphics. Full control of fonts and colors.
  • Sound. You can also have multiple sounds.
  • Scrolling border. You can insert as many of these as you like, at any of the screen edges. They can move in various directions at a variety of speeds.
  • Ticker. An animated text message in the status bar at the bottom of the stationery window. Lots of different animation options.
  • Positioned objects. You can insert a single copy of an image, or a scrolling repeated copy, using a position based on any of the window edges or the center of the window.
  • Containers.Containers are a powerful tool, which can be used to create layers of "stationery within stationery". Containers allow recombination of other Scrippy objects in many different ways.
  • Frames. A visible border placed around another object or group of objects.
  • Objects, which overlap, can easily be dragged and dropped to change the visual layering sequence.

    • Oh, and because Scrippy creates HTML coded documents you can also create web pages with it that can be viewed by users of Internet Explorer 5 and later, and users of Netscape 6.1 and later.

    All of this for $39, but it is free to try at http://www.scrippy.com/. And, there seem to be a lot of other people interested in Scrippy on the Internet. Just do a search and see what you come up with. There are tutorials and stationery everywhere. Try it and you will see how easy it is to make your email recipients say, “How’d they do that?” u