Have you ever spent a good amount of time chatting with a millionaire-plus? How about in the close personal company of a mucho money-aire? What about having to work on a special personal project of one un-bereft of major mounds of moolah? Well, normally, I’m not one to tech-and-tell, but this hits some good points for budding iWeb users AND I did get the ok to spill the beans, so allow me to unleash the legumes.

This particular pennywise princess’ name was...well, I can’t give the name now can I? We’ll call her M. M really enjoyed using iWeb but had a particular problem that vexed her. She was having this problem when she bumped into me at Panera Bread. She saw I had a MacBook Pro and thought I had a helpful look about me so she introduced herself and presented her MacBook, iWeb spread across it’s glossy screen.

“I’ll give you a spillion dollars if you can help me with this,” she stated. Before I got to ask, she continued, “See, I want to change this lil’ guy to pink to match those clouds.” The “lil’ guy” she was referring to was the search icon, the clouds were from the Cloud 9 theme. “All those vermillions of dollars to make this program,” she exclaimed, “and they can’t let me change this to the colors I want!” I felt it best at this juncture NOT to also let her know all the other things iWeb couldn’t do.

I tried using the adjust tool, but it’s not active on the search object. I was thinking about taking a peek at the iWeb package or the html, but wanted to exhaust my use-the-iWeb-GUI options first. That’s when I took a good hard look at the icon. It’s pretty much just a circle with a line attached. It should be possible to do that in iWeb, right? Plus, she could get some tips on how to doodle with iWeb and create whatever color search icon her heart desired!

I let her take control of the creating process, and had her create a circle by doing Insert -> Shape -> Oval. This creates a perfectly round circle that’s based on the theme (for my current theme, it’s black with a white outline). Then, choosing Insert -> Shape -> Line created a line at a 45 degree angle. We now had the raw materials for our search icon.

In order to make sure we maintained the same kind of look as the original, we snagged the image of the search icon from my site, enlarged it, then placed our created shapes over it. The first thing we noticed was that our shapes were too large. Holding down the Shift key, she was able to resize the line without changing it’s angle and then resize the oval without it losing it’s perfect circle shape. Next, our circle had no “hole” in it, so she selected it and changed the Fill to None. The next step was to increase the thickness of the lines, so she selected both the circle and the line and, in the Graphic pane of the inspector under Stroke, selected the color White, and then adjusted the width to 17 points.

At this point, she informed me that “now that circle’s WAAY too big!” I let her know that’s not a problem at all. Initially, she made the circle fit the outside of the magnifying glass and that’s always the first impression. However, when you increase the thickness of the line, it increases from the middle meaning that we’ll just have to shrink it down a bit.

“You just said a cotillion words to say what?”

“Select the object, hold down the Shift as before, but this time, add the Option key before resizing. This will keep it centered on the same point while resizing so you probably won’t have to re-position it after moving.”

“Shift-Option-Click and drag?”

“Right!”

One Shift-Option-Click and drag later and she was seeing her random parts forming the picture. “Soooo,” she postulated, “I could probably just draw another circle around the whole thing to make it look like a button?”

“Yup, and to make it easy on yourself, position it roughly in the middle then Shift-Option-Click and drag to increase the size until you can barely see the blue background. If it’s still just a little off on either side, use those arrow keys to Nudge it.”

After resizing the circle and giving it the color she wanted (Bubblegum from the color picker) and setting the Stroke to None, she noticed that her prior hard work was gone! I stopped her from going for the Command-Z combination to Undo and instead pointed her to the icons at the bottom of the window. Clicking on the most recently created circle then clicking the Backward button twice showed her the magnifying glass surrounded by her pink circle just as she wanted it. Clicking on the fringes behind her created shape selected the image we had originally brought in and we deleted it.

Now, it looked good, but was far too big to be useful (and she let me know this!). Attempting to resize it didn’t work because iWeb doesn’t allow you to group objects.

“Looks like a darjillion bucks, but now we can’t even use it,” she pouted. I had a solution for her though, one I’d come up with when I had the same “grouping” problem, but no way to fix it without using iWork, Preview Passthru. I had her select the entire group of objects, Copy, Open Preview, Command-N, Command-S to save, name it and save it.

Going back to iWeb, she chose Insert -> Choose... and then picked the image we’d just saved. It was still large, but now it could easily be resized by going into the Metrics pane of the inspector and setting the size (the original was 18x22 so we set it to 22). It had the same look, approximately the same size and covered the original perfectly all without having to edit any files. Maybe not quite so quick, but definitely easy. Plus, I had her download and install iClip lite so that she could have the shape available to her at all times ready to change the colors to match her mood.

She was so happy to have found a way to do this, she bought everyone a round of IC Honeydew Green Tea! Later, after the excitement had died down, she wanted to know what I was working on before she came over. So, I brought up Keynote and I showed her the image above.

“It’s cool and all,” she said, “but there’s no such thing as a ‘jobillion’”