Coat of Arms Design Web-Based Program

Note: the Coat of Arms Design program is now available. Read more about it at this link.

For the past few months, I’ve been hard at work on a Coat of Arms web-based computer program. (In addition to writing articles here, writing other software, etc.) I’ve had several people alpha testing it for the past few weeks and it is finally nearing a point where I can show it to anyone interested

The screenshot to the right is the current state of the program. I still have some work to do before I can let anyone beside the alpha testers use it, but I think that will happen within a week.

The coat of arms under design in the screenshot is particularly “busy” because I wanted to show several things: the background is a fur, then we have a bend ordinary with a unicorn rampant on top. Above all of that is a division covering the southern half with three roses. Finally we have an optional scroll with a name.

As for the rest of the screenshot, under the shield is a list of objects in the coat of arms. Buttons below the list allow an object to be removed or moved above or below the other objects. On the top right is an “About” button that pops up some information about the software. Below that is a selector for the shield’s overall background. Below that are several controls that specify the name on the scroll under the shield and some colors and a font size. Below that section is a series of controls to edit the currently selected object which in this case is a Rose. The rose can be enlarged (width and/or height) moved horizontally or vertically, rotated a number of degrees, flipped, and the parts of the rose can have different colors. Finally, that column of controls ends in a “New Object” button that puts a new object on the top of the list of objects.

What’s left? Add more charges (I hope to have about 50 creatures and symbols on the day of the launch), allow for quartering the shield, make the divisions nicer, allow dragging of charges, and some other minor things like make the font a little smaller in the edit window, and keep the selection set in the “objects list”, etc. Not all of those will get done before I open it up, but it should be more than decent at that point and it will only get better!