Cover Commander :: Introduction

Product: Cover Commander

Version: 2.9

Company: Insofta

Price: $69 USD

Date: Information correct as of 15/03/2008

 

Cover Commander is produced by Insofta Developments. The Company has an office in Seattle and they also produce some very nice stock Icons. Cover Commander is essentially a WYSIWYG box design program that doesn’t include any face design tools. However, as we’ll see, it’s one of the best 3d box maker programs on the market.

 

Cover Commander :: Installation

Cover Commander weighs in at 5 meg. The installer is signed and has been tastefully branded with product and company graphics. I didn’t encounter any problems during the installation.

 

Cover Commander :: Interface

Cover Commander has a very well designed interface that clearly shows a lot of thought has gone into it. The interface is initially icon driven with the program showing a welcome menu when you start. The icons are well designed and you can suppress this dialog if you don’t find it helpful or useful.

I was very impressed with the Cover Commander interface. It was a little bit like getting a gentle lesson in quality GUI design. The interface is split between a real time view port and a tabbed control system. Any changes you make to the tab controls are immediately reflected in the view port display.

Cover Commander also features a well implemented mouse control system allowing you to rotate, pan and zoom with effortless ease. The camera, light, shadow and reflection tabs can all store named presets, which make setting up a box shot a breeze.

 

Cover Commander :: Demo Restrictions

Output from the demo is watermarked with faint and unobtrusive watermarks. If anything, these watermarks are a little too faint. I would be inclined to make them a little darker as they can be difficult to see on some of the output.

 

Cover Commander :: Features and Benefits

Cover Commander offers a number of presets:

Box

Box with CD (Right)

Box with CD (Left)

CD

Screenshot

Curved Screenshot

DVD Box

DVD Box with Disc (Right)

DVD Box with Disc (Left)

Vista Box

Book

Thin Book

Manual

 

One really nice feature of the program is the way it dynamically smoothes the contents of the view port after you adjust your box shot.

 

I also particularly like the CD images that Cover Commander can add to box shots. This brings a new attractive visual element to a box shot:

 

The Curved Screenshot is also a good idea that introduces something new to the mix. Here’s an example of the Curved Screen shot in action:

Cover Commander also caters for box sizes other that the standard Software Box, CD or DVD with the inclusion of a “Fit Sizes to Side Images” Button. Here’s an example of this feature in action:

Cover Commander :: Image Quality

The image quality in Cover Commander is superb, even on machines without hardware acceleration. The program automatically smoothes images if “Auto Preview” is active. This provides an accurate representation of quality of the final image. Please click on the images below for a full sized view:

 

 

 

The Vista Box is new to Version 2.9 of Cover Commander. As is the new super high res output. Click on the images below to see a 2594 x 4000 pixel image created in the current version of Cover Commander. The output from the program is now ideal for print:

Cover Commander :: Quirks

Cover Commander doesn’t have any quirks. This is the first box design product review I’ve written where I can comfortably say that. The current version of Cover Commander now exports images of up to 4,000 x 4,000 and includes the ever popular. Vista Box. Cover Commander is one of the best box design programs I’ve seen. As a result I have much less to write about in this review!

 

Cover Commander :: Documentation

Cover Commander includes a full and comprehensive manual that covers every aspect of the program in great detail. Given that the program interface is so well designed and intuitive, you probably won’t need to refer to it very often.

 

Cover Commander :: Conclusion

Cover Commander is one of the very best box design programs on the market today. It delivers a very slick experience and one that I suspect many software developers will find quite inspirational. The quality of the output from the program is very high considering the blisteringly fast rendering system that the program uses. Highly Recommended.