Email effects has two main functions. The first, and we think most interesting, is the ability to convert a graphic to a text representation. You can either drag the graphic onto the Email Effects icon, or open it within the application. Either way, the graphic is then imported, being converted to a text equivalent. You can scale the resulting text depending on your particular application. For e-mail, you may want to keep things small.

The other feature of Email Effects is that it contains several graphic tools one would expect in a graphics programs. There are line, oval and square tools. The difference is that if you use a tool to create a shape, it will be drawn with different text characters, rather than graphics. For those who don't fancy creating a signature or other ASCII shapes character by character, this is the way to go.

Lastly, you can create large text characters out of any existing font. This is somewhat hard to explain, but fortunately, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can see that we spelled the word Mac out of lots of individual characters. Of course they each correspond to the character they are representing.

So start doing some interesting things with text and check out Email Effects soon.

Have any other tools that help you communicate? Let John know via e-mail, so he can check it out.

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