CHAPTER 9: Android Graphic Design: Making Your UI Designs Visual 331It is important to notice that GIMP also has pop-up helper features, which will describe what
everything in the software will do for you. To invoke this interactive feature, you “hover” (interestingly,
this is one of the ImageButton states that you just learned about in the previous section) your mouse
over the tool icon, the palette layer or the menu option. This is shown under the selected menu
option, in yellow, in Figure 9-16.
The Open as Layers function is useful because it combines the File ➤ Open and Layer ➤ New
Layer operations into one seamless “move” that will open an image containing one or more layers,
and will then place those layers above the current selected layer. In this case, as you can see in
Figure 9-15 (the Layers palette tab is obscured by the File menu in Figure 9-16), the selected layer
is the Milky Way galaxy source image that you originally imported (to see that “move,” reference
Figure 9-14).
As you can see in Figure 9-17, the ImageButtonRing.png layer is now selected and is now on
top of your ImageButton1source.png layer in the Layers palette (top left), and the ring decoration
for the ImageButton image asset, which you are in the process of creating, is compositing
seamlessly with a Milky Way galaxy image underneath it (refer to the image preview area on the right
of the screen shot).
Figure 9-17. A selected ImageButtonRing.png layer composited on top of the ImageButton1source layer