This is purely a bug-fix release. As usual in alpha stage, it’s worth updating.

Changes:
- Adding filters on sublayers adds them at the right position
- No more problems when using other types of color (CMYK, gray) . They are converted to RGB before use (painting tools)
- Arrow keys now move selection (use shift and control to move with 10 or 100 pixels steps). Hold Command to move the view (as it did before)
- Feature: right mouse click can be set to erase when painting (as opposed to using background color to paint)
- Some visual enhancements (new icons for layers and more visible layer bounds)

Update, have fun.

I changed the download website to a separate account. This makes it easier to backup the blog and it’s always a good idea to separate different sections of the website. I also set up a small php page to link to the latest version.

If you have downloaded 0.43, you don’t need to download 0.44 since this is exactly the same version but on a different location. I had to increase the version to make the transitition smooth from one location to another but it’s exactly the same app.

This is the page in question. It’s not really useful for end-users but I thought I should mention it, in case this messes up with something.

This new release brings a lot of fixes related to handles, rescaling and such things.

Features:
- Command+T creates a new layer if there is a selection
- Alt + drag layer without selection duplicates whole layer (including text and such) - previously only worked on selection

Fixes:
- Cancelling layer properties does not delete layer (if called from menu)
- Filter color cube still unsupported but does not block aynmore
- Preview for ‘Select by color’ in overlay mode displays ok when zoomed
- Enabling/Disabling ‘hide target layer’ renders the target layer
- Renders correct area after removing filter that ‘hides target layer’
- DragHandle for center is now centered on the active filter (eg. blur on a small bitmap)
- Fixed many occassions of crashes when dragging handles in Transform mode.
- Move layer to position (left, top, center …) works with any kind of layer (text, filter)
- Drag handles can be picked correctly no matter what the zoom level is
- Forces showing handles when showing layer properties (could be hidden by Command+H)

As always a rather large update like the previous is followed by a smaller one that fixes many glitches and add one new feature. You can now use the infamous Command+T shortcut and get and interactive scale transform toool. You can change at at any time the transform style from scale to deform by just presssin Command+T again. Basically the scale tool is just a deformation tool with some constraint to keep it rectangular. Also you can press control to force keeping the aspect ratio (in scale mode)

Other changes:
- Window now move out of the way (eg filter window can be set to appear in any corner)
- Aspect of the handles now doesn’t get affected by zoom anymore
- Some other appearances and stability fixes.

Here is a release that will fill a big gap in the feature set of ChocoFlop by bringing you: Rich Text Layers. You may read my previous post on the subject to understand the greatness of using RTF. The text feature is not perfect (resizing text views feels weird because it’s upside down) but you can still get pretty nice effects. Like this:

(click for bigger image)

As you guessed, you can indeed type text and see the filters applied in real time. Note that this works as usual fine with rather small images on a macbook pro. No idea how it fares on a G4 mac mini…

Short summary of the changes:
- Rich Text Layers
- Modifications on layers that are modified by a filter now update the correct area (eg. the area output by the filter, not the area of source image)
- Filters modifications on small layers over a bigger image do not rerender the whole selection/image (much faster)
- Navigation automatically hides if window is too small
- Limits for output of filters can be displayed (or not)
- Zoom with drag now zooms on the correct area (problem was zooming on small images unzoomed + centering was wrong)
- Added a handle to drag the center of filter layers
- ‘Hide target’ now also works when target is parent layer
- Fixed some instable operations when loading native documents
- Every filter in the Blur and Tile Effects category are set to ‘hide target’ by default
- Much better error management system (more exceptions catched and a link to report the bug is built dynamically)
- Command+ E merges with layer below if only one layer is selected

And of course a few hundred technical changes to improve overall stability, that you don’t really care about.

Use the application menu to update or get it from the download page. Have fun

I have to admit that one gave me a little laugh:

I’ll assume G.W. Bush just wasn’t available for the photo. I just hope the mac platform doesn’t end up like in civil war within three years… Maybe the Intel militia is going to bomb the PowerPC mosque or something.

(Bad) joke apart, the new intel mac pros are out. And ChocoFlop should run on them. There is at least one feature that will support quad cores (scan after selection updates). I look forward to hearing from someone with one of those.

It seems the some pages on the wiki had a ton of porn links in it for quite a while

The tutorial category is now clean again and the main pages for all categories have been protected. There still isn’t much content in the docs so far, but I’ll start filling this once the app reaches final stage.

Update: The talk category was a mess too… oh crap. Has anyone got links to good antispam extensions for mediawiki. I really need to find a way to only allow registered users. I am quite a newbie with this tool…

Thanks John for pointing this out.

The more I look at the OSX APIs …. the more I love them.

I am exploring the various possibilities of having text layers in ChocoFlop. I looked at the way an app like CoreImage Fun House does it but it’s rather limited. You can draw a string with the font you want, which is fine, but what do you do if you want a real text tool? By a real text tool I mean something like Photoshop has: the ability to create multiline, autowrapping text, with spell checking. I want to be able to pick one character and change it’s size, color, font and other atributes individually not to mention alignement and such things.

Well we have NSTextView. A NSTextView basically has all the editing features you can see in TextEdit. In case you’re not a Mac OSX user and think of TextEdit as of the old SimpleText on OS9 or Notepad on windows, believe me it’s not the same. TextEdit is basically a very lightweight word processor (it only misses headers/footers). One of the cool features is that TextEdit can load and save RTF documents, much like WordPad does on Windows. Well, an amazing feature of Cocoa is that NSTextView can also save it’s context as RTF data. It means that you can just add a NSTextView to your app and have rich text editing features out of the box.

Also, as you may (or not) already know any view in OSX can be captured as a PDF document, which in turn can easily saved as PDF document or translated into pixels.

What does this all mean in our particular app ? It means that every text layer in ChocoFlop will be a separate RTF document with all the attributes you want. This means really that inside the .chocoimg bundle (the native folder-based file format of ChocoFlop), you will have a .rtf file for each text layer that you can simply replace/modify with any RTF compatible editor.

That’s great because I always wanted the .chocoimg format to remain as simple as possible and I was wondering whether adding support for complex text would make it harder to understand. Going this way will ensure that a .chocoimg bundle will have only three type of elements in the folder:

- a TIFF file for every layer/mask (already the case)
- an XML file with the parameters for filters and layer ordering and modes

and soon:

- a RTF file for every text layer, as can be seen in this preliminary screenshot. The text is aligned on right, has different fonts and colors.

(click for a bigger image)

As usual some work is needed to integrate this in a nice way (the text in the screenshot is loaded from an RTF file) but be prepared to see this in the next release.

May the FSM bless the guys behind these APIs.

Thanks to the person who transfered control of my app on iUseThis.com. I can now update it myself and keep it up to date. So, whoever you are, thank you

Vote for ChocoFlop on iUseThis.com

In the meantime I also posted ChocoFlop on VersionTracker.com a few days ago. I guess I had to do it sooner or later. In a few days the total links in google to this website changed from about 600 to over 100′000 and growing. Looks like I need to speed up to get a stable release out before all those people start complaining!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, ChocoFlop finally has finally got a Magic Wand tool. I know it should have been here from the start but it depended on my SelectByColor .cikernel which wasn’t ready until now. As usual there’s room for optimization in the future but it works nicely. I couldn’t figure out to implement a flood fill in a .cikernel and I don’t think it’s possible (correct me if I am wrong!). So the current solution uses a CPU scan (non-recursive) on a mask generated by my SelectByColor kernel.

On the same front the Select By Color feature now has nice shades (and optionnally none). Before the shades of selection did not adapt with the amount of tolerance needed to select one particular pixel. Now it does. Short said: when you select by color with some tolerance you get a nice shade from white to black. The difference from the previous release is particularly shocking if you use ’select by color’ on a image that has lots of shades (blurred for example).

Other changes include:

- Mask operations are faster in 128 bits/pixel mode (actually uses 8 bit modes for most of them)
- Select by Color (and magic wand) now selects something if tolerance is 0.00
- Color picker has new cursor (with a precise cross, as oppsoed to using the icon from the tool button)

That’s it for today. Now the only tool left that does nothing is the text tool (and the free transform). Get to the download page or use the auto-update feature to get the latest release and enjoy!