- Fixed a few deadlocks when working with selections
- No more crashes on startup, especially when opening multiple documents at once (HUDwindow setframe)
- Selection scanning should be slightly faster
- Handles are now easier to grab
- No more useless yellow lines unless creating a live gradient
- Better window options on first start (ever)
- Navigation and thumbnail get updated less often , especially with a certain delay after painting and rendering

Well, what should I say. You get the update and I get some sleep? Fine.

- Zooming & panning around is now fast again with smaller images (no tiling when not necessary)
- Tiling is now used *only* if it slows down too much and never when painting
- Progress for rendering is updated more scarcely
- FPS calculation now takes into account the amount of aborted tiles
- Threshold to used tiling moved to 1 FPS (was 5)
- Hopefully fixed crashes in getOutputImageEnableLayerMask
- Debug options to force onePass rendering (no tiling) and “FPS display in toolbar” added to Help menu.

Please update and report your experiences.

The next big thing I see is to get filters to work equally as fast when masked (currently a big image plus a mask on a filter is very slow, much slower than the same filter without mask). It seems that it renders the full resolution each time when there’s a mask.

But I guess I’ll think about that tomorrow, given the time here. Good night!

Here it is!
- Fixes a SEVERE bug in 0.71 that caused the app not to work on Tiger (although for some inexplicable reason it worked on Leopard)
- Enhancements to make interface more responsive
- Effects on rotated images are cropped correctly again (previous version cut incoherent areas)
- Displays progress bars for rendering and magic wand

Since it’s 1:16 am and I am supposed to be at work tomorrow at a decent time, let’s call it a night!

So, if you downloaded 0.71 please UPGRADE NOW.

Although I am not able to reproduce on Leopard the bug that seems to be happening to Tiger users, I think I found where the problem was (some filters were indeed created in the wrong order).
If you are running tiger *PLEASE* download this and report back here in the comments or by mail on jacques (a-t) link-u.com.
Download release 0.72 here..

I’ll be working a bit more in order to release 0.73 later today, but it’ll help to know if this one works for you right now.

Update: This has been reported to work.. I won’t add this release to the autoupdate feed though. I’ll add 0.73 in a a pair of hours after fixing a few other issues.

As I said, much has been rewritten for the recently released version. Someone reported that the new version “would no longer allow me to open any files, let alone manipulate them.”. Obviously this doesn’t happen to me and many other people but if that’s the case remember you can always revert to older versions here:
http://www.download.chocoflop.com/

So if 0.70 worked better than 0.71, you can get it there.

I have no idea what that person’s hardware/OS version is or what the problem really is so anyone experiencing anything similar is welcome to file a bug report on this.

Ok, so this is a rather big one which brings many improvements (and possibly a few load of bugs since a lot of the back end has been rewritten).

- MUCH faster rendering for larger images. Now the app only renders what it needs (in most cases anyway, the rest will be fixed later).
- Tiled rendering for when things get slow
- MUCH faster painting (renders less useless areas)
- HUD info overlay now looks better, scales correctly and shows info about modes (quickmask, layermask, gridsnap, filtermap)
- Progress is now displayed again correctly for operations that take over a second
- Quickmask is not visible anymore in navigation area
- clicking on inspector icons resets values (rotation, offset, scale)
- Added some new icons (from iconDrawer.com and some I made), removed ugly mode icons (quickmask, layermask)

On the whole the app should feel much faster and more useable on decently sized images. It is szill a bit painful with 10mpix images but fine with 5 mbpix images (which is reasonable for most peoples photos).

Time to go to bed here. Please update and enjoy and report the additional thousand bugs you’ll find

I had some money on the paypal account (thanks to your support!) so I decided than rather than spending hours trying to design half-baked icons for ChocoFlop I was going to buy some from IconDrawer.com. I bought the classic pack and the add-on.

One day when this projects becomes more viable I’ll certainly contact them to get personalized icons. For now, I’ll just have a nice looking icon set to use for various things in the app.

After reading some reports about the difference of performance between ChocoFlop and CoreImage Funhouse (Apple’s original showoff example app for CoreImage filters) I decided to rethink and rewrite the rendering stack of the app.

The biggest error in design is due to the fact that ChocoFlop was originally developped on a G4 mac mini which didn’t support any CoreImage acceleration through the CPU. As a result I had written a lot of small caches everywhere to make it feel decent on this machine. Over time however I stopped testing it on such machine. So in the end I had both disavantages.

CoreImage is designed around a simple idea: That you only need to render what you need to display. And ChocoFlop so far was working the opposite way. For example when applying a hue filter on a 10 mb pixel image the filter would get applied to the whole image. Also when painting the paint buffer would be applie on the whole image. This basically made using ChocoFlop on a 6 megapixel image a real pain, even on a modern machine (such as my first-gen ATIx1600@128mb macbook pro). To fix this problem the app tried to scale down the whole document an rescale it back for display while filtering. This was both quite slow and ugly-looking (big blurry pixels and filter handles that you just couldn’t grab without blocking the whole UI).

After working on it for a while I am glad to announce that the upcoming release (0.71) will feel – and actually be – much faster than the previous series. When it gets released I invite you to open an 10 megapixels image and add a filter (say torus lens) on it and drag it around. It will change from unuseable to smooth, really. Same goes for paiting: the current release is not useable on a 10 mbpixel image, you’ll paint big straight lines and it’s pretty unresponsive. In the upcoming version you can actually paint what you want to paint (on my machine at least).

I still have to tackle so issues and I am bit tired to finish them today but hopefully tomorrow will be a more productive day (a.k.a. the kind without a sister crashing in at your place with beers when you were just about to get rid of a nasty bug). So stay tuned and expect great changes!

Here are the fixes for today :
- Better updates areas (eg. editing a text with a filter above it woudl updat the correct size of the filter). Same when painting on a layer below a filter. It gets updated on mouseOver.
- Invert selection at start (on new doc) doesn’t crash anymore
- Merging crashes less when merging layers with zero size (eg. two hue layers)
- Reset button doens’t recreate filter nor move filtter parameters window
- Fixes in thumnails generation (After merging).

So update and go to bed! At least I will.