I am afraid the current release of ChocoFlop will "expire" in 3-4 days. Unfortunately I haven't been able to work on it as much as I wanted and the current development state cannot be released. So you may well be prompted to upgrade to a new version... which doesn't exist yet. I'll try to work some nights this week, but if I can't make it you can still use ChocoFlop for about a month before it stops working. I certainly hope that by then I can put out a decent release with all the goodies you have been waiting for. Sorry for the mess, but without the threat of expiration I would just never work :-)

On friday 29 october 2008, your version of ChocoFlop (0.87) will tell you that it is expired. Note that if you have a license (free or purchased) this has nothing to do with it. Purchased licenses never expire and the free one neither (for now). It's just the current beta that expires. Pleasee just ignore this warning until a new version is released, hopefully sometimes next week.

Update: I have been making good progress on rewritting a lot of the underlying engine. I still think it won't be ready for friday but maybe this week-end. Downscaling now works pretty well, the new all-coreimage selection engine works fine too (previously selection was dislayed using OpenGL lines, which could get very slow for complex selections on large images). I still have to clean this up and rewrite brushpainting to adapt to downsampled display and finish fixing the new also all-coreimage bounds checking function (as opposed to the current technique which dumps the full image in memory and scans it with the CPU in 2-4 threads and causes some instability).

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

I have been complaining about the speed of the GPUs in Macbooks (and mac minis) for some time now. It seems Apple has finally heard our complaints. The new macbooks now finally have a decent GPU. Sure it's not the best thing in town but it sure is 4 times faster than the previous MacBook and ten times faster than the mac mini... which they are still selling today. So finally the buyers of the most popular Apple laptop will be able to experience ChocoFlop (and all other CoreImage apps) in a more pleasant way. If you get one of these, I'd love to hear about your experience. Especially if you had the Intel GMA version before. Here's a little sum up table of 3D Mark06 values I have gathered from around the net. There are a few differences here so it's not the best comparison around but it gives you an idea. Some of the essential points:

• Boy, do intel GMA cards suck. Not that this is news to anyone...
• If you have the previous macbook pro, the update won't give you much more GPU power
• The new entry level MacBook's NVidia 9400M now finally beats my two year old MacBook Pro (Radeon X1600)

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

Yes, it's been two months since I promised the next version will be much faster. Rest assured it is. But I am not releasing yet since I want to fix some issues this has created and further improve other things such as the speed of brush painting. Anyway since the current release expires in 30 days, I'll definitely release the new one within that timeframe :-) Among the main changes to come:

• Filter rendering on large images will be much faster
• PDF and Text rendering will be much faster
• Threading will be much more efficient (and safer): this means opening 20 documents at once won't feel so risky and processor intensive anymore
• The inspector now supports mathematical expressions (e.g you can type 120+32 in a position or scale field, and actually even much more complex math expressions)
• A nicer color picker (eventually faster on large images too but this is not done yet)
• Resizing canvas will respect the positionf of various non bitmap items (text, pdf, filter)
• And quite a load of bugfixes (which you can always read about on bugs.chocoflop.com if you happen to care).

5 comments | By Santiago Lema

Next release will feature support for simple license files that you can double click, rather than manually entering your name and serial. However the current release does NOT support this. So if you happen to buy a license in the meantime you'll still have to type in the license manually, despite what the registration e-mail says. This will work very well once version 0.88 is released, which I hope will happen this week-end. I have a lot to fix with the new mechanism that has been aded to make chocoflop faster so this is delaying the release a bit.

1 comments | By Santiago Lema

I still have a lot of work to do but I finally found a solution to the issue that has caused ChocoFlop to be slow when editing filters on large images. The current version becomes unusable with a 10mbpixels image with a radeon X1600. Just add a blur filter on it and you're dead. The upcoming release however supports this pretty pretty well. The whole idea behind CoreImage is that the speed should only be affected by the size of your display (or rather the window). The next release will respect that. : Rotating a layer in a 10megapixels image will still be smooth (unless you have a 10 megapixels screen that is). Well, it's 2:44 am and I am supposed to be efficient at work tomorrow :-)

2 comments | By Santiago Lema

This new release is great because: - It fixes a bug when using the 'soften selection' feature (deadock) - It adds a Bezier approximation when drawing with the brush When you draw fast, especially with a tablet, often you don't get enough points to draw a smooth curve. Now the app automatically smoothes the line based on your movement. This image illustrates the change (note that of course this is not the same line drawn here, it just shows the difference between the previous version and the new one with a similar stroke): PS: If you saw a release 0.86 for a few minutes, please update again. It's the same with a log of debug information printed in the console. 0.87 fixes this.

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

This is a quick for the previous release, which happened to cache the layer stack too much. You wouldn't see the difference immediately if you chose a different blending mode (you'd have to do something else like paint or change layer then cause a render to see the change). My bad. Oops, it's 2:51 am and I should be sleeping now since tomorrow I am supposed to be in perfect condition at work.

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

Here we are with a new sunday release. My holidays are over but I hope I'll be back next week-end with new improvements. Changes:

• Right click on view shows contextual menu (rather simple for now, more will be added layer)
• Command+Right click on view shows menu to pick layers (layers which are not opaque under the pointer are shown as greyed)
• Envelope doesn't stutter anymore while rotating layer (with rotation tool)
• Fixes quite a few bug fixes in 0.83 related to intiializing filter parameters (errors showing bug when asking for layer properties

0 comments | By Santiago Lema