Finally, ChocoFlop has reached the place all good software reaches!

For those who don’t know this serial is available for free on this very site

Well, I haven’t had the time to work on ChocoFlop… or at least not enough to get the new release out. Please be patient.

In the meantime I thought I could release a free working serial for people out there who are out of cash. The license costs 14.99 Euros (more if you want) and you’re still welcome to pay. But if you’re really broke you can use this one. I’ll will change this license on a regular basis but once installed on a machine it will remain valid.

First Name: ForNow
Name: FreeLicense
Serial Number: 89xZ9F911Z29D74E35BD84156C5635688CZ

Some user has pointed out that the second part of this number is similar to the infamous HD-DVD decryption key. This is however pure coincidence.

Enjoy

I’ll come back with a new release as soon as possible!

Don’t hesitate to Digg This

And sigh.

I think I’ll definitely take some time I can dedicate to ChocoFlop to move this website and others away from DreamHost. It seems I have an uptime of like 70% these days. Sometimes just waiting and hoping things will get back to what they were in 2005 just doesn’t cut it. I got used to the idea it will never get better.

I wanted to add some bug report today and the site was down again. I also saw there are comments on Versiontracker complaining about the website being down, not to mention half of paypal notifications for the people who are kind enough to pay to support this … just never reach the site (I have to activate them manually).

DreamHost, we had fun. Good bye. I am leaving you!

Huh, at least, as soon as I find a few hours and some motivation

Hum, it seems version 0.59 that I just released makes it impossible to use tools such as selection (lasso, circle or else) or text on any live filter. It kinda messes up the filter actually. I’ll fix this right now…

It seems the new update Apple released recently fixes crashes when opening certain 12 bits CR2 files. You could previously only import them using dcRAW because using the system support would crash ChocoFlop. Not anymore it seems.

Don’t know why this is not in the software update but you can Get it here.

PS: I’ll get back with a new release as soon as I get some extra time. I started some rather large refactoring (code cleanup) work so I won’t release anything in the following weeks I guess.

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.

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!

Every now and then I google for ‘ChocoFlop’ just to see what people are saying about it. There are not many links but the one I found surely suprised me. I always thought of the ChocoFlop name as a joke (although I am not changing it anytime soon)… but still, I didn’t expect someone to use the neo-adjective ‘chocoflopped’ to describe his creation using my app.

Well, this photo right here, which BTW looks great, is probably the first of history to have ever been ‘chocoflopped’ ! I mean he not only said it.. he actually created a TAG. I wonder how many people are going to share this tag…

Next thing you know, you’re walking on the street and some guy says:

- You know, those supermodels, they look really weird and deformed, but I think it’s not real. They’re just chocoflopped!

On a side note I discovered it was linked on iUseThis. Nice concept. It’s like digg.com for mac apps. I didn’t know this website actually but it would have saved me some time when I first started using a mac and I needed to know what the ‘right apps’ were. Don’t forget to click the little heart on ChocoFlop

Hm, I just found the answer to the question in the previous post. There was an inconsistency in the ColorSpaces used.

Now I have just set these options to all my CIContexts and the colors are fine:

CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateWithName(kCGColorSpaceGenericRGB);
contextOptions = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:(id)colorSpace, kCIContextWorkingColorSpace, (id)colorSpace, kCIContextOutputColorSpace,nil];

Yes this means that your projects won’t look exactly the same in the next reelase but the value will be correct.

Thanks to George Orthwein for having posted this:
Explanation