All I am going to say below is just a rough plan. This will give you an idea of what ChocoFlop is meant to become but not necessarily describe what it will or will not feature in the end or at some point.

Target Market

ChocoFlop clearly positions itself as a lightweight alternative to very expensive graphics tools such as Adobe PhotoShop, (ex. MetaCreations) Corel Painter. It is meant to be smaller and much cheaper. Ideally the target users would be web or mobile designers and other creative people working with reasonably sized images.

This is and will probably remain a Mac Only tool. It uses Core Image at it’s heart to be able to utilize to it’s maximum the hardware. Thanks to great work of the guys at apple I’ll be able to focus on usability and not much about optimizing gaussian blur filters and such things. Thanks to the work that’s already been done this project’s development time will be much shorter than if I had to start from scratch. That said, this makes the app very dependant of the operating system. But we all know intel macs are going to rule the world aren’t they?

Speed

ChocoFlop will always launch fast enough for the user to not to worry about opening/closing it on a low-end machine. The beta version I have launches on my Ibook in about 4 seconds the first time and instantly the following ones. Of course this is a small program right now and you can expect it to get a little slower with time. However I will do my best to avoid bloat. I want to be able to double-click and image, modify the curves, save and quit. All that as fast as possible. And I want the time to be spent on processing the image, not loading the program.

File formats

At start will be able to save in all CoreImage supported formats. As of 10.4 (the minimum required OS to run CoreImage apps) those formats are:
- BMP
- GIF
- PNG
- JPEG
- JPEG 2000
- TIF
- TGA
- SGI
- PICT
- PDF
- OpenEXR
- PSD (no layers!)

These should be enough for most people. But more may come if required. Additionally I will create one special proprietary format. It will be open, simple and documented (some folder with an xml description and a tif for each layer). It will allow to save layers and their settings and anything that’s tied to the application. Eventually if time allows I’ll have a look at the possibility of natively saving and loading PhotoShop’s PSD files. The format is documented by Adobe, so it’s nothing impossible. It will just take some additional time and support from willing users. Of course it can never be as perfect as the native format.

Not for printing (yet)

ChocoFlop is designed for people who create digital media. It’ll support RGB in 32, 64 or 128 bit modes but not CMYK or Lab or whatever modes you’d get for this kind of work. This may come in some very distant future, but this is currently not my goal so don’t count on it. That said you can of course print from the application.

Focus on Usability

Unlike many “Core Image Demonstration” type tools, ChocoFlop is meant to be usable in everyday work. The goal is not just to add as many filters to an image as possible and see what random results one can achieve. I expect users to know what they want to be doing. Real-Time preview and non-destructive Effect layers will be available as required but they won’t be the goal.

This means people who have spent time learning industry standard tools will feel right at home when working with layers, layer masks, selections and painting tools.

Global domination

Since you probably haven’t read all of the above I can safely state that the real goal of this project is complete global domination. That is, after release 1.0 comes out, which is planned the day after Duke Nukem Forever gets released on Nintendo DS.