A Research Engineer experiences unexpected slow-downs in his cutting-edge application. Find out what he did to speed-up his program. He learned some valuable lessons on the way. Read his story.

ChocoFlop 0.88ChocoFlop: Image and Photo Editing Application for Mac OS X.

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.

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.

This is and will probably remain a Mac Only tool. It uses Core Image at its heart to be able to utilize to its 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.

WHAT'S NEWVersion 0.88: Changes:

• Downscaling implemented at all levels. This means you can paint on a 10 mbpix image at screen resolution (rather fast) and have it render at full resolution upon mouse release.
• Filters on large images will preview much faster too.
• Double clickable license files
• You can type math expression in the inspector (ex. 150+32px will replace the value with 182px).
• Low resolution version of image is used for faster zoom display (not perfect yet though because downscaling can be slow on large images)
• All documents modifications are done within a single thread (instead of several per doc). Increasing stability.
• Overlaid progress of operations now works correctly (one dedicated global thread)
• Selection marching ants now uses a coreImage kernel as opposed to open gl (much faster with large selections)
• Finding bounds is now done with a dedicated coreimage kernel
• Faster Text and PDF layers updates
• Fixes opening certain rotated PDFs
• Enhanced color picker display
• Filters scale correctly (incluiding their parameters)

And many many many bugfixes. There are still a few issues left though regarding large images. Such as the fact that starting to draw a lasso selection can still be slow on a big image because the whole image is dumped each time. The same problem affects the start of color picking. This will likely be fixed in an upcoming release.
REQUIREMENTS1 GHz G4 or better, Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Growl installed.
DEVELOPERSantiago Lema
DOWNLOADS15466
DOWNLOAD NOW (2.7 MB)
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