posted April 7th, 2008
In Beta 3, full-out crashes are down dramatically from Beta 2. There’s still obviously lots of things that don’t work quite right, but crashes are few and far between. Actually, the number of bug reports coming in from people still using Beta 2 exceeds the number of reports from people on Beta 3 by a fairly large factor.
That said, above and beyond the number one cause of crashes is the startup sequence of the Dock. Even when the Dock didn’t crash, often some icons would fail to load, or all of them would be oddly garbled.
I made a rather strange and regrettable engineering decision with the Dock. The Dock automatically resizes, shadows, and blurs icons—and in the case of Core Image filters, applies that filter to the Core Image logo—at load time, rather than simply loading pre-rendered icons. This was mostly laziness on my part, and I’d been putting off fixing it until I reworked the Dock some more.
Now I’ve created a separate tool that renders all of the icons for me. The net result is a slightly larger binary (an whole extra megabyte—jeez), but faster loading times, less crashing, and no more garbled docks.
I don’t have any screenshots yet: the Dock is undergoing plastic surgery to become a toolbar, and wants to keep it’s privacy while in it’s mangled, half-breed form.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:18 PM
Any plans on making the toolbar be set to, at least optionally, allow for a single click to expand instead of a click and hold? It seems awkward to not have the choice.
April 8th, 2008 at 4:31 AM
Good decision to make it a toolbar. I think one dock is enough
Naked Light is becoming a great and useful tool. Thanks for that.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:32 AM
One thing that is an absolute-must is good keyboard shortcuts for the tools. Photoshop is a good example, as is Shake (single-letter shortcuts for the most part)
Another interesting idea would be a quicksilver-like node-adder. Say you hit tab, type “bl” tab again (or enter, or either) and a blur node gets added. Something like that could work very nicely with a node-based application. In fact, ‘f’ would be a good shortcut for it..
The Photoshop shortcuts are good for tools, but not for filters (of which there could be thousands), Quicksilvers interface is very good at pulling a specific item from a large list, and seems overall very fitting to selecting image-filters.
It also doesn’t seem to have been done before, so it would be pretty unique.
Another (similar) feature that would make NakedLight so much nicer than most other image-editing applications is easily customizable keyboard shortcuts (Hide them in Preferences> Advanced > Keyboard to keep things simple for most users, but make it available somewhere)…
If you could add single-key shortcuts for commonly used tools, the ‘f’ filters Quicksilver-a-like selector and customizable shortcuts, that alone will make NakedLight utterly great..
April 10th, 2008 at 10:19 AM
Luke: A single click is going to mimic Photoshop’s behavior, and select the top-most tool or filter in the stack. I might make that behavior an option, though.
Kevin: Thanks for the kudos!
dbr: Some filters in Naked light already have shortcuts. Typically, tool shortcuts are single characters with no modifier keys, while filters are characters with the control key.
I actually have really old mockups of a QuickSilver/Spotlight-like feature somewhere that I tried to dig up last night. They’re not on my current computer, though, and silly as this is, it’s too hot to run my G5. It’ll explode. That’s not coming in 1.0 for sure—Naked light doesn’t have enough features yet, and there’s too much other stuff to do already—but it’s definitely on the table for 1.5 or 2.0.
Same with customizable shortcuts (and also a customizable layout for tools and filters): its a great feature, but there’s not enough time to get it out by 1.0.