posted November 29th, 2008
With Naked touch out of the way, I can start (mostly) full steam ahead again on Naked light.
In that time, two important things have happened. One, Naked touch and life have delayed Naked light by a few months. Second, it appears that there’s a chance that Snow Leopard—and more importantly, OpenCL—might be a few months early. More specifically, they might come out at about the same time.
OpenCL—basically an open-standards replacement for NVIDIA’s CUDA and AMD’s Close to Metal—is clearly the future for highly parallizable tasks like the ones Naked light performs. Therefore, any work done on the current CPU and GPU renderers is redundant—it’ll be thrown away for Snow Leopard.
While I haven’t made a decision yet, it’s looking like dropping Leopard support and going exclusively Snow Leopard would be a good decision (if I do that, all present and future Pre-purchasers would be properly remunerated for the shift in system requirements). In either event, though, I need to pause work on the renderer and focus on cleaning up other incomplete features. So for now I need to adopt a sort of fiction—clearly the renderer is the portion of Naked light that needs the most work, but for now I’m going to work on other parts, anyway.
Composition History
This update introduces the History panel.
Much like Photoshop’s History palette, Naked light’s History panel presents a visual interface for all the actions you have performed in a composition. To quickly jump back and forth multiple states, you can just click on a state in the panel: all states after that will become undone, and all states before and including the clicked state will become done (or redone.)
Get It
Naked light Preview 5 now works only on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.5 and higher. This version also features a few sundry bug fixes.
November 30th, 2008 at 6:56 PM
Looks promising. I would, however, design the UI a dark grey, like Shake, instead of the tired Apple chrome. It’s way better for photo editing / compositing.
My2Cents
Ed
November 30th, 2008 at 7:13 PM
Flickr authorization still makes the app crashing. And a basic tutorial would be good, because naked light seems to be quite a different beast than the other image editor.
December 1st, 2008 at 6:08 PM
If making the app Snow Leopard only is what it takes to make it what you want Naked Light to be then I say go for it. I’m already a big fan and personally can’t wait to see how 10.6 makes it even better.