posted April 3rd, 2008

The Naked light Pre-purchase Program was a resounding success. Not just better than expected, better even than I’d hoped. Seriously, 3× better than I’d hoped. It was kind of ridiculous.

Was.

Pre-purchase sales stopped precipitously and abruptly last week, after only a few days, and I’m rather dependent on sales continuing–not necessarily as well as they started off, but well enough that I can you know, pay the bills.

At first, of course, I was really upset at this. Had demand really already been fulfilled? What would it take to bring back demand for Naked light? Would I be able to do that before I ran out of time (in other words, money)?

Yesterday I figured something out that, with 50/50 hindsight, is now really obvious. The last day of really good sales was last Monday, March 24^th. The next day, Tuesday, the 25^th, was my first blog post after the announcement of the Pre-purchase Program–a casual post about the Dock. The Pre-purchase Program isn’t mentioned anywhere else on my website.

In other words, when the Pre-purchase Program was no longer at the top of the blog, people stopped (just about, at least) pre-purchasing.

Or, in chart form:

Chart courtesy of Microsoft Paint. Apologies for the Arial and the dumb quotes.

Let this be a lesson to all software developers who aren’t well in tune with the obvious: make it really, really easy for people to give you money.

So a couple of things need to change. I have to be a bit more vocal in advocating the Pre-purchase Program. I really need sales to continue. Y’know, the kid’s gotta eat. This means three things:

• The Pre-purchase Program needs to be featured more prominently on the website and blog.
• I need to put really tiny and tasteful messages in the RSS feed. These will be totally quiet and not at all annoying, I swear and/or promise.
• I need to put a nice little notice in the beta. Again, totally quiet and non-intrusive. No pop-ups or modal dialogs, just a little note in the corner of a window. Think more Panic-style than David Watanabe-style. Plus, this’ll be turned off when you enter in your license.

I think I have figured out the right balance of letting people know about the program while making the program subtle enough to be easily ignored by those that have already bought a license or don’t care to. If I don’t get it right, of course, drop me a note.

Uh oh, what’s this?

While I’ve got your attention, the Naked light Pre-purchase Program totally needs some love.

For more details, see the Naked light Pre-purchase Program.

Thanks!

posted by Brandon Rosse | 2 Comments

posted April 3rd, 2008

My main development computer is out for the count. An early MacBook Pro, it had one of the early-design MagSafe power adapters that was apt to melt. Correction: it had four early-design MagSafe power adapters that all melted. The latest one lasted the longest–a whopping 8 months or so. But yesterday, it finally went to MagSafe hell, in a puff of smoke, sparks, and acrid smells.

So naturally I moved on to my second computer, a Power Mac G5. The Power Mac isn’t without its flaws. Something isn’t quite right with the cooling system, and the system likes to shut down randomly when under heavy loads or in mildly warm weather. In this case, a rogue episode of How I Met Your Mother was the culprit. Flash video, you murdered my computer.

No amount of open windows, nor strategically placed (and carefully wrapped) ice packs could cool the raging tower down. Nor did time help: when turned on, even this morning, the fallen computer roars loudly for maybe 8 seconds, then shuts off abruptly.

This leads us to my next Mac. A single-processor, 500 Mhz Power Mac G4, this computer predates Mac OS X, hasn’t been turned on in several years, and, apparently, died peacefully somewhere since then. It seemed to start up fine: it got all the way to the sign-in screen. But the keyboard and mouse (incidentally, the same ones that previously worked with the G5) lay unrecognized. Upon a reboot, the computer can’t seem to find the system folder.

I have a flashing image of a Classic folder with a question mark. Granted, I have no idea of what version of OS X this computer is running, but that should give you a hint. 10.2, maybe 10.3.

So that’s all of my Macs, out of commission, within 24 hours.

I’m running on a borrowed Dell Latitude, with a Pentium III, designed for Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98, a barely functional track pad, and a constant wheeze of hard drive noises. I’m assuming that’s the sound of all the bot nets it’s inevitably a part of.

If I’m lucky, I could be up and running tomorrow with a new, allegedly non-melting power adaptor. Otherwise, it should come for sure on Monday. That said, in the mean time, email responses will be slow, development’s paused for a few days, and I’m debating downloading the GIMP and trying to work on maybe (finally) getting a message board set up. Let’s hope this computer’s up to the task.

The G5 is worse news, as I need that to get PowerPC support working. With luck, it’ll come back to life in the next week or so. It always has, but each time it acts up I fear it’ll be the last. It might just need a new graphics card, I might need to get a whole new PowerPC guinea pig. More on that later when I figure out what’s going on.

Update: Christmas has come early! I’m back in business on my MacBook Pro!

posted by Brandon Rosse | 1 Comment

posted March 27th, 2008

Naked light Beta 3 is out today!

As the name implies, updates for the rest of March and through April are going to focus on compatiblity: getting images into Naked light, getting images out of Naked light, and getting Naked light to work on PowerPC machinery.

Saving

Finally, saving is activated. Naked light handles saving a little differently than most applications: it saves compositions directly into your Library. As you can see above, the process of saving is pretty quick and painless—just (optionally) type in a name and that’s that.

One major issue right now: there’s currently no way to save a document externally. In other words, if you wish to send a composition to a friend (or more likely, to me to report a bug), you can’t. There’s several issues related to this that need to be fixed to prevent a mass accumulation of duplicate images every time a composition got passed back and forth.

Known Bugs

• Masks are not saved.
• Intermittently, if you close and reopen a composition, its sheet will still be open
• File names are ignored in many situations, causing unnecessary “untitleds” to abound

iPhoto Support

This feature briefly showed up in one of the earlier betas, and now works. iPhoto images work just like regular library images. You can open them up in a new composition, drag them into the library, and drag them into albums.

Images that are used in compositions need to be saved to the library, so when you use an iPhoto image in a composition and save it, that image will automatically be imported.

Brushes

Brushes are now insanely fast. I frankly never, ever expected them to work this fast, and yet they do.

There’s still a few performance issues when drawing a brush (particularly a smaller one) for the first time, but that can be easily fixed.

The main speedup came from switching the code from Core Image to the Naked Anatomy Engine. There were two huge wins here.

As you may know, a brush stroke is a collection of paint daubs. Painting programs literally just draw a circle thousands of times in succession. In Core Image, I did this using a class called CIImageAccumulator, which let me draw a succession of Core Image filters. CIImageAccumulator, though, causes your CPU to work in lock-step with the GPU. This is fine in most situations, but at times when there’s a large number of filters (brushes) being drawn, it negates the best qualities of both the CPU and the GPU. The Naked Anatomy Engine let’s me drop directly into OpenGL, so I can upload all the brush locations at once, tell the GPU to render them, and then go off and do my own thing.

The other win is that the Naked Anatomy Engine is resolution independent. Core Image assumes that one point equals one pixel. That hasn’t been the case on any display made in the last decade, and means that with Core Image I had to re-layout all the little daubs of paint each time you zoomed in or out. With the Naked Anatomy Engine, I can re-use the same layout information time after time. This means that to completely redraw a brush stroke from scratch, I just need to copy a small buffer to the GPU and tell it to crunch away. It’s crazy fast.

Known Bugs

• The brush preview, for some reason, no longer works.
• Multiple dodging and burning operations don’t work—only the last one or two are shown.
• The blur and sharpen brushes are ridiculously, and unacceptably, slow.

Levels

Levels finally has a graphical interface!

The histograms may seem a bit strange if you’re used to Levels in Photoshop or Aperture, but after playing around a bit they’re pretty self explanatory and way more intuitive. The top, upside down one is the histogram of the image going into your Levels node. The bottom histogram is an estimate of the outgoing histogram.

The display visually shows you exactly what’s going on.

Curves is (still) broken. Soon I should be able to fix that and pop some histograms in there, too.

Library View

I put a little love into the Library this release.

The Library is much snappier. Instead of always rendering full quality images, the Library drops into a low quality mode when you’re, say, resizing your window to keep animation speeds up.

Selections are visually much clearer. There was a tendency before for selections to be almost unnoticeable.

You can now select an area of images (as shown). This obviously also needs to get put into the node view, too.

It’s now much easier to create albums. Previously, you had to drag and drop images into the source view. Now you get a simple plus icon.

Code Accumulation

While this may not be immediately apparent, I did a fairly largish rewrite to the accumulator which combines the code from multiple nodes into one GLSL program.

I’m praying that this will fix two bugs—El Crasho #1, and the Black canvas bug. These two bugs are nightmares of mine because I can’t reproduce them myself, nor can I figure out what causes them and why they’re there.

If this doesn’t fix these bugs, it will still make future debugging much, much easier, which is of course a huge win.

Get It

posted by Brandon Rosse | 7 Comments

posted March 25th, 2008

The dock is easily Naked light’s most-complained-about feature, so I don’t think it came as any surprise when I mentioned during the Pre-purchase Program announcement that I was looking at ways to let people customize it more to their liking.

As of right now, the plan is to simply make it a palette, similar to Photoshop CS3′s toolbar. When dragged to the sides of your screen, it’ll attach—and work like the dock does currently—Fitt’s Law and all. When free-floating, it’ll work just like Photoshop.

I’ve already recoded the dock twice—once for Core Animation, and once again to speed it up and fix some bugs. So to prevent having to recode the dock four or five times, I need your input now.

What suggestions do you have for the dock? What would you like to see?

posted by Brandon Rosse | 3 Comments

posted March 21st, 2008

The Naked light Pre-purchase Program gives you a steep, 50%-off discount off of Naked light, in exchange for helping Naked by funding a part of the development process.

Naked light 1.0 will go on sale in late Summer, 2008. (For international types, summer in the United States ends September 22nd—six months from now.)

Open Beta

Naked light will remain in open beta for everyone. Paying early just gives you a sizable discount and a warm feeling in your heart. Oh, and I’ll totally get rid of the dock for you.

How It Works

Licenses are available for purchase through Google Checkout. Once I receive your order, I’ll send you a serial number.

Current versions of Naked light Beta don’t accept serial numbers, but future versions will shortly.

Refunds

The Pre-purchase program fee is fully refundable. If a feature you want isn’t showing up or if you just changed your mind, shoot me an email (at refunds@naked.la) with your account information.

Keep in mind that after the Pre-purchase program ends, the price goes up to $99.99.

Bugginess

As you may know, Naked light is fairly buggy at the moment, and simply doesn’t work at all on some computers. Unfortunately, this is a half-Catch-22. I can’t get access to the requisite hardware without cash, and I can’t get cash without the Pre-purchase Program.

If you’re one of the people affected by the bugs, mea culpa. If you want, the Pre-purchase Program would totally help me out and is again refundable if those bugs don’t get fixed soon enough for you. If not, no worries—hopefully enough other people will order the Pre-purchase Program.

If you’re hesitant, though, drop me a message in the comments or by email (brandon@naked.la) about what is holding you back. I can’t guarantee that I can accommodate you—some bugs I just can’t fix in the short term—but I’ll see what I can do.

Why the Pre-purchase Program

I need cash to fund Naked light’s completion. I love working on it full time, but without any income, that’s not possible.

Venture capital really isn’t designed for small companies like Naked—I only need a few thousand dollars, not a few million. I also, frankly, don’t want to spend the time right now soliciting it when I could be working on Naked light.

Bank loans aren’t possible given the intersection of my relative youth (and equivalently youthful credit history) and the current state of the US economy. When the economy was better I could’ve squeezed by, but not being a huge fan of massive debt, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t.

The Pre-purchase Program is good on a lot of fronts. In loan terms, it’s fairly expensive for me: that 50% off to get liquidity six months early works out to be roughly the equivalent of a 300% interest rate. But, it’s relatively low-risk (risk free, in fact, as long as not everyone demands a refund at once), gives me a better understanding of the demand for Naked light, and, well, it’s a really good discount for you.

As an added bonus, I’m hoping that pre-purchasing might psychologically encourage some people to stick around here a bit more, giving me their feedback, and helping me make Naked light better.

Naked light Status Update

Naked light Beta 3.0—the Compatibility Edition—is coming out next week. Important features include iPhoto support, raw image support, a drastically faster brush engine, histograms, and bug fixes. Later Compatibility Edition releases (3.1, 3.2, etc…) should include proper Photoshop support, color management, more export options, and, finally, Universal support.

Pre-purchase It

posted by Brandon Rosse | 6 Comments

posted March 14th, 2008

I’m hoping to get raw image support into Naked light for the next large release, and to help this out, I need lots and lots of raw images!

If you’re interested in helping out, the following would be incredible:

• One or two raw images from your camera
• The make and model of your camera

All sent to rawrequest@naked.la! This would be a huge, huge help.

Quick Status Update

I’ve got a some really exciting stuff working right now, but Naked light’s been in a right buggy state, which is why there’s been a dearth of posts lately. I don’t mean to waste anyone’s time with an obviously buggy release (I’ve probably done that one too many times). I may release Beta 2.5 early next week, or I may just skip ahead to Beta 3.0, which should be out in the next week or two.

That said, I really don’t like not posting to the blog for this long of a time, so I figure some feedback is in order. If you want more (or less) frequent beta releases, or more (or again less) blog updates, let me know in the comments!

posted by Brandon Rosse | 1 Comment

posted February 15th, 2008

I had a sinking feeling as I posted the last release that I was missing something. I double-checked my To-Do lists, I ran through everything in my head, but I couldn’t figure out was it was, so I went ahead and posted it.

Turns out the feelings were right. That past release was probably the sloppiest, buggiest yet. Sorry.

There’s nothing terribly exciting in this release (I took Wednesday and Thursday off, so this is really only a morning’s worth of work), but since the bugs are fixed, it’s worth posting. Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 20 Comments

posted February 12th, 2008

The Speed Edition continues. This release is more focused on bug fixes, but also features some speed ups and an unfortunate speed regression (one speedup is still too buggy to be used). Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 3 Comments

posted February 4th, 2008

2.0 is the New 1.0

One of the (many) awesome things about being done with Beta One is that I can now release smaller releases much more frequently, hopefully on close to a weekly basis.

Beta 2.0 isn’t quite as different from 1.0 as 1.0 was from 0.0. I’m calling it 2.0 because it’s logically grouped with the next few updates which are all linked around speed.

That said, I got some of the biggest performance out of the way and Naked light is now ridiculously fast compared to Friday’s release (assuming you have the requisite hardware!) Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 10 Comments

posted February 1st, 2008

Two is the New One

I apologize—I took two weeks instead of one. I think that’s the last time I pre-announce any dates for a while.

There’s some pretty exciting changes under the hood, this time around! The corollary to this is that I can release smaller, incremental releases going forward, which is clearly much more desirable in terms of getting feedback and not having to disappear for a bit. Anyway, here we go! Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 11 Comments