You Can’t Fire Me, I Don’t Work In This Van

Gluestick 1.1 is the next free update to Gluestick we’re working on. It’s probably about a month away, but we’re already made substantial headway on it.

One feature that has been requested is the ability to change the transparent color of an image. This is helpful for dealing with images that come with some sort of background, like JPG’s that have a white background. We’ve already written some custom CoreImage code that does this, and we’ll be integrating it into Gluestick 1.1.

The second thing we’ve been working on is AppleScript/Automator support. This is one of those obvious things that just didn’t make it into 1.0.

Another issue we’re working on addressing is bringing in images with different aspect ratios into Gluestick. When you use a template, you can replace images in the composition by dragging a new image onto the appropriate layer in the layer list. This works great if the original image and the replacement image have the same aspect ratio, if you don’t, there is some awkward stretching. This can make things rough if you want to do something like badging folders with pictures from iPhoto. To address this, we’re adding a sheet that drops down when the new image has a different aspect ratio. It will let you size to fit, or adjust the bounds of the layer to the right aspect ratio.

Which also reminds me. We’re adding support for proportional scaling of images in layers.

I’m also looking at the bundled templates. In 1.1 we’re going to push user created templates more. User created templates are available in 1.0, but they aren’t well documented, and you can’t add user created templates to the templates menu. All the templates in Gluestick are also icon related. I’ll be adding some more templates for more vanilla tasks, like framing photos.

The registration system is now working. The delay had to do with getting Kagi’s servers to talk to our server, but it’s all fixed now!

Some of you may have noticed Gluestick has been released today. The registration server is running a bit behind, I apologize in advance. We’re working with Kagi to get it up.

In the meantime Gluestick runs perfectly fine in unregistered mode. Enjoy!

Earlier I mentioned that the Gluestick final canidate was delayed due to one last minute addition. Well, I’m happy to announce what we’ve been working on!

Gluestick compositions now operate in a three dimensional context. That is, layers can have depth. You can transform layers now using pitch, yaw, and roll! Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the time I said that Gluestick wasn’t optimized yet for 8 core systems?

So I have a new eight core Mac Pro on order, but I’m stuck in the mass GeForce 8800 GT wait. So tonight, I went to the Apple store to see the new Macbook Air, and I tried Gluestick on one of the new 8 core Mac Pros while I was there.

My primary development system is a dual core Macbook Pro 2.16 ghz, and on average Gluestick spawns 3-4 threads while idle, and 5-6 threads while busy. Pretty decent optimizations for a quad core system or dual core system.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when I fired up Gluestick on a new Mac Pro and found that it had spawned 20 threads. When it was more active it spawned around 25 threads. Gluestick was running great on the new Mac Pros. Now, I wish I could take credit for this, but it would seem there is some previously unknown optimizations in OS X that Gluestick is taking advantage of that allow it to run nicely on 8 cores.

It’s time to take the wraps off our first post-themes program. It’s called Gluestick, and we think it’s going to make creating simple graphics easy and quick.

The Gluestick icon was created by Bobby Anderson last year before he got hired by Apple. He did a great job, rendering it all the way up to 1024×1024. You can find the Gluestick icon on his homepage here.

Gluestick is not a heavy duty graphics editor like Photoshop or Pixelmator. Rather, it is a quick and easy editor built for the Can Combine Icons or iLife type. Want to combine a few photos together or create a title slide for an iMovie? Gluestick makes it a snap.

Our beta testers made us keep it lean and quick. It starts fast, it makes it quick to create a composition, and it saves fast. We included several time saving features that we think are really cool, and we haven’t seen in other software. I have a feeling you’ll think they’re cool too. But you’ll have to wait until Gluestick is done to try them.

Gluestick does not use a 3rd party graphics engine like Pixelmator. We started writing the graphics engine in OpenGL on 10.4, but then Apple demoed their lovely CoreAnimation API for 10.5, and we just had to make the move. Gluestick uses CoreAnimation for it’s rendering, meaning that creating a composition is beautiful as well as quick. Yes, this means Gluestick is fully GPU accelerated. In addition, we’ve optimized it for multi-core CPU’s. Gluestick can take advantage of up to four cores simultaneously, and we’re working on getting it optimized properly for eight. The graphics engine will even render your images with smooth scaling, and nifty CoreImage effects.

Gluestick is in final candidate, although we made the executive decision to make one major change in the last build, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer to get your hands on it. Gluestick requires Mac OS 10.5. It should run great on any Intel Mac or G5, but G4’s are also supported. We’re always working on getting it running faster so that users of older G4’s will be able to effectively use Gluestick.

The entire web site will be going down at various times over the next few days for scheduled maintenance. Dradis will be one of the effected services. Those of you who are submitting Gluestick bugs should hold off for the next few days.

We’ve recently released code and file format specifications that allows developers to read guiKit files. I thought I’d write an entry, explaining why we have released this code, and at the same time explain why we have not released a theme changer. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments haven’t been working. I’m fixing them now, but I have to dig through all the spam to approve pending comments. So if you submitted a comment in… uhhhh… the last few months since the switch to Dreamhost, maybe earlier, they didn’t go through. Shouldn’t happen in the future.

I’ve been getting quite a few requests recently for a new Catalyst build, so I took a break from the project I was working on to compile up a new copy. The only change is this copy is built against the newest version of ThemeKit, so it works with the Extras.rsrc platform profile standard devised by Geekspiff.

The reason Catalyst previously did not let you export .rsrc’s is because I didn’t want rsrc’s getting out into the world without profiles. There will be a build coming that will allow one to generate Extras.rsrc files from Catalyst for whatever it is you’d like to do with an Extras.rsrc. As a bonus, after lots of re-writing of the Intel compatibility code, you’ll be able to choose which platform you want to generate the Extras.rsrc for. On Intel and want to ship your PowerPC friend an Extras.rsrc file? No problem.

If people keep bothering me, I’ll get a new build out that exposes this functionality in the GUI of Catalyst.

I’m knee deep in a 10.5 based project right now. Originally it was targeted for 10.4, but at WWDC last year I met with some people and I decided the project would be much better suited for 10.5. If the blog has been quiet, it’s because I can’t really talk about my current project without talking about 10.5… and that would go to well with Apple. But, when sufficiently prodded I am maintaining Catalyst.