Catalyst 0.8
Posted by Colin
After a long wait I’m back finally finished up Catalyst. 
Just to clear things up, my day job is working for a school district helping maintain a few thousand iBooks. We’ve been reformatting the iBooks over the last couple of weeks, and getting ready to add around 4000 Macbooks into the mix. With finals for schools going on at the same time, sayign I’ve been busy is an understatement.
Catalyst 0.8 is finally almost ready to go. Here is the preliminary list of changes.
General use:
-Catalyst will now allow you to manually add and remove applications from it’s skinning database in preferences.
-On first launch, Catalyst will ask whether it should import all applications from your applications folder, or if you want to import them manually.
-Catalyst no longer lists image editors twice in preferences.
-Application importing will no longer crash on an application included with the Macbook Pros.
-Search has been optimized.
-Animation has been optimized.
-Support has been added for marking a resource as “finished” or “incomplete”.
-Resources may be filtered by “finished” or ‘incomplete”.
-Launch time has been optimized. Additional support for dual core processors has been added.
-A bug that caused a previously edited resource to overwrite the next edited resource has been fixed.
Application Compatibility:
-Catalyst is now compatible with any 3rd party enhancement that alters OS X interface files including Candybar, Iridium, ThemeChanger, Uno, and more.
-Automatic theming per application version has been disabled.
CoreImage Editing:
-Importing an image from an image editor no longer breaks non destructive imaging.
-Applying a filter to the entire stack of images no longer breaks some images.
-General bugs with CoreImage editing have been addressed.
Theme Previewing:
-The Duality engine has been grafted into Catalyst. Catalyst can now live preview any system skin you’ve created. This feature is universal. Support for previewing your application skins is forthcoming.
Variations
-Several cosmetic bugs have been addressed within the variations window.
-You may now add HTML previews to variations via a WYSIWYG editor.
Resources and .Skin File Format (ThemeKit)
-Catalyst now handles pxms with different bit depths properly.
-The .Skin format has been updated. Older .skins will no longer open. This is a one time only situation. The decisions was made that .skin is not used enough to warrant backwards compatibility in this build. As a result Catalyst will have to rebuild it’s app skin database.
-Clr’s are now supported for importing, but not yet editing. Catalyst can now properly create clr’s for the Intel Macintosh platform.
-ThemeKit is being commented in preparation for release of the source.
ShapeShifter Compatibility
-Variations can now have a ShapeShifter textual description and preview picture added to them.
-A bug has been fixed within the DLTA exporter causing images to be written to the DLTA in the wrong format.