Oops, it seems the previous released was compiled without PowerPC code. My apologies to the G4/G5 users who reported this.

It won't work on snow leopard but at least it'll work for those with PowerPC machines who cannot upgrade anyway :-)

1568 comments | By Santiago Lema

I just experimented a bit tonight with ChocoFlop on snow leopard and I noticed that if I forced software rendering (in preferences/technical), then rendering was fine.

Of course sofware rendering is much slower so this is not a solution, but it can get you through the day.

Also I found out that if I didn't call CIImageAccumulator's undocumented (but pretty useful) method named 'commitUpdates:' at lot of the corruption disappeared. Sadly without this most of the changes in the document are lost, but it sure *looks* like you can almost use it...



Good night :-)

1 comments | By Santiago Lema

When I came home after a long day of work tonigh, I decided to spend a few hours trying to fix ChocoFlop so that it would work again in Snow Leopard. I am afraid to say not only I didn't make it but I don't think I will be able to do it without spending weeks on it... And sadly, all I have is a few evenings here and there. So don't get your hopes high up for an update that fixes it this week.

While the application worked decently on (the old) Leopard the new version of the OS makes it useless . Barely anything works anymore :-( It has become slow, uses a lot of CPU. I don't know what changed but this is probably something deep in the roots CoreImage. Maybe updates to Snow Leopard will fix the issues it brought and ChocoFlop will run decently on 10.6.1 but I just wouldn't count on it.

On the whole, the truth is that ChocoFlop was a rather ambitious project. A little too ambitious to work on it on a "some evenings" basis. I started this on my iBook in 2004, having never written a mac application in my life before. I programmed on a G4 machine that didn't support CoreImage other than through software emulation. The very skeleton of the application still dates from back then. The app was based on a technology that wasn't designed to run on my poor machine. This triggered a lot of bad design choices. Moreover working on such a project one night every month made me forget half of the stuff I started and add feature bloat where I should have been fixing/rewriting the skeleton.

So the question is: can I fix it? The answer is: yes, but it would start by opening XCode and starting a new fresh project. Sadly, I simply cannot commit to that anytime soon.

The good news?

So you're releasing the source right ?

Hey, I donated! You're screwing me off!

11 comments | By Santiago Lema

I just received a report that there are issues with ChocoFlop on Snow Leopard. If you can confirm any of these please post a comment (with the name of your mac model and graphics card).

I haven't received my Leopard DVD yet. So much for preordering. I hope I can find a quick fix when this little box arrives.

PS: I got a weird duplicate key issue while adding this post (but there was no such key!), so I ran mysql 'repair table'. The issue was fixed. But somehow.. this TRASHED all the posts. Sadly I never found the time for moving the backup scripts to S3 (after the previous solution failed due to dreamhost banning backups). As a results those posts are lost forever :-( I really need to motivate myself to change those backup scripts.

8 comments | By Santiago Lema