Snow Leopard: Time to let it go

September 8, 2009, 21:50

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?

If you're still using Leopard or Tiger it still works fine. The new version I am releasing here will not expire, nor require a serial number.

So you're releasing the source right ?

It's a very bad source. Not only would I be slightly ashamed of the quality of the code but I wouldn't recommend anyone doing anything or it, much less trying to fix it. It would be a terrible waste of time. Also I am too tired to setup a SVN repository.

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

Well, yes, sort of. If you gave something recently and feel deeply wronged, I'll give you your money back. In the meantime I'll try to find a solution that may please everyone. I'll post about it if it works out.



PS:Sorry for any mistakes, I am typing this straight into the database since I haven't restored the backoffice part of the website, since my webserver's harddrive crashed, just after the provider which hosted the backups complained about too much disk usage (which is why I lack some recent backups). There are times when everything comes crashing down :-)

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