ImagePlay 0.1.5 Released!!
Check out the newest version of ImagePlay and send me some feedback.
This release mostly focusses on new features, and other interface stuff. The previous releases focussed more on effects-centric things. Still I managed to improve the performance of a few effects, and add a couple new ones. Colorize and Outline are two cool new effects. I’m still trying to perfect the effects needed to get that perfect “cartoon” look to turn a real life photo into a flat 2-D characterization.
Unfortunately, I still feel that ImagePlay is pretty “stiff” in it’s design. The manipulation of layers and effects needs to be more free-form. Letting the user “mold” images rather than tweak knobs. I hope to add drawing/painting layers in the future, but that’s a subject for a different entry…
I can sit back and relax for a bit now. I always get a bit nervous when I’m doing a release. Checking and double checking the software to make sure there are no major flaws I’ve missed. Then putting the release packages together, updating the website, sending out update notices, etc.
I probably could have gotten out a release a couple months sooner if I had gone through the bug-fix cycle sooner. It is more fun to add features than it is to fix glitches and implement basic but tedious behavior. The last couple of weeks have been crazy, I’ve been testing, testing, testing. I try to keep my code structure sensical and organized, but it’s surprising how much time is spent fixing bugs. You implement a fix for a problem which changes behavior somewhere else, so you have to go making sure the whole app still operates fine for every behavioral change in the program.
As mentioned in my previous post, there were some new features I was working on for this release that had to get axed so I could ship something now. Major new features/rewrites cause bugs like nothing else. For example, you can now preview effects before you add them to a layer. This function doesn’t let you change the effect’s settings in the preview window, adding such ability would end up being a major investment of time. So instead I put it off for a later version. But at least the basic ability is there now.
In the rush of development I sometimes neglect to note things in the change log. New features tend to get omitted more than anything. And there there’s the “fix” question; was this functionality broken in the last release or did I break it during the development cycle? So there’s a whole other job that needs to get done on each release. Anyway the point I’m making as that the Change Log isn’t as exact as I’d like it to be.