Finally!! ImagePlay 0.2 Released.
So after months in the pipeline, ImagePlay 0.2 has finally been released. It doesn’t have shape-layers like I mentioned in a previous post, but it does have new Text layers, and numerous improvements and new features throughout.
One major new feature is the Effects/Groups Manager. This nifty window automatically takes care of moving your effects groups between two folders “Groups” and “Groups Disabled.” It also displays a preview of the selected effect or group making management much easier.
There are a number of performance improvements with regards to the workspace. I did a lot of work to optimize drawing operations in general, but in particular the selection rect. It took me a good week to implement and tweak the sub-recting routine it now uses to determine the smallest possible area to update as you drag the selection rect around. The end result is that its much faster. If you’ve ever tried dragging a selection across several layers in a large project window you’ll definitely feel the difference.
Working with movies has been much improved as well. Now you can include the sound track when exporting, as well as other layers. This is great for doing logo overlays and things like that.
Another big improvement isn’t really a feature so much, but an ability. ImagePlay is now a Universal binary on MacOS X! In my rough tests this means almost double the performance on Intel Macs. And on the Windows version I have fixed a slew of bugs which basically made the program useless, and I’ve packaged it up in an installer. So now ImagePlay is acting a bit more like a well behaved Windows app.
Due to all the work I’ve put into this release I’ve decided to move from a “donation” system to a “purchase” system. The price is now firmly set at $20.00 USD. However, this does NOT change the open source status of the project or the Effects Library. The Effects Library is still free for all developers to use in their own projects, and it will always be so.
So, go check out ImagePlay 0.2 and tell me what you think! The complete change log is listed there as well, and it’s a long list.