[Horsepoo!!!]

Naked light on MacNN's front page. First I ever heard of this app.

Looks very, very interesting. I hope this thing isn't all glitz. The concept looks novel and amazingly powerful (if it actually works the way it's being advertised as working).

I suppose it needs 10.5 because it makes use of CoreAnimation to draw parts of its interface. How else could one explain the light gray window (as opposed to dark gray) and the nonstandard scrollbars (if I had to take a guess, I would say that they probably fade in and fade out depending if the cursor is within the canvas or outside the canvas so that the artist can take a look at a the image sans-scrollbars). Also seems to make use of the newly available source pane API as well as the new transparent HUD-style API for the Inspector window.

Vewwwwy intewesting! I used to be excited about Pixelmator but the hype for this app has just eclipsed Pixelmator's hype...at least for me it did. Pixelmator being more of the same (a Photoshop-clone using Apple technology as well as open-source libraries) but with a facelift. Naked light looks to be something original and many times more powerful.

I guess answers to my questions will come on Friday.

[Horsepoo!!!]

BTW, people that find Leopard's feature set lackluster have to realize that you can't judge a book by its cover. There's a lot of hidden underhood changes that allow developers to create an app such as Naked light that would otherwise not easily be possible under, say, Tiger.

When you're paying for Leopard, you're paying for the privilege to use apps that were easier to develop (using new APIs) allowing the developer to focus on, for example, the development of a novel concept such as node-based compositing.

Developers that don't necessarily use all the available APIs but absolutely want to be unique and change the look of their windows, are stuck with Photoshop-clones because they've been busy manually coding their new interface look instead of thinking of a way to radically improve on existing façons-de-faire which, in the end, brings nothing new to the table.

[MartiNZ]

Wow that's some hype on their site.

Good to see some quick-off-the-mark development using core animation. I think I'll have to try it just to see if I notice ... whatever one notices with core animation. Of course, I doubt my 12" G4 PB will run it to great effect .

[- - e r i k - -]

Wow. Didn't there use to be an app for classic back in the PPC days that was sort of like this too? Live editing with infinite resolution?

This looks very interesting indeed. Can't wait to get my hands on the beta.

[legacyb4]

Yeah, this looks very very interesting. Pixelmator seemed to fall flat after its release due to performance issues from the reviews I remember reading.

I think --erik-- is referring to Live Picture?

[- - e r i k - -]

That's the one legacyb4. I knew it was Live something.

[eggman]

Interesting. I used to work as a developer on xRes, a Live Picture competitor, after Macromedia acquired it. Some of us on the team were advocating building something much like this, and encountered resistance from upper management who were focused on wanting to build a graphics editor for the web instead.

Most of us on the team thought a hybrid vector/raster image editor with live effects would be a Photoshop killer, but the guy in charge of making those strategic decisions mused that back when he was a student he tried to build something combining raster and vector and it was a 'bad idea'. (He was telling this to a guy who, at that time, already had 10 year's experience building groundbreaking professional graphics applications.) This was back when Photoshop still only had one level of 'undo', and no layer effects.

Well, dense management decisions do have consequences, so when Macromedia's stock price dropped, the xRes team (and several other teams) got axed. Imagine my surprise when a few years later Macromedia came out with Fireworks - with a combination of raster/vector tools and live effects. Not nearly as ambitious and groundbreaking as what we'd envisioned, and (of course) focused on a toolset for the web, but years too late to catch Photoshop.

There are some thorny problems in trying to maintain resolution independence while working with intrinsically sample-based elements, like digital photos and scans... but a lot more can be done than I've seen done to date. I'm intensely curious and wish these guys well.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Wow, I learn new things everyday. I guess Naked light's concept isn't completely new. This is the first time I hear about Live Picture and xRes...looks like these two apps were really ahead of their time.

I did a search on Google and come up with this webpage:
BYTE.com

...and couldn't help but notice the price tag. $3995

I guess it was the price to pay back then for something so advanced.

I'm curious though...how was xRes' and Live Picture's performance. Naked light will get it's some of its performance the same way every new Mac compositor/editor apps do it: through CoreImage. But how was xRes and Live Picture able to maintain decent performance on infinitely scalable canvases and live effects on a 1994 or 1995 PPC Mac with 16-64MB of RAM (yeah...remember those days)? The link explains how Live Picture was able to maintain some performance but still...I have trouble believing you could have live previews of effects even the new revised way of storing changes to a picture.

[MacosNerd]

Seems to be another app doing what aperture, Lightroom, Lightzone is doing except its not even in beta (looks to be in beta 11/9/07).

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't seem much room for yet another non-destructive photo-editing product

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by MacosNerd 

Seems to be another app doing what aperture, Lightroom, Lightzone is doing except its not even in beta (looks to be in beta 11/9/07).

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't seem much room for yet another non-destructive photo-editing product

Lightroom and Aperture aren't image compositors. For example, Lightroom and Aperture don't allow you to take pieces of one photo and pieces from another photo and put them together to make something brand new. You can play with color levels, adjust contrast, and do basic photo touchups but you could never compose a brand new image in Lightroom or Aperture like you can with Photoshop can (or Pixelmator, or Acorn, or Naked light.)

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!! 

I suppose it needs 10.5 because it makes use of CoreAnimation to draw parts of its interface. How else could one explain the light gray window (as opposed to dark gray) and the nonstandard scrollbars

Those scrollbars are an option in interface builder for 10.5's Dev tools.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by Kevin 

Those scrollbars are an option in interface builder for 10.5's Dev tools.

Cool...in what context does Apple want developers to use them in? I'm starting to see similar scrollbars (starting with the widget manager in Dashboard and now notes in Mail) in recent apps.

I should check interface builder because I'm sure there's a lot of new stuff in there.

[eggman]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!! 

...and couldn't help but notice the price tag. $3995

I guess it was the price to pay back then for something so advanced.

I remember when the first graphics software I worked on, Lumena, cost $2,500 - it ran under DOS and used the equally pricey AT&T Targa Graphics card - $2,995 for 16-bit color at 512 x 480 resolution (with NO graphics accelleration at all. None).

<oldfart> And we liked it! </oldfart>

Because that was 10 times cheaper than the dedicated turnkey hardware/software that was beyond the reach of would-be digital artists at the time.

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!! 

I'm curious though...how was xRes' and Live Picture's performance. Naked light will get it's some of its performance the same way every new Mac compositor/editor apps do it: through CoreImage. But how was xRes and Live Picture able to maintain decent performance on infinitely scalable canvases and live effects on a 1994 or 1995 PPC Mac with 16-64MB of RAM (yeah...remember those days)?

The interactive performance of these systems (inc. Photoshop) would be laughable by today's standards, but then again they were running on 80 MHz processors (if you were lucky). However, they typically rendered in real-time at screen resolution - while stashing away procedural descriptions of the image editing process for ripping at higher resolution at output (or upon zooms of sub-tiles of the image). As a result they were reasonably responsive, especially by the standards of the time. Those standards allowed for doing something and waiting a second or so for it to finish processing. That was the order of the day... read early reviews of Fractal Design Painter - some of their brushes (at screen resolutions) produced beautiful effects... but you'd often just see a trail of dots when you made a brushstroke... and then it would fill in as you watched.

As I recall (we're talking over 14 years ago!) high resolution scans would be brought into the application by being translated into a multi-tiered image "pyramid", with representations scaled down to a variety of lower resolutions for use interactively in 'real time' during workflow. Like Google Maps today, higher resolution data would be loaded as needed, as you zoomed in.

BTW, that multi-scale representation of images was the inspiration for a very early web browser plug-in prototype which allowed you to display very hi-res images online by zooming and panning. It was called "Shockwave for xRes" and never left the skunkworks.

Of course, what we considered very hi-res in those days is now habitually edited in Photoshop without blinking. That's the difference between having 4GB of memory vs. 40MB. And eight 3GHz cores (or even two 2GHz cores) vs. one 80MHz. processor.

Orders of magnitude matter.

[legacyb4]

Did I miss pricing on Naked Light or has it not been posted?

[Chuckit]

The pricing hasn't been decided, I think. It's not even in beta yet.

[Horsepoo!!!]

The thing that intrigues me the most is that the interface looks curiously bare. Maybe the app won't pack as many tools as other image compositors...oooor maybe they've got a trick up their sleeve and managed to make this thing amazingly simple while providing powerful features.

Just by looking at the node-based interface, I understand how it will work in conjunction with the inspector window...but I still have no idea how the tool dock will work. Is the tool dock a floating window? Probably not if you read the description...apparently it would be on the edge of a screen to make use of Fitt's Law but what if the Mac OS X dock is in the way? So many questions...so little information.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Kevin 

Those scrollbars are an option in interface builder for 10.5's Dev tools.

I don't think they are...

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by goMac 

I don't think they are...

I'll take a screenshot when I get home. I don't have Leopard on my work computer. Probably wont till some things get worked out.

BTW if you ask me, Leopard was put out to support a larger frame of computers. Once this new RI GUI comes out, I think the bomb will drop on a lot of non Intel Macs.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Kevin 

I'll take a screenshot when I get home. I don't have Leopard on my work computer. Probably wont till some things get worked out.

BTW if you ask me, Leopard was put out to support a larger frame of computers. Once this new RI GUI comes out, I think the bomb will drop on a lot of non Intel Macs.

From what I've heard RI isn't a priority right now. I don't think older computers would have that much of an issue with RI.

What does require a higher end video card though is CoreAnimation, which I think is one of the biggest reasons Apple upped the requirements like they did.

[Kevin]

It needs to be a priority.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Oh gawd...Naked light is terrible. The developer warns that he didn't have time to finish the beta and that it should be considered an alpha but this thing is...well...TERRIBLE. I'd be surprised if anything good came out of this.

The concept was awesome...the brouhaha and commotion on the naked.la website really got me all riled up but this thing is a joke.

The developer says that if he had one more week to work on this app, it would have been much better. He apologizes and didn't expect such enthusiasm. But this app just looks like some CoreAnimation put together really fast, like it's someone's first time using Xcode and Interface Builder...I can't even get anything to draw in my 'compositions'.

The window is obviously not a real one...as I had suspected...neither are the top-left widgets. My OS X Dock is on the right of the screen...I also had suspected the Naked Light dock might have problems with this...of course, the stupid thing is drawn right on top of my Dock.

This is really a let down and I'm sorry I ever posted about this app.

edit: this thing isn't even alpha...this thing is developmental. It's so far from being finished it's ridiculous. No menu items. No way to delete nodes. The only tool that works is the 'rectangle' tool...and it draws a white rectangle...there are no options for it right now.

Don't download this folks...I'm almost scared now that this was some elaborate prank and Naked light is actually malware...I can't even imagine anyone releasing this abortion-of-an-app with this much hype.

[Whiplash]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!! 

Oh gawd...Naked light is terrible...
The concept was awesome...the brouhaha and commotion on the naked.la website really got me all riled up but this thing is a joke.

This is really a let down and I'm sorry I ever posted about this app.
.

This is what happens when the press covers something without actually seeing the product themselves. Anyone can quote a press release guys, we expect better from you.

This isn't even an application. this is a junior high school programming project. Obviously all the effort went into making a flashy website and generating hype. What energy was left over, is Naked Light. The program doesn't even work. None of the features talked about exist. It's a farce.

Honestly, I'm tired of this crap. Pixelmator wasn't much better. Simply rotating a large photo brought the program to it's knees.

I'm sick of Adobe charging 10 times too much for their product, but after playing with these new "revolutionary" products, I'm realizing that Adobe can charge whatever they want because they are the only company that makes a product that lives up to it's claims.

It's too bad, because I think there's a HUGE market for somebody who can make a decent mid-range product and deliver it in the $100 or so range.

[mduell]

I was skeptical when the main image on Naked light&mdash;Live filters wasn't even the right size. 900x383 image crunched down to 846x360, so it looks awful.

[CharlesS]

It... doesn't seem to do anything.

And what is that icon? It looks suspiciously like the Aqua texture blob PNG in AquaUI.bundle.

[Silky Voice of The Gorn]

I got it to do a gaussian blur and hue change on a few composited layers, and even moved the nodes around a bit to reorder things. The UI is interesting, and does remind me of Live Picture, an app I LOVED back in the day.

Unlike all the haters who seem to ignore the fact the dev was very clear about how crappy it is right now, I think it has potential.

[Mithras]

Well, the dev wasn't clear about how crappy it was until a couple of hours after his giant countdown clock went to zero. And after writing copy like this:

The emperor has new clothes. Introducing Naked light. Non-destructive image editing. Node-based compositing. Live filters. High-end tools. And infinite resolution. It's image editing, re-invented.

It is interesing, but it should have been "launched" with some quiet solicitation of feedback, not a splashy website and attention-grabbing countdown to "release".

[CharlesS]

Well, and then there's the the fact that that "The emperor has new clothes" quote is making a reference to a parable in which something had a lot of hype surrounding it but turned out not to have any substance. And then the app's name has the word "naked" in it just to drive the point home...

It makes me wonder if this is just a prank.