[Eug Wanker]

Just click on an effect and watch the continuously changing effect get removed or added, in real-time, on top of all the other effects. It worked just fine on my Mobility Radeon 9000 (TiBook 1 GHz).

That pic has 14 effects running simultaneously (with "108 plug-in instances").

FPS: 60
Processor Load: ~ 40-50%

[hmurchison2001]

Good find Eug. Either this guy is working on Motion or Apple plans to incorporate Pixelshox in a new and unique way.

Apple is definitely putting in the effort to stay at the forefront of graphics.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
Good find Eug. Either this guy is working on Motion or Apple plans to incorporate Pixelshox in a new and unique way.

Apple is definitely putting in the effort to stay at the forefront of graphics.

I wasn't the one who found it. It was in the other thread in which you posted. And supposedly Tiger's Quartz Composer is a souped up version of PixelShox.

[:haripu:]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
:What other image editing apps have you used?

Let's see: back in the days before PS became native to OSX I tried a few. The one that comes with the Corel Suite (don't know the name, but it was essentially like a simplified version of PS). The Gimp, of course. Interface takes some time getting used to it and doesn't support CMYK (which is a must for me). Good app. Never tried TIFFany. Ah yes, and some years ago, when PS wasn't that great already, I gave the alphas of Quark XPosure a try. They looked promising, but development was stopped.
So I have tried a few.

But that all is beside the point. The point I was trying to make (in far too many words) was just that it takes a lot more to code a "PS-Killer" than a quicker filter-technology. Years and years of know-how have gone into PS and it shows in every detail. I am all for competition but to take on PS would mean you have to offer something really ground-breaking and take image-processing to a whole new level. While Core Image is technically impressing, all it does for now is speed up things that already can be done. The real innovation won't come from this technological direction but has to come from somewhere else.

[direktor]

Working in video, I've noticed that Apple has had the beginnings of CoreVideo in the works for quite a while now.

Starting in DVDSP, they had objects you could drop into a DVD menu that you could then drop video onto, which would then apply an effect to the video. They're called patches, and you can see them if you open the DVDSP package.

Also in there is a framework called Oxygene, which is what the patches operate in from what I could tell (among other functions, I'm sure).

ALSO, in the newest versions of FCP and Livetype, Quicktime has the ability to display a Livetype project file on the fly (i.e. in a Finder preview window). All these features require some sort of framework and libraries running in the background...complex ones doing rendering, blurs, etc...many of the sorts of things seen in the demo video.

[hmurchison2001]

:haripu:

I agree. PS is more than just filters. It's a workflow. I'm not sure I know of anyone who could match PS right now other than Apple. And I think Apple's so called "PS Killer" would take 3 revisions before it was as feature complete as PS.

This pixelshox is quite interesting. I've only recently been exposed to this "VJ" phenomenon. Looks like more exciting products are on the way.

[moki]

Originally posted by Millennium:
It doesn't look like this is just a set of filters, though; this looks like a new drawing API. That means that theoretically, this could also be used to re-implement Quartz in a fully-hardware-accelerated manner, rather than the limited form currently used in Quartz Extreme.

Well, there are a few different things at work here. First, Apple did indeed announce Quartz 2D Extreme, which is the hardware acceleration you mention (text, lines, image copies, etc. all hardware accelerated). The way it works is quite impressive actually.

CoreImage is really quite a piece of work. Probably the most impressive thing I've seen out of Apple (on a technical basis) in years. There are a number of facets to it, it isn't *just* about filters. It provides a nice hardware accelerated image API. This in itself would be a good thing.

However they way they chose to implement it allows for incredible flexibility.

Your average application will benefit from hardware accelerated UI drawing (assuming they don't use QuickDraw) without doing anything at all.

More savvy applications that manipulate images in various ways can benefit by having available to them a nice set of useful image manipulation tools: common things like rotation, scaling, blurring, sharpening... all hardware accelerated.

Even more specialized applications can have their own image manipulation kernels that do specific things to images. You write them in a C-like language, and CoreImage compiles them for your video card (or uses its native runtime if your video card doesn't support these things).

But it gets better: string a few filters together, and a code-path optimized filter is created for them, dynamically and automatically.

The geek factor is high, as is the usefulness in the real world. It offers performance and convenience of such magnitude that I'd be surprised if developers don't pick up on it quickly. The downside is that cross platform products like Photoshop, Premier, etc. probably won't use the capabilities offered, because they are platform specific.

[Chuckit]

Wow, that is really exciting. GPU-enhanced everything, plus a powerful new API. Thanks for clearing that up, Andrew.

Incidentally, I can't wait to see a CoreImage-enhanced Snapz Pro. That program is bound to be almighty.

[murk]

Originally posted by moki:
Even more specialized applications can have their own image manipulation kernels that do specific things to images. You write them in a C-like language, and CoreImage compiles them for your video card (or uses its native runtime if your video card doesn't support these things).

So, does this mean that even if Adobe will not support it, it is very likely that Photoshop plug-ins for the Mac will? Although I am in the screw Adobe and make a PS Killer camp, if they don�t have the cojones for that, maybe Apple should make a plug-in that supports the built-in filters and give it away.

[chabig]

I don't see why a Mac developer couldn't just write a Photoshop plugin that brings all of core image's abilities to Photoshop. Sort of a glue plugin...

Chris

[Millennium]

Originally posted by chabig:
I don't see why a Mac developer couldn't just write a Photoshop plugin that brings all of core image's abilities to Photoshop. Sort of a glue plugin...

Entirely possible, even likely. I'm guessing that it's probably the only way we'll see CoreImage in Photoshop, though.

The big news here is still for the small-time guys. GraphicConverter with CoreImage would be no Photoshop by any stretch of the imagination (no layers, for example) but could still become quite a force to be reckoned with. Imagine using GC as a frontend to batch-process CoreImage filters onto a bunch of images. Now that would be cool.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I wasn't the one who found it. It was in the other thread in which you posted. And supposedly Tiger's Quartz Composer is a souped up version of PixelShox.

There's one major strike against the idea that our friend here went to work for Apple, though: the fact that he released the last beta of PixelShox for free. I doubt Apple would have allowed him to do that if he took a job with them.

[hmurchison2001]

James McCartney left his Supercollider project to work for Apple and offered the same feature frozen "final" version.

It seems Apple is content to let a developer at least give their users the respect to keep a final version. I've heard Pixelshox developer "POL" is indeed working for the Big Apple.

"El Presidente" your words are like song to me. I hope Ambrosia SW can find some use for Apples new technologies. I'm buying a bunch of stuff from you all when I get my next Mac(God I'm hoping the iMac kicks butt).

[Millennium]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
James McCartney left his Supercollider project to work for Apple and offered the same feature frozen "final" version.

Yes, but Supercollider itself doesn't seem to have been incorporated into OSX.

This is different. Although I'm not sure if the PixelShox engine is actually being incorporated into OSX wholesale, there are too many similarities between it and CoreImage/CoreVideo to ignore... plus the PixelShox engine was designed to be cross-platform. Even though I don't think it was ever actually reported, there's no way Apple would want that floating around, waiting to be reverse-engineered.

At the absolute least, continuing to distribute this thing -even as an unsupported free program- would violate his noncompete agreement. He appears to have made one last version after he was hired (just to remove the time limit, but it's still a new version).

[macaddict0001]

Originally posted by :haripu::

But that all is beside the point. The point I was trying to make (in far too many words) was just that it takes a lot more to code a "PS-Killer" than a quicker filter-technology. Years and years of know-how have gone into PS and it shows in every detail. I am all for competition but to take on PS would mean you have to offer something really ground-breaking and take image-processing to a whole new level. While Core Image is technically impressing, all it does for now is speed up things that already can be done. The real innovation won't come from this technological direction but has to come from somewhere else.

you mean ground brreaking as in applying filters to moving video in real time.

[osxisfun]

Originally posted by macaddict0001:
you mean ground brreaking as in applying filters to moving video in real time.

that was pretty damn cool. i think apple should invest in Pampers because once video design guys start to use this they will need plenty of them...

this was REAL TIME folks. layers upon layers of real time stuff applied to video. neat stuff.

[moki]

Originally posted by murk:
So, does this mean that even if Adobe will not support it, it is very likely that Photoshop plug-ins for the Mac will? Although I am in the screw Adobe and make a PS Killer camp, if they don�t have the cojones for that, maybe Apple should make a plug-in that supports the built-in filters and give it away.

Well, yes, but you'd lose the benefit of the lossless effects, because the plugin would at some point have to render it to a layer of Photoshop pixels.

[rezonate]

Originally posted by I'mDaMac:
CoreImage is an awesome technology. If Adobe integrates this technology I envision a real-time PhotoShop. No more waiting to preview and apply filters. CoreImage is non-destructive so you won't have to worry about saving multiple instances of the same file on your hard drive.

Sadly I doubt Adobe would use this technology since it would give the Mac version an unfair advantage over the Windows version. The only way we'll see it is if Microsoft has something similar in the works for Longhorn. Even then we'll have to wait 'til Longhorn "catches up" to OS X.

One thing positive though is I'm now less worried if Adobe ever decides to drop Mac support for PhotoShop. With coreImage I have no doubt that Apple could develop a PhotoShop killer if it had to.

This is the issue though. Does the Adobe of today really give much thought to the Mac platform as we would like, especially when it comes to new OS specific technology like CoreImage? Not sure to be honest. It seems they'd keep the codebase as close to Windows as possible, their bigger seller. It is a pity that they wouldn't take advantage of this, but it's all about marketshare, their sales. Photoshop on Mac being the dominant version has been eroding for years now, and I guess it wouldn't make busniess sense to specifically target OS X features to a large degree that wouldn't be mirrored by the amount of sales.

As to Longhorn, it pretty much has a lot of what Tiger has shown so far, and more. The adaptive OS graphical interface dependant on your GFX card is something that Longhorn has had for a while. People really bitched about this, that certain interface features wouldn't be there unless one has a feature capable graphics card. Now Apple are doing it, but that is cool though, means we no longer have to completely cater to the lowest common denominator.

[a holck]

Don't know if you read this on the homepage of the PixelShox programmer:

I'm a French currently living in the Silicon Valley area and working for a well-known company (for some reasons, the company name must remain undisclosed until the project I'm working on is officially announced).

I that the fruit company?

[moki]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
Good find Eug. Either this guy is working on Motion or Apple plans to incorporate Pixelshox in a new and unique way.

It's just become Quartz Composer -- frontend to CoreImage and such.

[hmurchison2001]

Originally posted by moki:
It's just become Quartz Composer -- frontend to CoreImage and such.

Moki looking at the updated WWDC schedule could you shed some light on these technologies. They look new to me

Now that Apple has announced Tiger they've filled in some missing pieces from their WWDC Descriptions.

Introducing PDFKit PDFKit is a powerful set of Cocoa classes that allows you to incorporate a rich PDF viewing experience in your application. PDFKit easily handles all the details relating to PDF display, navigation, selection, and searching. PDFKit also supports a variety of ways to customize your application's interaction with PDF documents. Attend this session to learn about leveraging the power of PDF in your application.

Sounds promising. My God PDF reading sucks on my PC. I'm highly jealous that you all have Preview which is nice small and fast. I think PDF is important. Hopefully this kit is adopted by those who need it.

New Development Quartz 2D is the powerful 2D graphics engine in Mac OS X, with advanced features such as transparency, anti-aliasing, and PDF support. Exciting new developments in Quartz 2D will be discussed in this session along with a focus on best practices you should follow to get the most out of Quartz 2D. This session is a must see for all WWDC attendees who use 2D graphics in their applications.

A poster here at MacNN was able to enable this in Tiger Preview and text rendering doubled. More optimizations are sure to come.

This looks new HDRI ImageIO is Mac OS X's unified architecture for opening and saving popular image file formats. Come to this session to learn how the ImageIO Quartz-friendly API simplifies working with TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and JPEG-2000. Additionally, ImageIO supports high dynamic range (HDR) formats, such as OpenEXR and floating point TIFF, that extend visual fidelity far beyond today's 32-bit images. Come to this session to learn about ImageIO and HDR imaging. This is a must-see session for developers working in digital video, cinema, and photography spaces.

HDRI is also used in 3D for radiosity. They left that out conspicuously, I wonder if Apple has more tricks up there sleeve here.

Quartz Composer Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data. It allows developers to use Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, and QuickTime technologies through a visual programming environment. Developers can use Quartz Composer as an exploratory tool to learn the tasks each visual technology performs without having to learn the application programming interface (API) for that technology. Come to this session to learn how to discover Mac OS X's incredible new graphics technologies.

Revamped Pixelshox. The Developer says he cannot speak about the company he works for until a product is announced. Could that be Motion or something new?

Xcode Modeling and Design Want to take your software design skills to the next level? Learn about Xcode's new design tools for object design and persistent object modeling. With these new tools you can view and edit a visual model of your object-oriented code in C++, Objective-C, or Java, and use the model to navigate your source base. Then, create an object graph of your application's object model, and automatically generate a schema for Cocoa's new Persistence Framework.

I don't remember seeing this before. It sounds new. Anyone familiar with Xcode want to chime in?

Introducting Core Data This session provides an overview of the new Core Data framework in Cocoa. It will focus on the new functionality provided for managing and persisting model objects, which includes automatic undo/redo, input validation, and saving to various types of "persistent stores" (SQL and XML).

I have no idea how this will affect OSX. But it's definitely new.

Advanced Core Data Learn about the more advanced features of the new Core Data framework, including how to work with multiple persistent stores at the same time, how to use predefined fetch requests and predicates to find your objects, how to get more out of your validation rules, and how to manipulate schemas at runtime.

More Core Data

[moki]

Well, sure. Apple demo'd lots of new technologies -- do you have a specific question?

[hmurchison2001]

Mainly the Core Data stuff. Is that just "basic" stuff they're talking about here?

[hmurchison2001]

Ok pretty much found out that Core Data is the metadata in Tiger. The other stuff is "almost" self explanatory. Tiger is going to be one hell of an update. People who are thinking of "attempting" to skip Tiger or underwhelmed are absolutely Mad. If apple didn't have an NDA on WWDC Mac developers would be dancing naked in the streets.

Holy Smokes OpenEXR Rocks!

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
If apple didn't have an NDA on WWDC Mac developers would be dancing naked in the streets.

I think there may be laws at work there as well.

[argod]

CoreData is EOF-lite. Enterprise Object Framework. EOF for Obj-C was EOL
at WebObjects 4.5.

[moki]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I think there may be laws at work there as well.

For the love of god, I hope so.

Anyway, the good news is that Apple has made much of this information public on their web site (not just for registered developers), in a general manner.

[rezonate]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
Ok pretty much found out that Core Data is the metadata in Tiger. The other stuff is "almost" self explanatory. Tiger is going to be one hell of an update. People who are thinking of "attempting" to skip Tiger or underwhelmed are absolutely Mad. If apple didn't have an NDA on WWDC Mac developers would be dancing naked in the streets.

Holy Smokes OpenEXR Rocks!

The main benefits of OpenEXR and HDRI will be for 3D applications as such, and this is has been around in most packages for years, except OpenEXR. Not too sure what HDRI at the OS level would be like, might just mean that various OS X apps. can open them.

There's not too many appplications on OS X that support OpenEXR as of now, although you could compile it yourself. It's really been making ground on Windows and Linux though, with some of the major non-Mac programs making use of it.

[entrox]

For those of you with an ATi Radeon 9600+, you can check out a pretty cool demo using HDR lighting: Download link.

[rezonate]

Originally posted by entrox:
For those of you with an ATi Radeon 9600+, you can check out a pretty cool demo using HDR lighting: Download link.

HDR is usualy a last resort in a tv/film production though, rarely used, due to render processing times. For examples and simple scenes it's great, but you can get similar results with other techniques, such as ambient occlusion passes, final gathering(xsi), using light rigs from inages, and overall, decent light setups.

[entrox]

Originally posted by rezonate:
HDR is usualy a last resort in a tv/film production though, rarely used, due to render processing times. For examples and simple scenes it's great, but you can fake it with better techniques such as ambient occlusion passes, final gathering(xsi), using light rigs from inages, and overall, decent light setups.

Perhaps, but the demo isn't particularly about TV or film production. It's a realtime 3D demo showcasing the higher precision modes of the current graphics hardware which makes it possible to have a, well, higher dynamic range

This particular demo utilises a technique called Image-based Lighting, which works by taking snapshots of the lighting in real-world scenery and applying them to synthetic scenes to illuminate objects. The results are pretty amazing.

I thought it would be cool to see some examples of HDRI in action, even if it doesn't necessarily apply here.

[rezonate]

Yeah, Image based lighting is primarily used in 3D simulations, or renders where it is most comonly used, and HDRI images those that are used.
An HDRI isn't really something you would actually 'see' on your screen, but the floating point data contained in an HDR image is used in calculations to gain higher quality images in renders, because the colour information contained in the image is higher than a 32-bit RGB image.

There's not much use of it outside of 3D due to what it's intended for. The real-time demos of HDRI are mostly pre-rendered scenes with some calculations done on the card. Can be handy for off-loading the work to the graphics card, rather than the CPU, but in the end it's kinda just fluff just now if a card can support it.

If you want to se some good examples of HDRI, check out some 3D forums, there's years of nice renders out there.

[RooneyX]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
Ok pretty much found out that Core Data is the metadata in Tiger. The other stuff is "almost" self explanatory. Tiger is going to be one hell of an update. People who are thinking of "attempting" to skip Tiger or underwhelmed are absolutely Mad. If apple didn't have an NDA on WWDC Mac developers would be dancing naked in the streets.

Holy Smokes OpenEXR Rocks!

There's an EXR Photoshop plugin on that site that I downloaded but it doesn't come with any readme file. Which plugin folder do I install it in?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
Ok pretty much found out that Core Data is the metadata in Tiger. The other stuff is "almost" self explanatory. Tiger is going to be one hell of an update. People who are thinking of "attempting" to skip Tiger or underwhelmed are absolutely Mad. If apple didn't have an NDA on WWDC Mac developers would be dancing naked in the streets.

Holy Smokes OpenEXR Rocks!

CoreData is (as people below me have said) quite a lot more than that. It's very cool, although the amount of new terminology involved is a little daunting at first. Agreed about the dancing though, the new APIs are extremely fun to work with and I can already think of tons of uses for them.

[tigas]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
FCP's success caused Avid to make some good Mac software to keep from losing their customers to Apple. A still image app like FCP made by Apple or not would force Adobe to really support their Mac customers or lose a quarter of their business of more to the competition.

Ahh... Wake up and smell the coffee! What FCP has made is a passable port of AvidXpress DV and HEAVY promotion of Avid on Windows... Avid 10.6 and 11 are still the bee's nees, IF you're editing and IF you can afford it. I'm not talking about Color Correction or Compositing: for that Avid sells a Softimage workstation running on a Dual Xeon (not as good as an Avid at machine control, asset management and editing, though).

Besides, 50% of all existant Avids are version7 on a 9600, and until they break down their owners don't want to upgrade, because it does everything necessary for the job. In fact, it's leaving Avid p*ssed that they can't force them to upgrade.

If there was a clear commitment from Apple that they were trying to spread the platform (aiming for 7 or 10% marketshare in 5 years, for example), big developers would be more mindful of losing the Apple market, even in markets that were always Apple hunting grounds (like film and image editing). But with Apple seemingly occupied with consumer electronics and walling the garden, I'm not so sure.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
CoreData is (as people below me have said) quite a lot more than that. It's very cool, although the amount of new terminology involved is a little daunting at first. Agreed about the dancing though, the new APIs are extremely fun to work with and I can already think of tons of uses for them.

Is a future version iTunes going to move it's Music Library DB into CoreData? iPhoto?

[hmurchison2001]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
Is a future version iTunes going to move it's Music Library DB into CoreData? iPhoto?

I'm trying to wrap my brain around the EOF concept. I guess in theory it's not really all that difficult. It allows you to keep persistent data that can reused by many different "front end" applicatons. I guess the power comes from the ability to define the logic between the DB and the front end client minimizing the need for changes in the persistent data. This must mean Apple is indeed trying to get developers onboard with a structure that allows them to store their data as persistent objects that can be accessed by a multitude of front ends that won't require the logic of the db built in. I cannot grasp the concept well enough to be eloquent in anyway but this would be interesting.

Correct me if I'm wrong but a scenario would be like iLife as you mention Horsepoo. I think Apple has already basically created db for all the apps. iLife 4 made it easy to be in iPhoto4 and access your iTunes music without having to open iTunes. iPhoto didn't have to appropriate too much of iTunes code but simply made use of it's db schema. The integration is seamless and the front end app only needs to have a small subset of support(Applicaton Logic) to support the desired featues.

Again correct me if I'm wrong but this seems much better than the previous Opendoc concept. Rather than reusing small bits of code in Opendoc which may or may not be safe and secure we can derive all the benefits from simply linking to a multitude of db from one front end.

Sooooooooo.

With this model it's unlikely that we see a Photoshop killer from one source. Instead we may see an app that deftly "corrals" the data from multiple sources tying them together with a powerful front end and support for modern API like Core Image/Video. I don't know...it's definitely powerful. Application design is certainly changing quite rapidly.

[argod]

Here is link to EOF Documentation.

http://developer.apple.com/documenta...cts/index.html

[larkost]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
Is a future version iTunes going to move it's Music Library DB into CoreData? iPhoto?

I would bet that all of the iTunes track information (id3 tags and the like) is already in a database (in fact the library file looks like one), and it would not be a bad idea to move this to use CoreData (so that everyone is using the same formats). But it would be a very bad idea to move the actual music data into a db. DataBases as a rule of thumb take 3 up three times as much space as storing the raw data, and are slower to get arbitrary data out of (but are much faster to search).

Since you don't typically want to search your music for specific patterns of bits... a database is a bad idea. Moving to CoreData for the meta-data would only be urgent if it would help expose the data to Searchlight. The information stored in the iTunes system is simply not complex enough to move to EOF.

[rezonate]

Avid's market is far more wide-ranging and deepe than what Apple offers with FCP. What FCP did allow, was for editing studios to off-load certain pipelines onto FCP but without really impacting on the Avid suites.

The same philosophy that applies to Discreet Flame systems can be seen with Avid. Clients ask for Avid thinking , it;'s a buzzword for quality, fast and powerful work. Many aren't interested if FCP can do some of the tasks, they pay top bucks for an Avid editor, and they expect one.

I don't thikn Apple are taking Avid on, and certainly don;t have the software, or hardware solutions to do so.

[rezonate]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
There's an EXR Photoshop plugin on that site that I downloaded but it doesn't come with any readme file. Which plugin folder do I install it in?

You should put it in your Photoshop filters folder. It officially supports version 7 and below, but should be fine in 8.

[hmurchison2001]

Originally posted by rezonate:
Avid's market is far more wide-ranging and deepe than what Apple offers with FCP. What FCP did allow, was for editing studios to off-load certain pipelines onto FCP but without really impacting on the Avid suites.

The same philosophy that applies to Discreet Flame systems can be seen with Avid. Clients ask for Avid thinking , it;'s a buzzword for quality, fast and powerful work. Many aren't interested if FCP can do some of the tasks, they pay top bucks for an Avid editor, and they expect one.

I don't thikn Apple are taking Avid on, and certainly don;t have the software, or hardware solutions to do so.

Apple is definitely taking on Avid but it's just at the low end to midrange level. What Avid and Discreet offer with their high end systems is true real time. Inferno Pros routinely edit with the clients monitoring their progress sometimes literally over their shoulder so you need to have real time access for everything. Avid is the same and these seats generate a lot of revenue. Apple isn't interested in competing in this arena. There is a lucrative market for systems $15k that offer %80 of the power the higher end Avids at a quarter of the price. Walter Murch said he could edit Cold Mountain on FCP because he could afford 4 FCP seats for the price of a high end Avid.

Apple has options. Let us not forget that with the acquisition of Nothing Real Apple got Tremor as well(Shake real time big brother)so they have code that that can easily extend Shake for some time. I think it's pretty obvious that Apple wants to keep the price of technology down. Shake has gone from $10k to todays $3k on Mac. This is great for multimedia. Put the product in more hands and we'll see cool stuff. But Avids high end is not under any serious threat.

[Kate]

Originally posted by moki:
Well, sure. Apple demo'd lots of new technologies -- do you have a specific question?

Sure, do you have to write a program to make specific use of that Quartz 2d Extreme API, or will an old app benefit anyway ?

[Superchicken]

I think Apple is going after any market they can make money in and not screw themselves. I think they're entirely willing to take on Avid in any areas they are capable of.

Adobe however is another story, Premier they killed on the Mac, that DVD app they never coded for it, partly because they don't want to compete with Apple. However Apple also doesn't really want to compete with Adobe, currently if Adobe is on the Mac, that means nobody can suggest that the Mac is inferior to the PC because there is the same software.

That said, Adobe also lately I don't think has any special love of Microsoft lately. Microsoft has specifically gone after Adobe's market with the PDF, which is a market they're doing well with, and Microsoft would readily take all of the other markets that Adobe is in. I don't think Adobe is stupid enough to want to make their relationship poorer with Apple than it already is.

That said, I sadly doubt Macromedia will take to much advantage of core image even if this would fit in even better with Fireworks than with Photoshop.

[moki]

Originally posted by Kate:
Sure, do you have to write a program to make specific use of that Quartz 2d Extreme API, or will an old app benefit anyway ?

As long as you do not use Quickdraw to render to the window (graphics context), and you retain (rather than release) your graphics contexts, the 2D Hardware acceleration is automatic. The OS handles uploading graphic context data to the video card, swapping out unused textures (virtual memory style), the OpenGL instruction pipeline, and so on and so forth.

It's really a brilliantly designed system, Apple has clearly been working on this for some time, and the way it is architected, it has excellent room for future expansion as well. The more capable video cards get, the better everything will work.

[moki]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
That said, I sadly doubt Macromedia will take to much advantage of core image even if this would fit in even better with Fireworks than with Photoshop.

I too am unfortunately less than optimistic about how cross platform applications will pick up and utilize this technology. They have a massive cross-platform code base to think about, and anything OS-specific is probably not an option.

Yes, "You get all of these great filters for free" -- but from their point of view, they still have to write them for Windows, so why bother? They also need to keep how things work consistent from platform to platform.

Still, the technology demonstrated is so advantageous, it just might be worth it to them. It's also a logical direction for Microsoft to pursue in some manner, so if there is an equivalent on Windows, perhaps a thin layer could be written for the application in question to use it on either platform.

Another option is that these program all support plugins. Worst-case, Adobe/Macromedia (or some enterprising third party developer) could develop, say, a Layer plugin for Photoshop that would let you apply any of the CoreImage filters as a modifying layer on top of the Photoshop document.

One never knows...

[Kate]

Originally posted by moki:
........ and anything OS-specific is probably not an option.

One never knows...

Isn't this the direct result of Apples Quartz policy? I mean they abandon GPU based drawing first and make much of the GPU and graphics hardware a heap of useless silicon for Mac OS X and afterwards try to remap graphics to much more modern hardware not yet heard of at the beginnnig of X. This must come at the cost of reinventing hardware based graphics layers in the OS. And since there are common ways of doing graphics engraved in silicon which are not really working the Quartz ways the gap must open further.
What if the graphics were based on more common tech, let's say e.g. OpenGL instead of Quartz. Sure some features would not be here, but the problem with lack of hardware rendering would not either. And cross platform questions of that type would not be there.
So was/is Quartz worth all this? From the point of a GUI driven OS, Quartz seems massive overkill. Semi transparent menus were there in OS9 with Quickdraw . So why Quartz and where does Quartz aim?

[moki]

Originally posted by Kate:
What if the graphics were based on more common tech, let's say e.g. OpenGL instead of Quartz. Sure some features would not be here, but the problem with lack of hardware rendering would not either. And cross platform questions of that type would not be there.
So was/is Quartz worth all this? From the point of a GUI driven OS, Quartz seems massive overkill. Semi transparent menus were there in OS9 with Quickdraw . So why Quartz and where does Quartz aim?

OpenGL won't do everything a modern GUI needs... or at least it won't do it in a particularly good fashion. No, Apple did a great thing with Quartz, the windowing system is what Microsoft will be striving to do with Longhorn whenever it is released.

[Ganesha]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I think there may be laws at work there as well.

Against dancing naked? In San Francisco? Right after Gay Pride?

I don't think anyone would of noticed if they did.

[weezie]

A question came to mind when I thought about photoshop or any image editor working with core image.

How will core image deal with large image files? Will its effects be scalable? Imagine working on a large color spread. It could easily be 18x12'' @300 ppi or much larger. Will you need to have the image be displayed at 100% to have good control over the filters? This has obvious problems, such as, there is no display that exists that could show the whole image at 100% -- even the new 30'' is not up to that task. Or will the filter parameters adjust for whatever magnification you may be displaying the image at?

Also, an image like this is way over 4 million pixels, so will this be a problem for GPUs? (I'm thinking not because we are talking about a static image compared to an ever updating GUI, but I thought I'd ask)