Opacity: Another Crash-Happy 1.0 App
It's 1.0 release week, here at TASB, apparently. It also appears to be crash week.
Another useful-looking app has caught my attention: Opacity. It's a graphics editor designed especially for doing one of my favorite things: icon creation.
Opacity, like ScreenFlow, looks like a really nice application built for doing one specific thing. Which makes it really good at doing that specific thing. And Opacity appears as though it will, someday, be quite good at icon creation. In fact, it looks to be the best icon-specific graphics editor I've seen thus far. But — and this seems to be a theme here lately — it crashes constantly.
Opacity: Crash-Happy
(click image for larger view)
I mean, like, unusably. Like during the tutorial. Not good. The saving grace here is that it at least autosaves a copy of your document. But when an icon editor, working on a single-layer, 512x512 pixel vector image, tells you it's out of memory (I have 5 GBs of RAM for crap's sake) when you're trying to save your file, you know there are some serious problems with the app. Am I right people? Seriously, who's with me here?
Opacity: Out of Memory? Already?
(click image for larger view)
'Nuff said, I think.
Opacity looks like it might be a really good application for icon creation — maybe the way to go. It's got some great tools for preview and output, and the price is right — it's about ten bucks more than Icon Builder, but is completely self-contained and doesn't require Photoshop. But it's far too unreliable for serious use at this point.
It's too bad that developers are releasing such buggy stuff. It leaves a really bad first impression, and makes me not want to rush out and purchase the product, no matter how hot it might look. I hope I get over that first impression before something else better comes along, or simply steals my attention.
In the meantime, as with ScreenFlow, I'll try to remember to check back for Opacity's 1.0.1 release.
Another useful-looking app has caught my attention: Opacity. It's a graphics editor designed especially for doing one of my favorite things: icon creation.
Opacity, like ScreenFlow, looks like a really nice application built for doing one specific thing. Which makes it really good at doing that specific thing. And Opacity appears as though it will, someday, be quite good at icon creation. In fact, it looks to be the best icon-specific graphics editor I've seen thus far. But — and this seems to be a theme here lately — it crashes constantly.
Opacity: Crash-Happy
(click image for larger view)
I mean, like, unusably. Like during the tutorial. Not good. The saving grace here is that it at least autosaves a copy of your document. But when an icon editor, working on a single-layer, 512x512 pixel vector image, tells you it's out of memory (I have 5 GBs of RAM for crap's sake) when you're trying to save your file, you know there are some serious problems with the app. Am I right people? Seriously, who's with me here?
Opacity: Out of Memory? Already?
(click image for larger view)
'Nuff said, I think.
Opacity looks like it might be a really good application for icon creation — maybe the way to go. It's got some great tools for preview and output, and the price is right — it's about ten bucks more than Icon Builder, but is completely self-contained and doesn't require Photoshop. But it's far too unreliable for serious use at this point.
It's too bad that developers are releasing such buggy stuff. It leaves a really bad first impression, and makes me not want to rush out and purchase the product, no matter how hot it might look. I hope I get over that first impression before something else better comes along, or simply steals my attention.
In the meantime, as with ScreenFlow, I'll try to remember to check back for Opacity's 1.0.1 release.
Labels: Applications, Art
This entry was posted
on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 12:42 PM.
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10:30 PMHi. I'm the developer of Opacity. I'm sorry about the bugs you ran into! Luckily version 1.0.1 (just released) fixes all of the crashes that have been reported and also improves Opacity's memory use. I hope you'll be willing to give it another shot. I'm very serious about fixing bugs, and if you are still having any after updating to 1.0.1, please send them to me so I can fix them as soon as possible. I appreciate getting any feedback- and negative feedback really helps me know where Opacity needs to improve. My top priority is making Opacity as stable and reliable as possible. Thank you for taking the time to try Opacity!
- Jacob
1:01 PM
Jacob,
So far the new version looks much improved. Thanks! I'll be posting a follow-up as soon as I get some time. If I encounter any bugs I will let you know.
And thanks for this really cool looking app. I do some icon design and a dedicated app is a great idea. Yours looks well-implemented.
-systemsboy
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