Comments on: The Treachery of NSImages

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:56:14 +0000

I’m glad to hear it’s useful! I’ll keep up with the updates as best I can, so check back at the software page occasionally. There are still a couple of annoying glitches with it. Two things I plan to add at some point: batch processing, and CoreImage effects (contrast, saturation, etc.)

And I’d never heard of Goldberg, so there’s yet another free app that does the same thing (and is better at being backwards-compatible). Apparently if you want to make it rain, you wash your car, and if you want to find a good OS X app, you write one that does something similar and put it up on the internets.

By: David

David — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 17:30:33 +0000

This is a nice program to have around. I used to use Goldberg for resizing (and it does other handy stuff), but one day it just stopped working, and I can’t get it back to working. (Maybe one of the OS X 10.4.x updates broke it; the author doesn’t respond to e-mail.) But mostly what I need for daily use is resizing and cropping, and Incisor is just great for those needs.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:09:50 +0000

You’re not slow, it’s your OS. The program’s only compatible with OS X version 10.4 and higher.

I tried to see if I could get it to run under earlier versions, but the bulk of the work the program does with loading & saving & resizing images is built into 10.4 of the OS.

By: Rain

Rain — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 05:14:26 +0000

I’m sure it’s me, but when I downloaded it, I couldn’t get it to work. It would look like it launched, but then nothing would happen. I’m ‘tarded when it comes to this kind of thing, though, so perhaps I am doing something wrong? Download, open, drag icon to my applications folder and launch, right?…

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 02:44:46 +0000

Well, I’ve got to point out that HL wrote his version for Windows, making him the evil twin.

By: Humuhumu

Humuhumu — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:07:31 +0000

Still, you get to a point where it’s past functionality and is just about what “feels” right to you. And it’s kind of neat to have an app that does exactly what I need in exactly the way feels natural to me, because I could write it myself.

The power of custom software is not to be underestimated. I’ve always been a roll-your-own kind of girl, and now I’m just spoiled by it. With Snaplux, I’m doubly-spoiled, since when I want something a little different, I don’t have to tweak it myself, I just have to lean back in my chair and say “hey, hun? wouldn’t it be neat if Snaplux…”

I’ve been using Snaplux since Hanford first created it, and I sincerely can’t fathom how I managed to post images to my blog before I had it. It was a relative pain in the keister, that’s for sure. I’m surprised that there’s not a few more obvious solutions floating around out there.

Now, if Hanford takes up smoking and you take up tiki bar hopping, I’m going to be seriously freaked out.

By: Hanford

Hanford — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 23:10:03 +0000

Thanks for fixing my comments. I totally know the feeling you’re talking about — being able to solve a problem in the exact way you want to. I had specific requirements for how the cropping worked in my tool, and I also wanted to be able to set a final image size and then go back and play with the crop. The result was a program that does exactly what I want. And I bet you’re 100% right about Incisor being easier to write than Snaplux; I never released it because I never fixed the bugs because I just got tired of working on it. Oh well.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 22:47:33 +0000

Thanks for the screenshots, Hanford. (I edited your comment because WordPress doesn’t seem to like empty anchor tags). I can almost 100% guarantee that it was easier to write my app than yours, since Cocoa has so much fancy image-processing stuff built in, stuff I don’t remember being in Windows. But then, it’s been years since I’ve written a Windows app.

And sure enough, as soon as I put the app on one of those shareware announcement sites, I found three other Mac apps that do the same thing. So it’s not exactly an untapped market.

Still, you get to a point where it’s past functionality and is just about what “feels” right to you. And it’s kind of neat to have an app that does exactly what I need in exactly the way feels natural to me, because I could write it myself. It sounds like a corny Mac switch ad, but there’s really something to it: programming for Windows felt like a chore, but programming for OS X is somehow more satisfying, like I’m just modifying an app to work exactly the way I want it to.

By: Hanford

Hanford — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 09:34:00 +0000

Heh, I wrote one about a year ago called Snaplux, but I’ve never released it. It pastes, crops, resizes, FTPs, and generates HTML (which it puts into the clipboard), so it’s ready to be pasted into a Blog. It even is similar in the way images are acquired; you can only paste into Snaplux, there’s no “open” option. I have to post screenshots, because Incisor looks eerily close to mine.

Note in the image below: the ghosting outside of the crop box, the style of the crop handles.

crop window

Here’s the Publish section of Snaplux.

publish section

There are some differences. Snaplux’s resize option is in the Publish tab. This is because cropping is always done on the full size original image, with the resize happening at publish time. Also, I never got rotation, flipping, and cool things like Drop Shadow in, although at one point I had dreams. And there’s the whole file naming/code generation for the FTP publish and HTML generation.

Nice job on Incisor. Great minds think alike.