You may be wondering why there haven’t been updates for a little while. Two reasons. First, resources have been diverted onto getting a new project off the ground. It’s another OS X app, provisionally called MediaCation, that tags your media files. It may see the light of day in about a month or so.
The second reason is that Icon Composer stalled a bit. It was getting a bit weighty code-wise, so a decision was made to re-write sections to make the layout more logical. The result was supposed to make it easier to add functionality in the future, although the interface wasn’t supposed to change. However… things don’t always turn out as you thought. There’s a conceptual problem with transforms and filters in that they’re not always commutative. By that, I mean that the order in which you apply them can be important. The more transforms and filters you add, the more obvious the problem becomes.
Take for example the colour adjustments. You can apply those in any order you like and the result will be exactly the same. But what about combining crop and rotate? If you crop first and then rotate, your canvas will be slanted. If you rotate first and then crop, your image will be slanted but your canvas won’t be! Similarly, a horizontal flip followed by a vertical flip gives exactly the opposite result to a vertical flip followed by a horizontal flip.
This held things up for while, until it became clear that it’s up to the user to decide the order that the transforms and filters are applied. So version 1.2 will have support for that concept. Probably a table of actions that can be reordered with drag and drop, and live updates on the image. Exciting!
