site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev@lists.apple.com On Mar 24, 2008, at 9:32 AM, Matt Rhodes wrote: Hey Team. That makes complete sense. Personally, I love writing generators! :) Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani@apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.ap... It looks like FxGenerators don't have access to the 3D API -- is this correct? That is correct. It was an oversight. I have fixed it in a future version, but that version won't be available to the public any time soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. As you know, bug fixes have to be tested, and there wasn't time to test this fix for an earlier release. I'm hoping in the future we can seed 3rd party developers earlier to get better feedback. However, even when we've tried, the feedback from 3rd parties has been minimal. It's hard to find bugs in time to fix them when we don't get very much feedback (which admittedly is at least partly our own fault for not getting seeds to developers earlier). In other words, yeah, it sucks, and we're working on it. The following has been our experience with Generators (vs. Plug-ins): We have several plug-ins that work more appropriately as Generators, but we keep having to back off from creating Generators because the feature sets for Generators aren't the same as for Plug-ins -- and they should be (from this developer's point of view). Are there other features which aren't available for Generators that are for Plug-Ins? The only other one I can think of is the temporal image API, which isn't available because there are no input images to Generators, so getting the input doesn't make sense. We think of Generators as Plug-ins without the need for an input layer. We need all of the features that plug-ins have to offer -- parameter interaction (we had to wait for that to work properly), preview Movies (which still aren't supported, from what I can tell), 3D API's, etc. In the past (and seemingly here as well), the feature set of Generators have taken some time to catch up to Plug-ins. This causes a perpetual cycle of "can't create a Generator because we need the new Plug-in feature." Parameter interaction should be working just fine in generators. If it's not, please file a bug. With previews, they are generated automatically for generators and always have been. We can do that with generators because they take no input. But with filters, it's not as easy because any given input may not be appropriate for a preview of a particular filter. For example, a photo with no green in it, won't show a green screen filter very well. And an image with no alpha won't show an effect that does something based on the alpha. I think the idea was that we want to generate a preview when possible so developers have less work to do. But there are cases where we can't do that. Maybe we should check to see if there's a preview movie and show it if it exists, and generate one if it doesn't exist? If you'd like to see that, please file an enhancement request. Maybe there aren't a lot of Generator developers out there, but all of our FxPlugs are Generators at heart -- and we hate telling the user to create a dummy layer just to use our Plug-in. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com