Apologies to everyone for the lack of activity on this blog, but the thing is, we've been busy boys and it's all relates to the above question. The thing is, what we all know, but we at The Escapers choose to mutter quietly and while nobody is listening, is that Flux can be a little slow even on pretty fast Macs. We're been looking at all kinds of ways to resolve this problem, and while moving a lot of code to pure C rather than the Objective variety has improved things a lot, it's only got us so far.
So, in The Escapers "Labs" (That's my flat), we're been cultivating a Leopard-only version of Flux which makes heavy use of Core Animation, which is a Leopard only feature. This has given Flux an incredible speed boost, especially on Macs with great graphics cards, so even older Macs get a great benefit, as although say G4 Powerbooks lack a bit in CPU speed, they more than make up for it with the GPU.
The problem with all this is that if the "Labs" version goes mainstream, we lose support for Tiger. We could of course maintain two versions of Flux, building features into the "Labs" version, then if they're Tiger-compatible, use them in the older version. This is a lot of work, but could be worth it if we find we have a lot of users sticking around on Tiger.
Please let us know how you feel about this, either mail us if you want a personal response, or maybe post on the forum or here on the blog. We know that Tiger is not that old, I myself run a G5 with Tiger as well as my Leopard powered MacBook, but the benefits may outweigh the disadvantages. Let us know what you think!
Monday, June 30, 2008
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