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
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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?
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'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.