So my app does exactly what I want, and come to think of it, can also handle making a desktop drawn across multiple screens from 1 image.

Desktop Blurrifier makes any image a little blurry. It scales up, or down too, and can reposition horizontally or vertically. One really cool thing is that I made the scale slider do a non-linear scale. So 1/2 of the slider scales from 0.1 to 1.0; the other half scales up as a square of the value, from 1.0 to 4.0. It also “snaps” to the middle tick slider with a bit of code. My biggest hurdle on this app was learning how to deal with CIImage class. The examples Apple supplies, the Core Image Fun House app, is fantastic in its own right; but MF! it is so efficient and dense I could not figure out for the life of me how any of it works. Really the point of sample code is to usually show an example of 1 or 2 or maybe 3 concepts. Well this one has every CIImage filter included, plus procedural UI elements! There was another sample I looked at, ImageExample I think, and that was easier to understand but had some color management code completely woven into it that I couldn’t just cut and paste code. Which is generally all the better in the end, but of course frustrating when it doesn’t make sense. I did end up with a reasonably elegant solution for my filter objects, with cues taken from that sample code. Performance was always good on my coding machine, but my wife’s older laptop showed some noticeable lag. Well, it’s not supposed to be Photoshop so I wasn’t going to try to change it much.

I also had fun putting some drag and drop code in, which includes a big fat red stroke when a new image is dropped. One frustrating correction I had to make at the very end was dealing with multiple Space in 10.7 Lion. Lion’s spaces EACH can have different desktops AND can also have changing images as well. The changing image option was a real pain to deal with, as I never used it and it didn’t occur to me until my beta test group (thanks MacDeveloper.net) brought it up to me. I had to sort of hack in a check where if an image failed to load in 2 different ways, then I’d assume the Change Image option was on and then had to dump out to an error dialog. When the change image option is on, the current desktop isn’t actually returned as a picture, it’s returned as a FOLDER URL. And there is no option to know specifically that the option is on, you just have to see if it’s a folder or image URL. Using the set desktop method though, will simply turn this option off. So after I warn users, they can still set a picture, and BAM it’s on. But their rotating image won’t continue to rotate, that would have to be turned back on. Oh well, maybe a preference for another version eh?

One of the teachers at the Big Nerd Ranch had said that the greatest gift to programming was the internet. Truly without the help of other experienced programmers and sample code, I’d never get nearly as far as I do with applications.

Next up I am going to get to work putting ID Font Catalog on the store. That may require more work as I want it to be 10.5 compatible and not rewrite the whole thing just yet. I need to just find out how to sign the app in XCode 3.

I must say I think this is the cleanest and most robust implementation in ASOC I’ve done so far. I hope that the users find it a worthwhile upgrade and it keeps their workflows humming without issue. Full paid version is only $5 more than before at $95, and upgrades for previous users are $50. Email me if you didn’t get my email with the special upgrade link.