TiltShift 1.3 available

Mac App StoreAfter a very long wait, TiltShift 1.3 is finally available! Check out the previous post to learn more. Open the App Store app on your Mac and click on “Updates” to update to the latest version.

Here’s what’s new in this version:

  • Fullscreen View. Use View > Enter Fullscreen or the fullscreen widget (⤢) common to many (Mountain) Lion apps to entirely focus on your photo and use as much screen space as possible for that task.
  • Visual refresh, chapter I. TiltShift now overall wastes less screen space, most prominently on the bottom of the window and looks a lot cleaner and nicer.
  • Important bug fixes related to Close and Save As. TiltShift should no longer break under any circumstances.
  • More small fixes. As usual, a few minor things here and there.

What would you like to see next? Use the contact menu above to tell me! If you experience problems, please also contact me before writing a negative review on the App Store.

One more thing: a few users run into a problem where the processed photo looks distorted or otherwise not as expected. The preview inside TiltShift is just fine. This seems to be related to a problem with the graphics processor on the Mac and I haven’t yet found a pattern that would allow me to prevent that situation. If you run into that issue, please open TiltShift Preferences (TiltShift > Preferences…) and turn on the option “Enable Software Renderer” at the bottom. If that doesn’t help, please get in touch!

Option for Software Renderer in TiltShift Preferences.

Option for Software Renderer in TiltShift Preferences.

Birthday Present

Sidebar refinements in version 1.3 Tomorrow version 1.3 of TiltShift will be released. While it’s not exactly a major update, it took two months to get approved, due to a very strange problem that eventually came down to a bug in Xcode 4.6.

Even though the experience of getting through review was far from being perfect, I am very thankful that there are excellent and dedicated people at Apple that helped me in the end. Without those people I might have given up on the product by now, at least dumped the Mac App Store distribution model.

Most of all, my gratitude goes to the unknown engineer who solved the bug that was causing the archive build not to include the .xcent file.

Brief technical info only relevant for developers: Upon building, Xcode generates a file with the extension xcent compiled from the original entitlements file that you have included in the target. Main difference is that variables like you Team ID will be resolved during that process. The derived xcent file is being used when resigning from the Xcode Organizer that happens when uploading to iTunes Connect or exporting a developer ID signed app, since app developing is difficult and using an enterprise mobile app development could be helpful for this. In case that file is missing for some reason, your app will no longer have sandboxing enabled, which is exactly what I witnessed.

I take it as a birthday present that the update was approved last Friday.