What's new in Flare 2
The original Flare was named Best of the Mac App Store in 2011. Now Flare 2 is here and features an improved workflow, a new user interface for Yosemite, curated collections of Effects that are updated monthly, and iCloud support so you can take your favorite effects with you wherever you go! Here is a detailed look at what's new in Flare 2:
The new effects view has improved a lot since the original Flare: It is blazingly fast now and with this will support hundreds of effects easily. For that we have added the ability to sort (for example, use sorting by date to always see your latest work) and to favorite effects. There are different views, from the familiar thumbnail view to a detail view, and a very compact list view.
All your effects will sync via iCloud automatically, so you will have them on all of your Macs (and other devices, but more about that later).
So, you might have heard about problems with iCloud and you may ask: Are my effects safe? And that is one of the reasons Flare 2 needs OS X Yosemite: We are using CloudKit, which is a new way to access iCloud that gives us much more control, and this way we could make sure your effects are safe. Glad you asked. :-)
We unified Presets (now called My Effects) and Snapshots in a single panel on the right, and we added a third one called "Best Of". These effects are coming in from the internet, and are our curated collection of the latest and greatest effects. If you used the original Flare, you might know we had a page on the website to browse and download more presets, but with Flare 2 this manual process has been completely automated and built into the app itself.
The next feature is one of my favorite new things in Flare 2, and we named it Simple Edit: This is a way to let you adjust the most important settings of an effect very quickly, without even opening the Advanced Edit panel. Select an effect, click on the Edit icon, and it will show a popover with a few parameters that let you adjust these settings very quickly. Please note that you do that while the effects panel on the right is still open.
And we moved the Master Opacity control to the bottom bar, so it is always accessible.
So, when you are ready to build your own effect, click on Advanced Edit in the Simple Edit popover to open the edit panel of Flare with all the nitty-gritty details. And here we find another favorite new feature, the Add Filter popover. Click the Plus icon on the bottom left to open it:
This popover is the new unified place to add a filter. We have categorized the old and many new filters in more groups, and we added a live preview. Hover over any of the filters and you will see a preview directly inside the popover of how that will look on this particular photo with this particular filter list.
Talking about new filters, we have added the following: Tilt-Shift and Soft Focus (there are apps out there that do just these two!), Highlight & Shadows, Paper (including, but not limited to, the ever popular Polaroid border), Saturation & Vibrance, Color Cast (really great for simulating analog film), Bokeh Rings, Sharpen Luminance, Van Zesen, and seven Vintage film filters. And while we were at it we have improved the following filters with new options: Brightness & Contrast, Lightleaks, Borders, Textures, and Scaling.
And we added five new Blending Masks that add much more flexibility for creating new effects.
Batch processing is another big new feature. Applies an effect to a batch of photos. The UI is again without any modes and doesn't get in your way.
Which leads to the next improvement, and that is to render exported images in the background. That is just a necessity if you try to export a batch of photos, but it also comes in handy when you are just working on one photo. Rendering is never blocking the app anymore, as it did in the original Flare. And there is more background rendering, like for the thumbnails in the effect panel, that is really smooth now.
The icing on the cake is what Yosemite gave us: A sleek interface that puts content first, very smooth animations in the UI, even speed improvements (well, it is 64-bit now, too). Plus, Yosemite supports two different interface themes in light and dark, and this is something that is just ideal for any photography app. The discussions about what's best are endless, and will never be decided, because in the end it all comes down to personal taste. That's why we put in extra-effort to support both. Now if it'd always be that easy to end a seemingly eternal argument. :-)
It is a bit daring to release an app for a new OS on the same day that OS is released, but what we did with Flare 2 is something that would not have been possible with Mavericks. We would have had to compromise, and our goal with Flare has always been to do the best possible effect app. It has been a while since the original Flare came out, and we knew we had to do something big to get back on top again. Flare 2 is this, but we needed Yosemite for that. So if you haven't upgraded yet, keep Flare 2 in mind, and come back when you have. Its worth it!
So ... are we done yet?
Well, no. We also wanted to add "one more thing"...
We always wanted this, but so far this has simply been impossible. This has changed with iOS 8 though, and when we learned about that at WWDC this year we were very excited. Finally we were able to sync the effects from our Macs to our iPhones, and have them with us "on-the-go".
To understand why this is huge and something new, let me explain a bit about the technical background: Sure, there are tons of effect and filter apps on the iPhone already. What Flare does is something much more advanced though. More than just applying some graduation curves, color shifts, and blending a few textures. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he used the term "desktop-class apps" to describe what's different to the apps on the iPhone compared to apps on other smartphones at that time. And this is also a perfect term for what Flare Effects is: It is "Desktop-class effects" on your phone.
For example, an effect like Daguerreotype is made up of approx. one hundred (!) Core Image filters chained together in a complex rendering tree. And then these filters do include some more advanced filters like Barrel Distortion, Sharpen, and Blur. To render this on OS X the app needs about 140 MB of memory. Now, if you do the same thing on iOS the app will be asked politely to stop this immediately, and when it doesn't, it will be terminated without any further notice. Also, Core Image on iOS 8 will now render big images by tiling them, but it will not accept a rendering tree the size of Flare's. At all. So we had to rewrite all the effects, and find some more tricks, and reduce the memory footprint to an absolute minimum.
Not surprisingly, this also helped the Mac version. When we were done with rewriting the filters we saw huge speed improvements on the Mac, too. So even if you don't use Flare Effects, this port made the Mac app much better.
Finally, let me add this: It would not have been possible to do this without the team, especially with the iOS companion app. After WWDC, when we decided to ditch our own Effect management and go with CloudKit, use all the new and exciting UI stuff in Yosemite, and try to bring desktop-class effects to the iPhone, we had a summer full of hard and incredibly intense work before us. Without adding Craig and Sean to help on the coding I would have never finished this on time (if you want to read more about this effort you may want to read Craig's blog post on furbo.org). Anthony's UI and UX design was just as brilliant as always! Last but not least, Talos and Travis, managing this huge effort has helped making Flare 2 a reality. Thank you, guys!
Now what are you waiting for? Go check it out! :-)
Wolfgang Ante