waffle

Like Thought, LLC launches Opacity today. It is something as sorely needed as an image editor optimized towards working with images in multiple resolutions.

Opacity is perhaps the most truly innovative application to come out of any company — any — for the last year. You work mainly with vectors but also with pixels in layers geared towards certain resolutions. You can use “factories” to produce multiple versions of the image with each a separate resolution, file type and naming scheme, and there are variables to change different parameters of basically anything.

What’s more to it, Opacity is the full package. It is an image editor and a great Mac app with immense attention to detail. (Look no further than the “variables” plug, which is represented by a domestic AC socket — and the socket is localized!)

Opacity looks very powerful, but it’s also very confusing at first. Luckily, Opacity ships with wonderful eye-opening follow-along tutorials that reveal some of the raw power that can be unlocked, and I’m told instructive videos are in the future.

Opacity 1.0 may not be perfect, really easy to use for the uninitiated or free, but as it stands, it represents a far bigger leap into image editors for the express purpose of creating a resolution-independent user interface than anything else, and Opacity and Like Thought deserves all the credit they’ll get. This is a big deal for developers who need to care about resolution independence, and by 2008, that’s the lot of us.

(Disclosure: Like Thought created Opacity, but there’s some of my code in there, and I beta tested it. The shortcut part of Preferences is littered with Shortcut Recorder controls, and Hex Color Picker is bundled as an optional extra. Don’t confuse this for simple tit-for-tat back-scratching, though. My code has no bearing on any of the actual main features. Had I or my software had no involvement whatsoever, the application would still have been every bit as brilliant, and I would have come out just as strongly in favor of it.)