A few months ago Apple announced the deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL. These technologies are the basis for my Ephemeral screen saver, so this announcement was a great excuse to learn Metal, Apple’s replacement.
My early impression of Metal is that it’s far easier to use: it was relatively straightforward to get it to draw the IFS fractals, whereas with OpenCL it was an absolute nightmare. In fact Metal makes things so easy, I’m seriously considering turning some of my other ideas into screen savers. Anyway, the conversion of Ephemeral is progressing well, and I hope to have a release ready soon.
In other news, I recently moved my web hosting to a new provider, which has allowed me to start using https for added security. At the same time I made a few other small changes to the website, including retiring the RSS feed — it just wasn’t worth the trouble.
Another big update to Ephemeral, but this time mostly under the hood. The biggest change is that I’ve reworked the rendering engine so that Ephemeral never needs to fall back to using the CPU for drawing, which means it will always draw with the new blur effect. The other changes are:
As with the last version, Ephemeral 2.1.0 (Felix Feles) now requires Mac 10.8 or later. But if you’re running 10.6 or 10.7, the old 1.1.2 release is still available.
With some spare time on my hands, I’ve turned my attention to updating my Mac screen saver Ephemeral. This release is a huge update from the old version. The main changes are:
As this version of Ephemeral is a major rewrite, any feedback about how it performs for you would be great.
I’ve got more ideas for improvements, so stay tuned!
psxdmh is my PlayStation Doom Music Hack — a command line tool to extract music and sound effects from the PlayStation versions of the Doom and Final Doom games. Pre–built executables are available for Mac and Windows, along with a collection of the Doom music generated by psxdmh.
The source code for psxdmh is available under the GPL v3 license. This means you can have a look at how psxdmh works, produce a modified version, or use parts of it in your own project.
Full details and downloads for psxdmh are here.
Older news items are available in the archive.