Hi. My name is David Frampton and I develop software for Mac OSX. I manage Majic Jungle Software where games and screensavers take center stage.

Here at FluidMac though, “Creativity Tools” are what’s on offer, and FluidMac’s two debut products are FluidNoise and FluidMotion.

FluidNoise

Frustrated by the limitations of the photoshop clouds filter, I decided to write a noise generator to create images that could be used as grunge textures to roughen up images, or as inputs to shaders in my other projects. As the application grew I realized that it could become useful to others as well, for a whole host of different purposes, and FluidNoise was born.

At it’s most basic level FluidNoise is a Perlin noise generator which uses a variation of the noise functions developed by Ken Perlin. It can produce results similar to the clouds photoshop filter, but with the flexibility of the gradient editor and the various input parameters, images from fire to water to rusty metal can be created.

Images can be exported at 8bit or 16bit, and movies or image sequences can be exported using 3D noise to animate the result. It is also possible to create seamless tiling / looping images / movies.

Ease of use, and the “Mac” experience are the major goals for my applications. This means that features like drag and drop, and undo/redo support will be present. I hate modal dialogs, and try to keep all commonly used controls within easy reach.

I anticipate that FluidNoise will be released in mid-late January 2008. As I post this, The rendering system is basically complete, with multiple CPUs being used where available and near complete gradient editing. The bulk of the work between now and release is adding undo support, exporting of images and movies, writing of documentation, and just generally making it as intuitive and user-friendly as possible.

FluidMotion

Inspired by what iSight Screensavers could become, and by what I saw as a missing app, I started work on FluidMotion about 2 months ago.

In a nutshell, FluidMotion is a movie editing application for users of image editors. It takes away a lot of the complexity found in the likes of iMovie or Motion, but keeps the flexibility and control where it’s needed. At this stage of development I am wary of making too many promises. I have a solid idea in my mind of where it is heading, and am excited about what the result will be, but there are still plenty of unknowns. In particular this is going to be like no other movie/editing app, and I need to make sure that my idea for a good interface sits right with potential users out there.

So, beta testing will be a huge part of the release process. If you are interested in beta testing FluidMotion, for now please subscribe to this blog so you can keep an eye on progress, and more details will follow closer to the time. Currently beta testing is expected to commence mid 2008.