DiscreetFX Platform Shift

[nicholas]

DiscreetFX's primary focus for quite a while has been developing visual effects products for video editing solutions on Windows. We would sometimes also make these effects available at a later date for Mac OS X. Potential Mac customers would call us concerned because certain products would ship much later for Mac OS X if ever. As 2010 winds down and ends we have noticed a softening in our Windows effects business. We did some research and found that while companies that sell integrated hardware/software solutions on Windows are doing fine software only vendors have noticed a great slow down.

 
 

Our research results have come back and this downward spiral will only continue and accelerate in the future. Microsoft continues to bleed many key executives at an alarming pace. What do they know that we don't? Since we wish to grow and expand DiscreetFX we plan to avoid this destitution and software sales decay. For some time we have already run the business side of DFX on Mac OS X and this has worked out well. Starting today we will change the focus of our software effects development from Windows to Mac OS X. Now the OS X versions of our software will come out first and later the Windows versions will ship if ever depending on the product. The first product this will affect is MusicFX.

 
 

DiscreetFX's Amiga business and Amiga.org will remain unchanged since this has always been the fun side of the business. This decision should strengthen DiscreetFX and help it grow. We are only reporting it here for transparency reasons and for full disclosure to our customers since some of them are members of this site. Of course old products are still fully supported.

 
 

If you have questions don't hesitate to ask. Our first mission is to help our great customer base. Exciting times are ahead like the Mac App Store. A lot of our regular customers have changed platforms from Windows to Mac and we will now join them. Expect to see other software developers follow suit. We are usually slightly ahead of the curb. If you remember we were one of the first to embrace selling software on Flash drives in 2006 and we completely moved to selling all our FX software on Flash drives in 2008. Apple just started selling Mac OS X and iLife 11 on Flash drives last week with the new MacBook Air.

 

Best regards

 

DiscreetFX Team

Why not write your apps using Qt4 enabling you to simultaneously release your products for all major (and some not so major) platforms?

[nicholas]

Why not port to AROSx86 and sell "closed" hardware and software solutions then?
This way you control the quality of the hardware such as RAID(s) and video cards ensuring that your product performs expectedly well on the hardware.

Excellent idea, but surely an OS with better stability would be better for such devices? Haiku/Linux/BSD etc....

[nicholas]

the only thing I use my iMac for is the net...

Heretic!

[nicholas]

Believe me I'd love to get this old iMac doing something useful, but you'd need to use a calendar to time the bootup sequence and you could take the dog for along walk waiting for iTunes to start...

Is it PPC or Intel?

[nicholas]

It's an old iMacG4 800Mhz PPC, bought it for £65 then had to pay some geezer nearly 400 quid to fully upgrade it to OS X 10.4.11



Make's a nice desk lamp though...

HOW MUCH?!?!?!?! :O

Burn this to a disc.

Stick it in your Mac, hold down the letter 'c' while it boots and follow the prompts to install it.

Once it reboots, login and type

Code: [Select]

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop
Wait for ages, then reboot when finished.

Et voila, a useful desk lamp!

[nicholas]

@ Nicholas

Cheers mate... I think... :confused:

Erm... bit of a dummy when it comes to macs, is that a cd or dvd I burn it to... :confused:

Either mate, it's only small so it will fit on a blank CD.

Will I lose all my data, progs, passwords, cookies etc... if I do this ?

I don't have any backup OSX discs if it goes wrong...

Yep, unless you backup your data first.

I assume Lubuntu is a different OS system...

Or is this all just a plot to blow up me mac and stop me posting nonsense on Amiga.org... :roflmao:

It's a version on Linux that runs well on low-end hardware like your iMac.

PS:The bill broke down as

1GB Memory Upgrade  £60
160GB Hard Disk £48
DVDRW Drive  £25
Upgrade OSX 10.2 to OSX10.4.11
Call Out Charge £55
Labour £192

Total Cost £380

(Spot the Mug or What ... )

You could have bought a brand new Intel Mac Mini for a couple of quid more!

[nicholas]

Cheers Tone,

I'll give that way a try first, as I say I have no way of reinstalling OSX back on this mac and don't want to lose any of the data on it.

Anything has to be better than OSX10.4 which I find terribly slow...

To do that you'll need to burn this but it'll run like a dog on such a low spec machine, even slower than OSX 10.4.

Lubuntu is much more lightweight than it's daddy.

[nicholas]

Frankly I don't see what people see in Linux.  At work I run a Virtual Linux box as a web server and it does great at that.  But as a web server it doesn't need a gui and it runs happily by itself, which is how Linux seems the happiest.  

Every once in a while I try a Virtual Linux box just to see how it works, I've tried KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, Openbox, E17 and none of the Windows managers impressed me as something I'd want as my main OS.  The whole this seems designed by geeks for geeks and frankly a waste of time for me.

Stick with what you like then.