I'm proud to announce the next major update of my favorite VJ software, CoGe 1.4, which will be released at 26th of September, 2012. There will be a couple of important bug fixes and stability improvements, some UI cosmetics and over 10 new features as well.
CoGe 1.4 adds Dry/Wet fader for Effects, with new type of QC modules: Blends. You can fade between the dry and wet image using the selected Blend module like a mixer. A bunch of QC Blend modules will be installed with the new version, but you'll also find a template to roll you own modules with Quartz Composer!
CoGe now supports using of system-wide GPU accelerated Core Image Filters as effects. This is a great addition to the existing QC module based ecosystem, since Core Image filters are GPU accelerated and available system-wide. There are a huge number (around 50) of Core Image filters available by default on Mac OSX, but you can add more filters by installing Image Units which are packages of Core Image filters.
Setting value on Sliders manually now supported: a Set Value: option to the contextual (right-click) menu added with a textfield for sliders. Behavior modules for sliders. Behavior is a new kind of QC module type for sliders, they are processed on each render pass, but you can manage them to act only when the sliders' value changed. You will find the template with the available input ports in the modules/templates folder. There are some modules what CoGe 1.4 will installing, like Invert - which is a replacement for the previous built-in Invert feature, various Smoothing controls, and a Randomize function which randomise a value when a slider gets a new value, for example, with a MIDI controllers. Moving a slider with your mouse won't process Behaviors!
LayerGroup items using system-wide GPU accelerated Core Image blend modes(there are a lot of them) instead of simple Over/Add from now. The rendering task of LayerGroups has been rewritten from scratch for better performance.
...menu got some new features also. It contains a list where you can select the screen for the Main Output, and a new toy: Create PNG Snapshot. This new feature generates a .png snapshot from the Main Output to your account's Pictures folder. The snapshot creator functions happening in the background, so it won't bother the rendering.
CoGe 1.4 adds MIDI/OSC sending for Media Slots and Matrix and MIDI/OSC assign finally. The least is pretty handful if you wanna trigger clips from MIDI coming from Ableton Live for example. On the OSC side, there are also some additions in the Preferences: it displays the host IP address which cool if you wanna control CoGe with Lemur for example, but this update adds Bonjour based OSC output auto-detect function to OSC preferences too. You can select the OSC destination from a popup menu, which is super-handy when using OSC Talkback with apps like TouchOSC.
The whole Copy-To-RamDisk function is redesigned. It won't bother rendering anymore if you drop a bunch of large files to a ClipSynth, and with a newly added behavior to the Preferences pane called Fill Media Banks when dropping many files you can fill all the Media Banks with a single drop. The maximum available size of the RamDisk is selected by the available free memory. Media thumbnails are cached within a project, so Media Bank changes won't re-generate all the thumbnails anymore. Auto Player Select got a new category called WebFiles (PHP and HTML actually) with a new Player module for them as well.
CoGe 1.4 will be released at 26th of September, 2012.