September

Celebrating the early autumn light following a smattering of golden days.

Hot off the press

Extra, extra, read all about it! Celebrating the release of Apophysis 2.09 as thousands of addicts the world over get their fix of the purest iterations. The title comes from the likeness to rolled and stacked newsprint, but also contains an element of self-referentiality in both the first use of the program and my use here and shock revelation of a certain undocumented feature :whisper: ;)

Tip: linked transforms #2 - introducing pre-transforms

Oh joy! I recall my delight on discovering the power of linked transforms as introduced in the 2.08 release. This was a feature that wasn't trumpeted, just quietly slipped in. Well, those sneaky developers have done it again, given us a little Easter Egg quite undocumented in the spartan changelog. 2.09 has much going for it:

• much more responsive


• unused variations greyed out


• only used variables shown


• transform weight permanently visible in Editor


• transform opacity

The thumbnails are a nice addition, but an option to default to names would be better. And that Easter Egg? Right-clicking in the Xaos tab now gives 2 linked transform options: before and after. The old linked transform is now 'after', but the 'before' option, always available via a little work but again completely missed by yours truly, opens up yet another vast landscape of possibilities. In conformity with my previous notation, I'll refer to these as 'pre-transforms': all of this linked transform's output is fed to the selected transform, and it receives its input from all except itself.