Online Documentation

v 2.7 (in develepment)

• Looking for a bug on certain laptop systems where Desktop backgrounds are not displayed correctly.

v 2.6.1 (January 21, 2004)

• Fixed a bug for Jaguar users which caused config panel to fail because we were using a Panther-only font call when building the custom tab items.

v 2.6 (January 21, 2004)

• Pathline rendering returns to Fluid
• New tab items with visual selection icon for render effects
• Video device selection button and dialog for video reflections
• Updated documentation
• Added flow controls to the liquid properties tab. This allows manual control of the x and y flow of the liquid.
• Reorganized the prefs dialog
• Small rendering speed improvements
• Screencapture: You can now save the currently rendered frame by hitting the S key on your keyboard. The image is saved into a ~/Pictures/Fluid/ directory. Multiple images are numbered sequentially within the folder.

v 2.5 (development release)

Fluid
• Working on a new rendering type, LIC, which is pretty cool. But, it's also pretty processor intensive. Slow, slow, slow...but pretty.
• Fixed some service resolution idiosyncracies with the Rendezvous implementation.
• Changed the background color of unused second monitors back to black (instead of the theme's background color). We had some requests for this to be changed back...so here you go.
• Themes and ColorMaps menus bug in Panther fixed. Now you can get to items in submenus.
• Bug in Background Effects (distort/warp) selection fixed. Now the selection sticks.
• Adding video reflections. Now you can use your iSight or other video feed as the source for the reflection. This is way cool.

Fluid Theme Server
• Fixed some performance idiosyncracies with the Rendezvous implementation.
• Now publishes themes as the computer's Sharing name instead of its hostname per Apple Technical QA1228.

v 2.1 (June 2, 2003)

• Added French localization for the Fluid interface!
• Small speed enhancements were added. Mileage may vary. Around 5%-13%.
• Fixed render bug on some laptop models. The bug may still exist on other laptop models but we haven't seen it yet.
• Added mode that allows Fluid to have real transparency when rendering. This allows the real desktop to show through, not just a screenshot that Fluid takes when it resets. This is a huge improvement! Caveats: It is quite a bit slower because the operating system is now having to composite the whole screen with alpha transparency; There is a flicker sometimes when a region of the screen behind Fluid updates (we are working to try and fix this). Since this feature is not yet working up to our standards we are disabling it in this version but look to see it in the near future.
• The background color for second monitors (if Fluid display is turned off on that monitor) now uses the background color that the user has selected (no alpha support yet). Before it was always black.
• Added keyboard controls: "F" displays the current framerate in frames per second; "->" resets Fluid immediately; "T" displays the name of the current Fluid Theme
• All text in Fluid (including the above) now renders in the same style as the OS X Dock does, with fancy shadows and all.
• Streaklines and vectors are now antialiased when rendered (if supported by hardware).
• Vectors now have a glow when they overlap each other and their tails are a bit longer than they used to be.
• Removed FFTW math library option because we originally misunderstood the license to be LGPL instead of GPL. I'm not quite sure if G3 owners are going to be able to use Fluid now, though. If you are using a G3 with Fluid 2.1 let us know (or if it doesn't work, you can also let us know).

v 2.0.3 (March 14, 2003)

• Rewrote screen capture code. The old code crashed on at least one user's system.
• Fixed some interface problems with desktop background config tab.
  

v 2.0.1 (February 26, 2003)

• Fixed a flaw in the way that we were handling desktop backgrounds that caused them not to work on some machines.
• Fixed some interface idiosyncracies with warp/distort background and background scaling interfaces.
  

v 2.0 (February 25, 2003)

• New documentation in PDF and Text form. You can get the PDF here, in case you're interested.
• Wrote a preference pane "application" for the Fluid Theme Server. Now you have a control panel to start/stop the server.
• Fluid now supports networked themes via Rendezvous! Fluid can now use themes found on other computers on the local network. Fluid Theme Server will allow you to serve your themes to the rest of the network. Fluid finds all Fluid Theme Servers automatically and their themes show up in your themes menu. How's that for "zero-config" networking? In addition, if you use random themes, then it will also use any network themes available. This option, available only when running Jaguar or later, can be disabled in the "Expert" tab of the Fluid config sheet. FTS is a stand-alone application which will eventually be a faceless app. While in development it will continue to be a standard OS X app that is present in the Dock. This is for development purposes only.
• New About Box to reflect the changes in our new company identity change. About box is now much more simple. No scrollie box, no paypal logo, etc., etc. Just the logo, credits (obligatory), and a button bar. The Apple Way.
• The Prefs window now loads backgrounds in the background so it shouldn't freeze while it is doing it any more. The way that backgrounds are handled internally is now much cleaner also so it should make dealing with backgrounds a little snappier.
• Now the name of the current theme is displayed at the bottom left of the screen for a couple of seconds when using randomized themes. This allows the user to identify themes that he/she likes.
• Fixed avery obscure crash that happened only when using randomize themes and the previous & current themes have certain flags turned on. This one was hard to track down.
• Computer specific preferences are no longer saved in theme files. These include Multiproc, the Fluid model (AltiVec or FFTW), and whether or not Fluid is rendered to the main screen only. Usually, you will only want to set these once and you want them to stay the same even if somebody else gives you a Theme of theirs and they have different settings on their machine.
• Colormap menu is now disabled if there are no colormaps available. The randomize colormap button is also disabled for the same reason.
• Random themes now correctly find all themes, not just those at the top level of the directory structure.
• Changed colormaps in Colorgrade mode to always show the entire colormap spectrum available. Fluid now scales the colormap to match the available velocities. This way, you will always see the entire range of colors even if you set up a lame fluid model that would otherwise be very boring to watch.
• Fixed the bug in the colormap editor that caused the first color that was edited to change to full opacity in the Color Panel. Very annoying. Now it works correctly. My mistake.
• Added a set of default Themes that are embedded in Fluid. This will allow us to have some themes without the user having to install them seperately. They will appear in the Themes menu under the Default Themes submenu.
• Fixed the corrupted background images that some people were seeing at certain resolutions. Woohoo!
• Added a new background warping effect called Distort. It displaces the pixels of the background image much like the Photoshop Liquify filter works, except Fluid does it in realtime around 40 frames per second on a decent machine and it is powered by the fluid model. This is basically the same effect that Alias/Wavefront is using for their Windows-only Maya screensaver. This is all that saver can do...this is but one of many effects that Fluid can do.
• Web-based backgrounds are now downloaded everytime Fluid resets. The background image is now also recaptured everytime Fluid resets.
• New Glass-Blocks render "substyle" added for users with Radeon 8500 cards. This effect uses an OpenGL extension available only on that card, so it is not available to all users.
• New background type added: Desktop Background. This uses the user's current desktop background for the background of Fluid. If the user has their "Desktop" settings set to change backgrounds automatically, Fluid will notice the change when it cycles. So, if you have your backgrounds set to change every minute and you have Fluid set to reset every minute, then Fluid will have a different background image each time it resets. Pretty cool. This setting is also very useful if you want to run Fluid all the time as your background. Now you can have Fluid just run with your background current background image and you don't have to change it in both places.
• Added new Particle render style
• Added new StreakLines render style
• Added new Contour Lines render style
• Added new Contour Fill render style
• Added a 3D effect to the colormap render style so that it looks bumped up.
• Added reflection mapping to the colormap render style. This looks really good and increases the perceived resolution of the entire render.
• Completely redesigned the configuration pane so that it correctly fits on an iBook screen (I never realized they were so small!) and is better organized (hopefully).
• Added smoothing to the bubbles so that they look better at lower resolutions of the model. This will help those with slower computers that have to run in lower model resolutions. Even 32 and 64 look pretty good now.
• Now every setting scales proportionally when changing model resolutions. So, if Fluid is set for resolution 64 and you really like it and want a high res render, then you can just set it to 256 and not have to change things to get it looking right again.
• Bubbles now move at the same speed regardless of resolution or framerate.
• ColorMap files now have a preview of the colormap in their icon when saved from Fluid. And, as far as I know, Fluid is the only program that allows you to edit and save OS X's built-in NSColorMap objects. Fluid's colormap files can be loaded directly into OS X's color palette.
• Theme files also now have a preview in their icon. One caveat: They use the last rendered frame in the preview window as their screenshot. So, to get a preview, you need to run the preview until you get an image that looks good and then hit 'configure' to open the configuration pane to save the Theme. That's the only way we could do it since the model has to work for a bit to get a good screenshot. Plus, this way you get to pick the screenshot that you want in the icon.
• Backgrounds can now be web-based. Yep. Just open your web-browser and drag an image from a web page onto the background image in Fluid's prefs pane and Fluid will then load that image from the web whenever it starts. This is really cool when using webcam images from the web. I figure that somebody will come up with some interesting uses for this feature. Caveat: Right now it only gets the image when it starts the first time...not on every reset of Fluid. We are working on a fix for that.
• The "Background" tab preview now shows what the background will look like in Fluid (complete with background color and all).
• The Fluid model resolution can now only be set to a predefined set of numbers (that are all fairly reasonable) via a menu. This is to help keep people from setting it to insane numbers thinking that it corresponds to video resolution and not resolution of the model's grid.
• We've provided settings for the viscosity and time increment fields (though you can still use your own via the Custom menu item). This should help people a bit since those are fairly cryptic settings.
• Turned the color map control to horizontal to allow for it to be bigger.
• The preview window now always renders in 64 resolution so that it won't chug the machine if somebody sets Fluid to 1024 model resolution or something. It still looks the same in the preview window at the lower res due to the above changes to resolution scaling.
• Optimized sqrt() function which resulted in a 15% speed increase.
• Note: If you find bugs or problems in this version, please let us know by emailing support@concepthouse.com.