Keith
Visitor
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Re:More bugs and annoyances - 2008/05/16 04:23
Hi Bunglemeister,
I'm sorry to hear your experience hasn't been as pleasant as it could be 
Let me address each one of your comments.
I'm working on a new Comic, and started to plan it out just putting in the frames (no images), and the text including speech bubbles. There are three pages in my document, but Magiq is incredibly slow (2.4GHz Mac Book Pro with 2GB RAM and only the browser and Mail running apart from Magiq). It also crashes every few minutes.
Comic Life Magiq has been very stable in our beta testing so we're not sure what is making it crash for you. I haven't checked with our email support people yet, but if you could send us your comic document file, that could be very helpful in solving this mystery. We've not seen any kind of crashing like you mention before
When zoomed to 100% and trying to move around the screen with the space bar held down, Magiq tends to suddenly jump to an adjacent page or even the empty space next to the page (with the mouse buttons still held down and the space par still pushed). It even tends to jump to the adjacent page if 80% of the editing area is covered not by the page it just jumped to. Scrolling with the wheel is useless, because the scroll ratio is way to slow (no 3rd party mousedriver used).
Again -- I think this is probably related to the performance/crashing issues you are experiencing. Scrolling on our various test machines has certainly been very useable and stable -- but we'd love to hear other people's feedback. We'll continue to optimize as well.
Magiq doesn't remember which panels I had open the last time, so when quitting and restarting the app I always have to set things up again and again (this is even more annoying because I have to restart the app very often due to the crashes) Magiq also doesn't remember, which panel layout collection was last selected either, so every I load a document I have to re-select the preferred panel layout via the drop down menu (shouldn't that info be saved in the document?)..
These are definitely some things we will look into.
Comic Life use to have the option of using curved tails on a speech bubble and the curves would automatically change the direction depending on the direction the tip would point to, this functionality is apparently gone, which I found very handy, though. I know I can reshape the curve of the tail with the Add Parts tool, but I'd have to manually reshape it every time I choose to change the direction.
Yes, I agree on this. With all the new flexibility of Comic Life Magiq, we may still have some tweaking to do!
Also when selecting a speech bubble there's no indication on which tail shape it is currently using (tail name not displayed). There's the icon of the tail shape, but that's often not clear enough.
In the first dialogue after startup, if you select "Load Past Comics" it will only show the first few letters of the name, even on mouse-over it won't reveal the full name. If the cover of several Comics is the same it is impossible to tell files apart with long names that differ only in numbers at the end.
Would the full name on mouseover/selection be suitable?
Comic Life has keyboard shortcuts for displaying and hiding most panels, why doesn't Magiq?
We'll add that to the to-do. Not all window sections are simple open-close (they can resize), so it's a bit more complex than before.
If Magiq is using Core Image Effects etc. why is it taxing the CPU so high (40-100%), even when just scrolling around and editing some text in speech bubbles with no images even placed yet?
While writing this post and rechecking some things in Magiq it actually crashed three times. I don't install any SIMBL stuff or other hacks, so I am pretty sure the instability is not an issue on my side.
I'm happy with the feature set of Magiq, it's awesome, now if you could get it out of beta I'd be a happy customer again
Comic Life Magiq is designed for working with many high resolution images -- and so is working to cache continuously- that is, scrolling performance should be about the same with images included due to this cacheing work. Brushes used on Panels can also be complex to render.
However, we've not heard of crashing like you describe, which is certainly unacceptable. Your machine is certainly within specification, and with no additional haxies should perform identically to other users' machines. Please do send us in some example comic documents, and we'll do our utmost to solve this problem with you personally.
Many thanks for your patience,
Keith
plasq
Post edited by: keith, at: 2008/05/16 04:41
Post edited by: keith, at: 2008/05/16 04:55
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