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Refraction History |
Author: |
Xentronix |
Version: |
1.0 |
Download: |
none |
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The life and times of Refraction
What is Refraction
Refraction is a higly modualar image editing package for BeOS. It differs from most image editing applications in that it is designed to be as flexible as posible. The basic core does little more than load and manage 'Tool' plugins. These Tool plugins handle most of the load of image editing. This alows the flexiblity to update, change, replace Tool plugins as needed. Floater windows (ie Layer Window, Color Picker Window) are also plugins. Theses Floater plugins also alow Refraction to be expanded and changed as needed.
This simple plugins design does not mean that Refraction is lacking in the basic tools department. The Refraction Team has put together quite a impressive set of base tools (most under the Refraction Sample Code license) so that other may learn from them. Things you come to expect from any image editing tool. Pencil, Brush, FloodFill, Basic Shaps, Zoom and may others.
Refraction is designed for BeOS. What does this mean exactly? What advantage does this give us? BeOS is designed in a unique and clean way, its API or object based and the systems message passing and threading alow things that aren't posiblem on other systems. Refraction is build from the ground up to take advantage of these aspects. The Plugin model, The simple message passing, Clean object model all can be seen in Refraction. Infenro also takes full advantage of BeOS's supeiror multi-threading feature unlike any other image editor.
History
Refraction has a simple history. The team on the other hand... Refraction started out
as a small project started by YNOP in January 2000.
The reasons were simple - a image editing tool that was plugin based - also to learn simple 2D graphic
manipulation. In late May 2000 BeUnited started a open sourced image editing
project named Photon (based upon a abandoned image editor project). The team
was assembled from a handful of people selected by Eugenia. The team spent
several months reviewing the Photon source base and came to one conclusion -
total rewrite. After a short time a few members from the original Photon team
joined with YNOP to create the Refraction Team and started work on YNOP's already
started Infenro core. The basic design of Refraction (plugins - parts) alows the work
to be done concurrently by many people and not worry about source control, thus
the primary development has been via the internet. Refraction team continues to
work and improve the feature set and 3rd party APIs for the future.
Refraction was started as Inferno. Unfortunalety this name was registered as a trademark, and we were not allowed to used it any longer.
Copyright © 2000-2001 Xentronix. All rights reserved.