bvigil Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
Hey FrancisK7,
As a photog, I was searching for something like PFixer. I looked at Motibodo, RPGKeys, Paddy, Knobroom... Knobroom was the closest to what I was looking for but LR4 had just arrived and development had basically come to a halt. There were no options out there for hardware-based MIDI control on the Mac. None.
My background is in applications development so I decided to take a stab at it. I created a few proof of concepts for my own use and while it actually "worked", I quickly figured out why nobody was doing it. It's WAY harder than it first seemed. For the PFixer engine, there were a few options: I could license the same macro engine that RPG & Motibodo use and whip up some keyboard and mousing macros (a la Windows 3.1 style). But that felt a little too much like framing your house with SuperGlue... just don't lean on the walls. Plus I didn't want to rely on software from another vendor to make mine work. Or I could use a plugin, and apply tons of presets, which is [I think] the way that VSCO Keys works -- you'd think there would be a better way, but the Adobe API is really basic, and has very little functionality for the Development module.
So we took the hard route of "CAT-scanning" the internals of Lightroom and using the insight to communication with LR internally at the operating system level. And it worked way better than we had hoped. We still have a two areas where we resort to mouse-clicking, but other than that, we are using Lightroom to control Lightroom. As an aside, custom keyboard shortcuts was a complete afterthought. Once the PFixer engine was in place, adding shortcuts and "virtual" Trackpad sliders was relatively easy --- talking to LR was the hard part.
Anyways... I only mention all that because it's been a huge advantage: from multiple versions of LR4, thru seven versions of LR5, not to mention OSX 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 PFixer has remained solid. We've fixed a few bugs and added a few sliders that Adobe added to LR5, but nothing other than that.
Right now we're in the quiet before the storm waiting for LR6 to see what those changes will mean to PFixer, if any, before we release the next update. I suppose if Adobe added compete keyboard customization and MIDI support, we'd have a hard time articulating a need for you to buy PFixer. But there's about a 1% chance of that happening.
But until then, we'll keep delivering.
|