< A href="http://www.stone.com/">Stone Design has announced Imaginator, a new image processing application that is built on technologies found only in Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger. Imaginator offers real-time processing for image effects and other image processing, and achieves this by leveraging native Cocoa development and several core technologies in Tiger. The company will release the product on April 29th, the day that Apple ships Tiger.
"iMaginator must be seen to be believed," said Stone Design CEO Andrew Stone in a statement. "When Tiger ships, just download it and you’ll see that this application truly unleashes the Tiger. Users of Stone Studio and Create will recognize the easy to use features such as the Effects/Images library and the Image Drag Well for instant saving of images and chains of effects for later reuse."
Imaginator is specifically built around Tigeris Core Image "Image Unit" technology, a system of image manipulation tools that are built straight into Mac OS X. Similar to the "Audio Units" format for plugins and effects that can be used in GarageBand, Logic and Soundtrack, Image Units are plugins that can be used in any application that recognizes them.
The software ships with more than 100 effects, transitions, and filters, and can utilize any Image Unit plugin that will be released in the future. 100 of the effects are Image Units Apple is releasing with Tiger, while Stone Design has developed seven of its own, including: Crop Fade Mask, Oval Mask, Make Transparent, Colorize, Grayscale and Polka Dots.
Imaginator incorporates Tigeris SpotLight, the instant search technology Apple is touting as one of the main features in the new OS, and it supports AppleScript.
Stone Design also noted that iMaginator is a LinkBack server, which means you can copy the resulting image and paste into a LinkBack client server, such as Stone Designis own page layout and web authoring application, Create. You can find more information on this at Stone Designis Create webpage.
Stone Design has priced Imaginator inexpensively, at US$49, with "free upgrades for life."