All the newsletter emails have gone out, and the press releases, and the quick updates to the website and store, and I've even started on version 1.0.1 to fix a crasher. Which is all to say Retrobatch 1.0 was released yesterday!

We've been flooded with ideas and inquiries, which is always a good sign. And the sales aren't too bad either. Thanks to everyone who's tried it out, and the nice write-ups it's received, and if you haven't checked it out already- why not?!

There were times in the development of Retrobatch that I wasn't so sure it was a great idea to spend this much time on a new and unproven app. I usually start a little smaller. And it was supposed to ship last September. But the original beta testers were enthusiastic about it and finding interesting new things to do with it I hadn't considered. I was also finding areas of cross pollination between Retrobatch and Acorn (and which is only going to grow in the future).

For instance, the initial work to bring Metal to Acorn 6.1 was originally done in Retrobatch. Since I had no legacy code to worry about with Retrobatch 1.0, I started with Metal from the beginning. And with that experience I was able to figure out how I could move code around and refactor Acorn in an intelligent way to bring Metal rendering there. And of course a number of the nodes in Retrobatch are obviously derived from Acorn.

And all the experience with working with wide gamut images and deep colors in Acorn meant that I had Retrobatch able to flawlessly handle those types of images from the start.

It's nice having two apps that nicely dovetail each other, and can build on each other.

In the past when I would switch from working on VoodooPad to Acorn, it would sometimes take me a couple of weeks to get my brain in the right mode for dealing with the different problems. And while there's still a bit of a context switch when moving from Retrobatch to Acorn, it's not nearly the same as it was with VP. The architectures are very different between Retrobatch and Acorn, but they both use the same core libraries and that really helps.

So what's next? I've already started on Retrobatch 1.0.1, and I'm going to start working on Acorn 6.2 as well. But I've also already started on a number of new nodes for Retrobatch (like levels, compositing, writing animated gifs) so there will probably be a RB 1.1 release sooner rather than later.

And next week is WWDC, so I've got a little bit of celebrating to do there first.