Monday, January 9th, 2006

I saw a post go by on the lua mailing list today, adding a new product to the user projects list... Adobe Lightroom, which just came out as a beta today. And I was flabbergasted by how it was described... '''Adobe Lightroom is "the complete, elegant environment for the art and craft of digital photography from raw capture to creative output". Over 40% of Adobe Lightroom is written in Lua.''' (emphasis mine).

Holy Crap. 40%? Wow. That's nuts. I had heard it described as a Cocoa app, so I needed to download it to check it out.

The first thing I did when I got the .dmg was to open up the package and snoop around a bit. Not that many .nib files laying around, but I bet they are using Cocoa. I found a couple of .lua files.. but they were in byte code for so I couldn't see what was in them (damn!). A little shell script action reveals that there are 223 different .lua files in there. Wow.

The UI is definitely not Cocoa. I know this because my scroll wheel doesn't work, and it feels kind of .. jerky. Almost in an OS 9 sort of way. I'm wondering if what they are doing is driving the whole UI with Lua? That would be super cool if that's the case, and I wonder if the exact same widgets are going to show up on the windows side?

Man I wish I could see what Adobe is doing with Lua behind the scenes. Is this a move on their part to a make as much of their code base for this project cross platform, or was it something else? Inquiring minds want to know. Oh hey- and Lightroom is also using sqlite!

I also got a kick out of the way palettes work (qt7 movie) in Lightroom. The palettes in FlySketch work the same way (yaqt7m).

Anyway, I really like Lua. It's simple, lightweight, a breeze to work with, and fun (because it's new!!!). I think Jens said it best when he compared it to a haiku.

-- posted 11:26 pm