Colorthink 3.0.3 bugs and omissions

MacOS 10.7.5

A few things I found while I’ve been debugging some of my own profile creation tools:

2D/3D plot list + menu has an entry for “Active”. When it is enabled, it shows 2 or more blank entries. Selecting any of them gets an error “Error: additem not setup with Add menu correctly”.

Clicking the 2D and 3D graph buttons in the profile inspector frequently does nothing, or simply opens an empty (axes only) grapher window. Sometimes I get lucky and it actually graphs the selected profile, but usually I have to add it to the list manually.

Profile Inspector shows tag sizes in Kilobytes, which isn’t very useful when inspecting an 11 byte tag (that should have been 12 bytes) and it all shows 0.01KB. I would prefer to see an exact byte count instead of a bad approximation of a user friendly value.

ColorThink does not graph 2D and 3D plots for devicelink or abstract profiles. Abstract could show a cube mapping (see Apple’s ColorSync Utility) or a gamut hull, device link probably should should a cube mapping.

Abstract and DeviceLink profiles show the 2D and 3D graph buttons in the Profile Inspector without graying them out, but they do nothing.

Profile Inspector has the Curves tab enabled for devicelink and abstract profiles, but shows nothing for the curves in those profiles. Abstract should have obvious content. Devicelink should switch from L* to device coordinate curves.

Profile Inspector Statistics tab shows nothing useful for devicelink or abstract profiles. Gamut Volume for both shows -NA,N(0,00). Abstract profiles have an obvious gamut volume. Devicelinks are less obvious, but should switch to device dependent measurements.

On MacOS, all file paths are still given in Carbon “:” separated form. We moved to OS X a few years ago now, and it’s time to adopt Unix style file paths.

Similarly, MacOS identifies profiles by extension not just by filetype “prof”, so having that as a warning is kind of pointless now. Classic is now long gone, and no longer a concern for most users (ok, except those still running G5’s).

And requiring that filenames and profile descriptions match is kind of old-school as well. I want the filename to be unique, but I don’t necessarily want the description to be so terse or filesystem centric – that’s why the ICC specified the description separately from the filename (well, that and 8.effing3).

Colorthink’s system Profile Manager is not finding all the same profiles as ColorSync. Colorthink appears to be ignoring symlinks/aliases in the profiles folder. Photoshop and other Adobe applications add a couple of symlinks/aliases so ColorSync will see the profiles installed, but we can keep the profiles in our directories and update them without upsetting the OS.

If a profile does not give the user read permissions, Colorthink flags it as defective/not a profile instead of warning about the bad permissions. (happened when I copied some profiles from a previous system volume)

Profile Inspector Curves tab appears to have some spinny progress/busy indicator UNDER the window resize thumb on the lower right. In some profiles the curves never display, and that animated icon just keeps going…

Hmm, is there any way to attach files in this forum? I need to send you some profiles that generate errors.

All good input. Thank-you.
We will pour over this and see how we can improve.

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If you’re wanting to send us files for testing, we have a “feedback” feature built into ColorThink Pro. Go to ColorThink Pro 3.0.3 > Feedback System… and fill out the form. That way, your contact information and operating system, etc. is automatically included. There is a means for attaching any files you think we might need in order to understand and duplicate your findings. Thanks for contributing these; it really helps us track down these issues and solve them.

Speaking of… Any news of when we might be looking at a new version?

We are really itching to roll up our sleeves and dig into an update on ColorThink very soon. Over the next couple or 3 months we should be able to get an update out.