One of the minor frustrations of Alcyone is that I don't have anything that fully takes advantage of the hardware. It's running Win7-64 and it has 4 cores.

But now I've ordered something that really will do it. It's "Poser Pro 2010", and it's the first 64-bit version of Poser. I've been an intermittent user of Poser for several years; I think I started with Poser 3, way back when.

This wasn't very cheap. $430. But I just put in the order at newEgg, and I'll probably have it next week. Should be fun -- and, maybe, fully test out the new cooling fan. (Eeek!)

UPDATE: I had to pay full price because they didn't offer an upgrade from Poser 7. There's an upgrade to Poser 8, but it's 32-bit.

Another thing I'm hoping is that they have finally completed getting rid of all the structural cruft that was left over from when Poser was developed for MacOS Classic.

You know, the one which used cooperative multitasking and had no memory management and did a piss-poor job with threads, so that everyone did their own memory management and did their own internal cooperative multitasking instead of using threads, and... Gad, what a piece of shit.

Poser through version 6 or so was really unpleasant to use on any of the NT-derivative versions of Windows. It "knew" that it was the only app running on the computer, for instance, so when it was doing a render there wasn't any way to get it off the main screen. It refused to minimize. (If, for instance, you clicked the "Show the desktop" icon, which is supposed to force every app to minimize instantly, then when Poser noticed that it had been minimized it would put all its pieces back up again, as soon as it got around to it. Which, with its lousy internal structure, might take anything from ten seconds to a couple of minutes -- but it always happened.)

And because it was doing its own round-robin multitasking, there were times when it could take 30 seconds for it to respond to a mouse-click or an operating system signal.

But some of that got cleaned up in Poser 7. Transitioning the thing to 64-bit necessarily means it had to be seriously restructured anyway, and I'm hoping that part of that was to clean up the relationship with the operating system.

The product has gone through multiple corporate hands over the years. The original developers were all Mac freaks, and they ported it to Windows because the Windows market was 15 times the size. But deep down they believed that the Mac way was the right way, so they didn't conform to standard Windows GUI guidelines. So menus looked like Mac menus. They didn't use standard Windows mechanisms for that. And there were a lot of other things like that.

The biggest reason I hope they've finally modernized the design is because now, finally, OSX is here and so those fucking Mac-heads will finally design the product to use real threading, and stuff like that. But I have no hope that the Windows version will actually look like a Windows app. It's still going to look like a Mac app. Pearls before swine, and all that. We Windows heathen will get a taste of the good life, and we'll like it.

(Bitter? Me? what gave you that idea?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 02:39 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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