Imimot

CoGeVJ 2.0 Development update

Hi, there! This is Tamás from Imimot. I'm the developer of all software from Imimot, with occasional help from freelancers. We were so busy with development of our apps in the past months and not really communicative as needed - I totally understand you want to be informed about the tools you love and use - so I'm here for sharing you some information about the long-wanted CoGeVJ 2.0, and why it is being delayed.

A little look back

CoGe 1.0 (developed by myself) has been released almost 10 years ago, as a modular VJ tool heavily based on Quartz Composer. Quartz Composer was a fantastics and very popular tool back in the days, and handled all media playback in CoGe - playing movies, still images. These were really customizable modules in CoGe called "players".

But after a couple of years with the yearly macOS updates, it did not get much love from Apple anymore, it started to be less and less reliable, so I started to develop the "Native Players"- these built-in modules were using Quicktime, Apple's media handling framework.

Quicktime then got deprecated by Apple in favor of AVFoundation, they new 64bit technology.

With the release of macOS Catalina, Quicktime is not available anymore, so our beloved CoGe.app does not working anymore. The "fix", which meant the switch from Quicktime from AVFoundation was in the work already those days, and I made a very big mistake: I made a promise that the new version should be out soon, and I was not able to keep the promise.

I'm personally responsible for that decision of course, and apologize for things taking far longer than I’d originally estimated, and not informing you more often.

Why is the delay?

So if the switch between Quicktime and AVFoundation was already in the works those days, what happened then, you could ask.

Well, it turned out I need to change some fundamentals in CoGe's rendering engine to make it working with the new framework, and also realized CoGe has to move away from its Quartz Composer root. However, this is much more complicated than I thought, as many parts of the application designed around Quartz - basically all Automation is Quartz Composer based in CoGe for example, so I need to develop a new way to handle that too, in a similar fashion.

CoGe also need to move away from the now deprecated OpenGL technology for its rendering engine to Apple's new Metal API, which is also a much bigger task than I originally estimated.

Last, but not least, Imimot is not a supersized company, and while CoGe is definitely my lovechild, it has other products I need to work on too.

So when CoGeVJ 2.0 will be available?

Learning from past mistakes, I cannot give you an ETA, but it is unlikely it will be happening in 2021. It is in the works, but it is going slowly.

I hope this update is clearing up the confusion about where things are at, why they’ve taken so long. Thanks for sticking with us, and for all your support over the years!

Tamás