RIP CubeMovie

Today I have decided to pull the plug from CubeMovie HD, the small “rotating-cube” slideshow application that debuted in 2004.
On Snow Leopard, CubeMovie is completely broken and fixing it would require a complete overhaul, maybe even a rewrite.

Customers that have purchased the program in the last 6 months (June 1st onwards) are entitled to get a refund. Just email to supportcw@mac.com asking for it.

As the father of the creature, let me do the obituary:
CubeMovie is my first relevant program. With over 400 copies sold and $5000 in sales, I cannot call it a success but it still in the median of what a piece of shareware sells. (Fortunately, my more recent products were designed with more ambition and experience, and are doing better…)

CubeMovie is the first program I ever sold. This encouraged me to continue and write more programs. SimpleMovieX was born six months after CubeMovie, and showed enough potential to grow a business upon: I remember paying a fairly expensive PowerBook G4 in 2004 with CubeMovie and SimpleMovieX sales.

Finally, what sets CubeMovie apart is a little known fact: Under the hood, CubeMovie is a ClockWorks application. The whole program is made of around 400 interconnected “vignettes”, that define the flow of events. CubeMovie was first and foremost written as a “demo” of ClockWorks, a programming environment. But ClockWorks was a failure and CubeMovie was the unexpected debris of the shipwreck.

The picture below is the code that manages the texturing of the 6 faces of the cube: from top to bottom, the 6 picture views of the User Interface that link to 6 parameters objects that link to 6 OpenGL display lists.

The whole source of CubeMovie can be seen here (it’s a pre 1.0 version, the final 4.0.2 version graph was far more complex with over 400 vignettes, but I don’t have a picture in my archives, sorry).