Isadora has been an indispensable tool for live visuals, projection mapping, interaction, performance, and more – and now native Apple Silicon (M1) support is on its way.
Founder Mark Coniglio has the news. What’s great here is you get nearly all of your existing tools in native form. It’s still in testing phase, but it sounds like it’ll be ready for primetime soon. Mark writes:
Isadora is now compiled as a “FAT” binary, which means it has code for both the Intel and ARM processors bundled into the same application. (It also means the macOS version has doubled in size to 100 megabytes… but I guess that doesn’t mean much in this day and age.)
With a couple of exceptions, nearly all of the Isadora’s built-in actors, as well as the “official” actors from the Add Ons page, are also compiled this way. Some rough tests show that things are actually working well.
In addition, I’m happy to report that there are – so far – no obvious issues with the macOS Monterey beta. Considering the what Apple unleashed upon all developers with Catalina and Big Sur, I can tell you I am breathing a (cautious) sigh of relief. Let’s see how it goes as further betas appear.
The team has now started internal testing on Apple Intel and M1 computers, and also on Windows. Once we feel good about what we have, we’ll seed the beta testers so we can respond to their feedback. Our ultimate goal is to get this into your hands as soon as we can manage.
Isadora is a special tool to have on those machines – uniquely designed with performers’ intentions in mind, as you’d expect from a pioneer in technology for modern dance.
This is a big deal, in that Apple’s new platform is efficient, predictable, and absolutely sips power and generates low-heat. It’s not that these systems aren’t already appealing running Rosetta 2. But obviously for these performance-critical applications, native is what we’re really excited about.
The PC still has the edge on the graphics processing side, in that a dedicated GPU does have more parallel processing horsepower. But that’s not for all use cases, and I think even some in PC environments will be eyeing these machines as part of their stable – to say nothing of what hardware Apple may have in store for the future.
And speaking of PC, making sure ARM works on Mac will also be related as the PC side offers more ARM offerings, too.
So I think we are absolutely watching for tools like Isadora – and TouchDesigner, Unreal Engine, Max, Notch, and others – to go to native M1 support.