The color and blitting bugs in the Intel version of REBOL 2 for MacOSX have finally been fixed, but it has a price to pay in that R2 for MacOSX Intel is slower at displaying graphics than the first Intel version. As we already know, Apple are in the process of kicking QuickDraw out the door, so Quartz can have full reign in the world of MacOSX and that means REBOL must follow suit, so the new version is based on Quartz. It's only one page of C code to change, but it's problematic as it is, giving us two problems:

- The colors are wrong. They always were, but moving to Quartz did not initially solve the color problem.
- The coordinates for what regions to blit in a View window are wrong, which gives misplaced and stretched graphics elements.

The first problem is partly due to the move to Intel, which uses a different bit ordering for blitting and not being able to feed Quartz with the correct color format. The first version did not use Quartz and therefore did not show the blitting problem:

Original Intel version with incorrect colors

After consulting an Apple developer, the color bug was fixed after moving to Quartz, but the second problem then occurred. It has been worked on for some time, but has proven to being troublesome because Carl has had trouble figuring out the correct coordinate system to use. Incorrect blitting looks like this:

Well, that just doesn't work, does it?

Due to time constraints and a strong desire to continue the development of REBOL 3, the blitting routine was changed to blit the whole window instead. This causes a minor slowdown, but it certainly looks far better:

Back to normal

Fonts are still a problem in MacOSX Leopard, though.

Release date is currently unknown.