The last release of Shazzam (version 1.3) was in July of 2010. Version 1.3 had a lot of good updates and has been well received in the community. I’ve been very happy with the outcome and the current version is very stable.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the future of Shazzam. I’ve always felt that it would make a good addin for Visual Studio. It turns out that a lot of people who use Shazzam are not using Visual Studio. There are the designers who use Expression Blend and the gamer shops that use Shazzam for shader previewing. That makes the idea of creating a VS addin less appealing. And then there is Visual Studio 2012 coming. It has a very impressive set of tools for graphics developers, including shader editors.
So what’s happening with Shazzam? There will be a new release early in 2012. It will continue to be a standalone product. I have some ideas on improvements and other fixes. For one, I want to make it more "social". By that I mean making it easier to share shaders files with the community.
More importantly, I am writing a book on shaders for O’Reilly (details in another post). Shazzam will play an important role in the book and it needs some improvements to help that goal.
If you have suggestions add them to the comments, or look for the new forums coming soon.
Shader Book Coming soon
HLSL and Pixel Shaders for the XAML Developer. O’Reilly Media Inc..
