Announcing TD Trebuchet!
So, gonna address the elephant in the room, but what would be the pitch to use Trebuchet instead of the GitHub - EnviralDesign/TD-Launcher: A bootstrapper exe for automagically loading your toe file in the correct version of TouchDesigner. ?
Good question. TD Launcher is a fine tool and I’m glad that Lucas was able to build it for the community.
However, there are a few differences between the two.
The biggest difference is the same as with any commercial product vs an opensource one. TD Trebuchet provides a higher level of support. B/c this is a paid product I have a greater incentive to issue bug fixes and address issues in a timely manner.
Other notable differences are:
Our installer and application have been digitally signed. This isn’t an issue for everyone but if you are working in an organization with stricter IT setups this will allow you to run the application without any security warnings. This is also one of the main reasons for the cost. Digital certificates aren’t free and I’m trying to recoup some of my cost.
We have a native UI. Not strictly necessary but things feel more integrated.
TD Trebuchet is faster. This is something of a design choice in TD Launcher vs TD Trebuchet but TD Launcher takes a minimum of 5 seconds to launch your project where as TD Launcher will usually launch TD in under 1 second.
TD Trebuchet supports older versions of TouchDesigner. All the way back to 2017.10000. Where as TD Launcher only supports 2019 and newer.
While it isn’t out yet there is a planed release of a MacOS version which will be available to anyone who has purchased the Windows version.
Certainly if TD Launcher works for you by all means use it but I think that TD Trebuchet offers significant value and I plan on continuing to improve it via updates as time goes on.
-Isaac