In the aughts I worked at Adobe and spent time trying to archive the source code for Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, and other apps. Thomas Knoll's original Mac floppy disk backups were available, so I brought in my Mac Plus, with a serial cable to transfer the files to a laptop via Kermit. The first version was 0.54, dated 6 July 1988. The files on the floppies were in various ancient compressed archive formats, but most were readable. I created an archive on a special Perforce server of all the code that I found. Sadly, the earliest Illustrator backups were on a single external disk drive that had gone bad.
the Illustrator guy was in Palo Alto and approachable .. at the time the feedback was that the interface interactions were not great .. hard to say now, but Freehand became popular quickly, then folded.
Freehand still hasn't been beat, even after all these years. Never did like Illustrator, but like everyone learned to use it once Freehand bit the dust.
I know! I have read every piece on the site, and they really go into some fantastic detail about old Apple stuff. No idea who this person it, and they have not posted in a few years, but would love to know more about their background. Almost certainly a developer inside Apple in the 80s and 90s.
Anyone having trouble adding this to their feed reader? The RSS works fine on my end, but Miniflux says
This website is too slow and the request timed out: Get "http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/rss.xml": dial tcp 209.182.219.107:80: i/o timeout
I remember traveling to Adobe in the mid-90s to exchange source-code with them, 'cause PhotoShop was MacApp based, and they had a layer working on Windows.
And we traded an in-process SQL engine.
I recall brining home some of the code, there were definitely parts of PhotoShop that were included, but not a lot. Just some funky color-space calculations that we ignored.
I'm looking forward to looking at the source to see if there's any remnants of MacApp in the mix. They may have changed everything since the mid 90s. Who knows.
They call that out as an exception specifically actually: "All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple"
MacApp on Windows ?!! of course.. what a bloatware.. Think Class Library saved the life of lots of devs. Greg Dow might still work for Adobe today. ps- PowerPlant was even better than TCL now thinking on it.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPlant
Incredible that the UX is still generally the same. What a vision the original engineers had.
I am annoyed today though every time I open the app. The only time it has ever felt snappy on desktop was a sweet period when the MacBook Pro M1 first came out and Adobe Photoshop had a Silicon beta out.
I cant speak for all PS users, but it's not that it is a special UX so much that it is embedded in the muscle memory of the user community, and that degree of familiarity contributes mightily to people being able to get work done quickly.
The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
As someone, who used Photoshop a lot, the UI/UX is good. It would be pretty hard to make it significantly better. And yes, even if you somehow made it better, many users would complain, because they have muscle memory of the UX, and are extremely efficient with it.
It would be curious to see UX timeline of what PS influenced, and what influenced it, in mouse age. A lot of desktop derivative products seem to hold on PS-like UI, it's all very mutually reinforcing. I'm not sure what iPad UX is like. I remember autocad products also adding ribbon system and it wasn't end of the world, but also very few ppl that I know end up migrating.
Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow.
Like part of me feels like there is a better physical hardware implmentation to manipulate all the curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but mouse+keyboard is... good enough.
When Photoshop went subscription I bought the full version of CS6 (or whatever the last non-subscription version was). It was very expensive. Then when that stopped working on Mac, I tried using every reasonable competitor, paid for several. I'm sure some of them are very competent tools, but it was a nightmare trying to learn a new UI. I bit the bullet and started paying the subscription.
The Messy Middle is an incredible book that essentially details how the CEO of BeHance, back in the day, rewrote Adobe's offering for the cloud, and detailed how he'd do it.
Scott Belsky - now investor himself - writing how he sold both BeHance and Adobe down the road for the rent economy.
I say The Messy Middle is an incredible book, but it is shelf help for dwindling execs.
To their generic credit, the open source scene for artistry and imagery is better than it ever was, because everybody has been priced out of the pro tools that actually can't keep up without community support.
Back in 1997-98 we had Pentium II machines (450mhz) with fast SCSI drives and 128 MB of ram that were fast Photoshop machines. I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out.
> I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out.
One of the comments that Steve Jobs made in the Boston 1997 speech was "No one at Apple has reached out to Adobe to ask how to build the ultimate Photoshop machine" - and in the next few years, Photoshop benchmarks were a key Mac vs Intel comparison during his keynotes.
I don't know if Jobs already had influence on the original beige Power Macintosh G3, but he really seemed to care about Photoshop performance when he arrived.
Back when PS6 was the current release I deliberately downgraded to copies of 2 and 3.5 that I found on a Hotline server, because they were extremely fast and did 90% of what I used photoshop for.
I looked at the source code but I wish I could understand what makes it beautifully elegant. I was pondering this question before as I was learning rust, and how tricky it was (decision overload) to make just a snake game (regarding code structure). I then was thinking how one would build a UI, functions which operate on a "space", and I thought of photoshop specifically, or 3d studio max. So finding this repo was really cool, except I simply just don't understand it.
If anyone knows of good resource I could learn code structure LMK! I find it interesting just from a learning perspective, as I always try to increase my design pattern chops
I can't say much about this code or your personal background, but my honest opinion is to take a step back and examine the principles.
I used to be very bothered by abstractions, design patterns and structure. But I realized that when I worked with 'true' imperative code (forget classes for a while), keeping all code in the same file, the code started to structure itself. I am not saying this is the only way, but I feel like OOP can be a hinderance, as you get bogged down by alternatives.
It uses MacApp, which was one of the first frameworks that tried to handle all the boilerplate for you.
The basic structure of MacApp apps is a document, and the MacApp framework dispatches events to your handlers. It's been forever since I worked on a MacApp app, but I think that's the basic structure.
It sounds like the MacApp stuff isn't included, but it's probably out there somewhere.
I know at some point Adobe ported MacApp to Windows so they didn't have to rewrite everything. I expect at some point they replaced MacApp with their own abstraction layer.
I met his dad, who was a professor emeritus at University of Michigan's nuclear engineering department. He wrote the classic textbook on radiation detection.
> they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
Adobe tries to fight that, as this leads to genericization[1]. Their trademark guidelines[2] state a number of examples, like:
"Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form. Correct: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software. Incorrect: The image was photoshopped."
I’m sure they know that. The text is there so that they can stand up in court and point to it, not because they think people will actually follow the instructions.
It's just like "LEGO® bricks." They're desperately trying to avoid genericization but it's way too late and nobody is going to say that informally. All companies want you to use their trademarks as capitalized adjectives but nobody can make you, personally, do that. But it does help with their official corporate partners who will follow the guidance if they want to stay in Adobe/LEGO's good graces.
I, as the Krita maintainer, hereby give everyone the right to verb the trademarked name "krita". Whether it's I "krittered that concept" or "I kritaed that sketch" -- it's fine!
The only thing you cannot do with the trademarked name krita is publish rip-off, spyware-laden versions in places like eBay.
No you didn't. No one actually uses Gimp. We just say 'Gimp is a replacement for photoshop' and pretend that is actually an acceptable solution for people using Linux.
(Btw I switched to Krita and I'm never going back to Gimp. Even the things Gimp should be good at, Krita is better.)
Yes, companies can lose the exclusive right to their mark if the brand is sufficiently genericized. Just ask Frisbee, (Kawasaki) Jet Ski, ChapStick, Velcro, Lego, Band-Aid, Jacuzzi, the list goes on.
Of course. A trademark exists to mutually protect consumers and businesses from deceptive advertising. When a term referring to a specific product becomes a term for a product category etc, trademark protections then becomes harmful to consumers, but they still benefit the business. If you're building a brand generally you want to be as close to the legal limit as possible without exceeding it
A photo shop was a thing long before adobe made some software that could replace an entire photo shop and called it... Photoshop. Verb your nouns and that thing you do in a photo shop becomes "to photoshop"
I think the insistence on using the "Adobe® Photoshop®" is more that the term is already sort of generic and they are on shaky ground from the start. Sort of like windows, or dos, Microsoft goes hard always calling it "Microsoft Windows®" or "MS DOS®" because just windows, or disk operating system are already very generic terms.
Not that this will stop them from trying to sue you if you release products using those terms, Gotta give the lawyers something to do after all. Otherwise they would just be sitting around wasting money.
This is in contrast to Xerox a term invented specifically for a new invention and the company that invented it.
It doesn't necessarily matter if you follow their guidelines or not, this is all legal facade so that they can retain their trademark. In the majority of instances, they simply have to show they made efforts to retain their unique trademark. They don't care that you say "I photoshopped X" they just care that GIMP isn't marketed as "GIMP: Open Source Photoshop" (or similar instances).
Readit News
I recall brining home some of the code, there were definitely parts of PhotoShop that were included, but not a lot. Just some funky color-space calculations that we ignored.
I'm looking forward to looking at the source to see if there's any remnants of MacApp in the mix. They may have changed everything since the mid 90s. Who knows.
I am annoyed today though every time I open the app. The only time it has ever felt snappy on desktop was a sweet period when the MacBook Pro M1 first came out and Adobe Photoshop had a Silicon beta out.
Those days are long gone and we are slow again.
The way to go back then was the SGI Indigo w/96MB.
It worked best for me in the late '90's on a 9500, and even then needed an entire GB of RAM.
Unfortunately, Live Picture only ran on Mac. Photoshop was a bit janky on SGI back then, IIRC, but still the better of the two platforms overall.
[1] http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-th...
The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow.
Like part of me feels like there is a better physical hardware implmentation to manipulate all the curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but mouse+keyboard is... good enough.
Scott Belsky - now investor himself - writing how he sold both BeHance and Adobe down the road for the rent economy.
I say The Messy Middle is an incredible book, but it is shelf help for dwindling execs.
To their generic credit, the open source scene for artistry and imagery is better than it ever was, because everybody has been priced out of the pro tools that actually can't keep up without community support.
One of the comments that Steve Jobs made in the Boston 1997 speech was "No one at Apple has reached out to Adobe to ask how to build the ultimate Photoshop machine" - and in the next few years, Photoshop benchmarks were a key Mac vs Intel comparison during his keynotes.
I don't know if Jobs already had influence on the original beige Power Macintosh G3, but he really seemed to care about Photoshop performance when he arrived.
If anyone knows of good resource I could learn code structure LMK! I find it interesting just from a learning perspective, as I always try to increase my design pattern chops
I used to be very bothered by abstractions, design patterns and structure. But I realized that when I worked with 'true' imperative code (forget classes for a while), keeping all code in the same file, the code started to structure itself. I am not saying this is the only way, but I feel like OOP can be a hinderance, as you get bogged down by alternatives.
The basic structure of MacApp apps is a document, and the MacApp framework dispatches events to your handlers. It's been forever since I worked on a MacApp app, but I think that's the basic structure.
It sounds like the MacApp stuff isn't included, but it's probably out there somewhere.
I know at some point Adobe ported MacApp to Windows so they didn't have to rewrite everything. I expect at some point they replaced MacApp with their own abstraction layer.
https://archive.org/details/macapp2cdrom
The behind the scenes documentaries for the prequels have aged well: https://youtu.be/da8s9m4zEpo?si=5y5gHUMxztwVzMny
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19896784/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_...
Adobe tries to fight that, as this leads to genericization[1]. Their trademark guidelines[2] state a number of examples, like:
"Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form. Correct: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software. Incorrect: The image was photoshopped."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
[2]: https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html
[1] e.g, https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/15-product-trade...
The only thing you cannot do with the trademarked name krita is publish rip-off, spyware-laden versions in places like eBay.
(Btw I switched to Krita and I'm never going back to Gimp. Even the things Gimp should be good at, Krita is better.)
It still won't work in the long run, but I'm very aware now that Velcro is a trademarked name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
A photo shop was a thing long before adobe made some software that could replace an entire photo shop and called it... Photoshop. Verb your nouns and that thing you do in a photo shop becomes "to photoshop"
I think the insistence on using the "Adobe® Photoshop®" is more that the term is already sort of generic and they are on shaky ground from the start. Sort of like windows, or dos, Microsoft goes hard always calling it "Microsoft Windows®" or "MS DOS®" because just windows, or disk operating system are already very generic terms.
https://youtube.com/v/BR6F0EdyulA?t=404 (dave plummer)
Not that this will stop them from trying to sue you if you release products using those terms, Gotta give the lawyers something to do after all. Otherwise they would just be sitting around wasting money.
This is in contrast to Xerox a term invented specifically for a new invention and the company that invented it.
Incorrect: The image was photoshopped.
Correct: The image was enhanced with GIMP software."