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Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)

TIPSIO
61 replies
1d2h

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.

Those days are long gone and we are slow again.

aredox
43 replies
1d2h

Is it because the UX is good or because changing it is impossible without the users rebelling en masse?

biofox
22 replies
1d2h

No point fixing something that isn't broken (someone please tell Microsoft)

Rinzler89
12 replies
1d1h

>No point fixing something that isn't broken

But how do you know a UX isn't broken, when you've only seen one iteration of it you're whole life and have nothing else to compare it to? Kind of like Plato's Cave Allegory.

You have to try new things, and if you see them fail, then you know which one was the best.

Dylan16807
9 replies
1d1h

"try" doesn't imply "ship to millions of customers"

And sometimes there's good enough and you should leave it alone. QWERTY isn't optimal but it's not very far from it.

eimrine
3 replies
23h54m

Qwerty is a significant brake in learning English from scratch.

Dylan16807
2 replies
23h47m

How so?

And I'm pretty sure an alphabetical keyboard would do much more harm than good, if that's the implied alternative.

pests
0 replies
13h44m

Every time I'm confronted with an alphabetical keyboard my brain malfunctions. It should be easy but I'll be on R or S looking for the T and spend 5 minutes scanning for it. Usually via remote with some crappy app trying to login or search and its on a big TV huge, usually people watching making the awkwardness even worse since everyone else can obviously see where the T is.

/end rant

eimrine
0 replies
8h44m

How so?

I am not native but I feel pleasure from using Dvorak and chatting with no need to look at keyboard. I am trying to spread acknowledgement about Dvorak among young folks and those who agreed to learn feel the same boost. The difference is unimaginable for those who already has some muscle memory for anything related to Qwerty such as Ctrl-C. So the difference is between creating the layout for touchtyping goals and creating the layout for any other ones.

Rinzler89
3 replies
1d1h

But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you ever know if it works or not?

A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user releases need to look and act exactly the same.

Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or none.

So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the first time.

Dylan16807
1 replies
23h58m

You bring in testers and UI experts, and you have the experts watch the testers.

Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.

Karunamon
0 replies
23h36m

Are there such a thing as UI experts anymore? It seems like we only have designers left, and I am none too thrilled about their influence.

marginalia_nu
0 replies
1d

A/B testing does very little to improve any UX. It's got merits in performance optimization, where the implementation differs but the contract is static between A and B, but with user interfaces, it generally leads to pessimizations as usage is not proportional to usefulness.

The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself, e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case that is very far removed from a productivity tool.

aredox
0 replies
21h56m

AZERTY is very bad and France is still stuck with it, despite Québec having a variant of QWERTY for decades, ditto for Switzerland having a custom QWERTZ, and BÉPO being heads above.

beau_g
1 replies
23h49m

Use gimp, add a new layer, paste something into it, and resize it, then you will know

frankharv
0 replies
22h36m

How about PhotoShop's Magic Lasso?

I have not found many tools that work as well and make productivity great.

turnsout
6 replies
1d1h

In Photoshop there are at least three completely different dialog boxes [0] for saving an image as a JPEG, each with totally different UI widgets and functionality.

They simply refuse to revise anything in the interface—they just keep adding. It's the software equivalent of hoarding.

[0] Save/Save as, Export As, Save for Web (Legacy)

reddalo
2 replies
10h16m

How long has the Save for Web been "Legacy"? I feel like it's been there for a long time.

jaredwy
0 replies
4h5m

I was the engineer that added that string. Since adding that string... I joined the photoshop team officially. Spent maybe 5 years there. I have left adobe. I Had a year and a half sabbatical. Now writing this comment. It's been a while.

MontagFTB
0 replies
3h15m

The intent was to direct customers to the new “Export As” experience, which was a newer code base and handled some things SFW did not. Enough people couldn’t leave SFW behind though, and it’s been Legacy ever since.

Anecdotally, SFW is the result of converting Adobe ImageReady into a plugin. When IR was originally created, many of its sources were split off from Photoshop to get it off the ground. So now we have two variants of “the same” sources for many files- one evolving in Photoshop, and the other frozen in time in Save for Web.

turnsout
0 replies
23h6m

Same—I just wish they'd either drop the "(Legacy)" and admit that they can never remove it, or add those same features to the Export dialog!

grishka
0 replies
6h41m

There's also two implementations of the "new document" dialog. The old one, that works instantly, and the new one, that takes a solid second to render no matter how fast your machine is. There's a checkbox in settings to use the old one.

navjack27
1 replies
1d1h

Hard to do when the power users for the most part try to block analytics and the insider testers have very fluid workflows and there is no such thing as death by a thousand papercuts to them. They aren't getting the signal because the people that should be telling them the signal are actively denying sending the signal.

eimrine
0 replies
23h59m

Аre you saying this about OS which shows ads in Start menu?

kjellsbells
14 replies
1d1h

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.

brazzledazzle
4 replies
1d

Adobe actually changed a bunch of shortcuts at least a couple of points between photoshop 7 and creative cloud. I remember how I'd developed muscle memory that took a bit to fully overwrite.

tambourine_man
3 replies
23h12m

There are settings to revert them all

brazzledazzle
2 replies
22h44m

Yeah but I wanted to maintain "compatibility" with others using the software whether for discussion's sake or so I can hop on their workstation and not have to think about changing anything. Turning those legacy settings on and having that survive restarts could be flaky/buggy. I got the impression keeping that functionality well tested wasn't the highest thing on their development priorities.

tambourine_man
1 replies
20h47m

Adobe needs an easier and broader “settings” in the cloud. It should be as easy as login in to have your completely bespoke Photoshop greeting you.

pests
0 replies
13h49m

Slightly different experience, but logged into my friends Google TV the other day and it had all my apps and I was correctly signed into everything, background and screensaver all set up. Very smooth experience.

bonaldi
3 replies
22h57m

is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s

There were a number of factors here - outsourcing engineering leading to a disastrously buggy 4.0, then failing to move to OS X for years after the market was ready to, hostile and arrogant approach to customers ("where else will they go?") and finally the misbegotten attempt to turn a DTP app into a web design tool. InDesign 1 was fairly clunky, but everyone was desperate to escape.

It's an Amiga-like shambles of mismanagement that wasted an early lead; I am still nostalgic for both tbh.

frankharv
2 replies
22h41m

I don't know if I agree about InDesign being clunky.

The problem was everybody liked PageMaker7 and nobody wanted something new.

How about Audacity? The clowns simply bought CoolEdit and renamed it. Very innovative.

invalidlogin
0 replies
20h41m

Audacious.

frankharv
0 replies
20h38m

Whoops I meant Adobe Audition=CoolEditPro

philistine
1 replies
1d1h

The only way Adobe can get out of this conundrum is by announcing a transition to a new interface, finding ways to incentivize schools to teach the new interface, while keeping the old one around for as long as possible to give time for the oldies to slowly retire. We're talking decades.

basch
0 replies
1d

The user interface is extremely customizable. You can have a default layout and still keep legacy ones around. You wouldn’t need to kill the legacy layout unless you are removing the cuetomizability.

nprateem
1 replies
22h20m

Intellij are about to learn this lesson unfortunately.

grishka
0 replies
6h44m

Oh yes. As someone who writes a lot of Java, I once had a discussion with someone from JetBrains on Twitter about it. It boiled down to me saying "I'm simply not open to change, I like my IDE UIs the way they are right now, thank you very much" and him repeatedly not even trying to understand my point and replying "could you please try the new design and share your feedback".

nineteen999
0 replies
16h32m

It can also work the other way though on rare occasions. The Blender UI revamp had the opposite effect, it helped drew more users to the platform (although so did the addition of Cycles and later EeeVee renderers).

maxglute
1 replies
1d

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.

bonaldi
0 replies
22h52m

A lot of PS 1.0's UI (2-col toolbox on the left etc) owes its heritage to MacPaint, which was a launch app for the Mac. Even the iPad shares keyboard shortcuts set by the original Mac, though has considerably broken away in other aspects.

bufferoverflow
0 replies
1d1h

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.

bonestamp2
0 replies
21h35m

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.

BeFlatXIII
0 replies
1d1h

Considering how many complaints about GIMP UI being bad with no more substance than "Just compare it to Photoshop!", I'd bet 65% on option B.

ompogUe
10 replies
1d1h

Not sure if you worked with it in the early '90's, but on a Mac w/4MB of RAM, it took ~5-10 minutes to undo a Guassian Blur. The pain was real.

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.

apercu
4 replies
23h2m

"SGI Indigo". I had one of these. Not for Photoshop but still...

nullhole
1 replies
19h45m

Excellent joke.

Indy still had the best looking case, though, I think. There's something about that sliced-box appearance that's so unexpected and interesting.

boffinAudio
0 replies
11h27m

I have my SGI O2 sitting on top of my Indy, just because the contrast in design ethos inspires me, somehow.

yjftsjthsd-h
0 replies
22h7m

There are too many daemons. In a vanilla 5.1 installation with Toto, there are 37 background processes.

Comparing the output of `ps aux` on a default install of Debian and OpenBSD still gives me this feeling:)

alamortsubite
3 replies
1d

Ha! In the early '90's the way to go was Live Picture [1]! Your undo would have been instantaneous!

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...

ompogUe
0 replies
23h40m

Yes, I remember Live Picture! It was slick. I actually spent more time in that and Fractal Design Painter, than Photoshop back then.

huxley
0 replies
23h17m

Hahaha that’s Old School.

Live Picture was one of several photo compositor tools that focused on Photoshop’s pain points. Fauve Matisse was a little earlier than Live Picture and I believe it introduced layers to Mac photo editing. They ended up getting acquired by Macromedia (or perhaps even Macromind) after a rewrite to compete with Live Picture it was renamed Xres and then abandoned.

Daub
0 replies
14h11m

I believe that Livepicture was fast because they loaded the full image as a set of tiles.

I also believe that Photoshop was 'inspired' to introduce layers in version 3 in response to Livepicture's layers. It was layers which caused Photoshop to explode in popularity.

Adobe then went on to sue Macromedia for using tabs in their interface. Bummer.

Daub
0 replies
14h14m

People forget that Photoshop worked on a Silicon Graphics box. It was indeed the way to go, so long as you could afford it.

vondur
1 replies
19h49m

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.

MenhirMike
0 replies
19h30m

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.

ljm
0 replies
21h38m

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.

grishka
0 replies
1d1h

Just downgrade? I still use some version from 2022, the first M1-compatible one that was cracked. Still as snappy as it was 2 years ago.

darknavi
0 replies
1d2h

I still use an old CS6 license and while it's snappy in the app, it still takes its time to boot.

ChiperSoft
0 replies
17h9m

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.

thih9
45 replies
1d2h

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."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

[2]: https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html

cynicalsecurity
25 replies
1d2h

I photoshopped an image with Gimp.

resource_waste
14 replies
1d2h

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.)

rvense
6 replies
1d1h

Personally I crop screenshots with GIMP twice a year and it's absolutely fine for that. Not sure what your problem is.

NovemberWhiskey
5 replies
1d1h

If your use-case is "crop screenshots", your competition isn't Photoshop, it's MS Paint.

yjftsjthsd-h
2 replies
22h23m

If there was a linux port of paint, I'd consider it. Until then, GIMP is fine.

nunez
0 replies
12h6m

jspaint.app has you covered

bigstrat2003
0 replies
20h2m

Check out Pinta. It does basic image editing pretty well, imo.

bmacho
1 replies
23h36m

There aren't many image editors that are able to crop pictures in a usable way. MS Paint for example can't do that. I wonder if the "move this rectangle" method is under patents.

taskforcegemini
0 replies
10h33m

Maybe you mean something different by "cropping", but drawing a rectangle followed by ctrl+c then ctrl+n is fairly quick / good enough

wizzwizz4
5 replies
1d1h

GIMP is the screenshot cropping tool, or for when you want to write a Lisp program to do a single, technically-precise thing to an image. Krita for everything else!

I'm still waiting for the Krita equivalent of Inkscape.

ltlnx
2 replies
20h56m

What issues do you have with Inkscape? I've used it for both (semi-)professional and personal work, and the UX is quite pleasant.

wizzwizz4
0 replies
4h0m

It's a semi-decent SVG editor (if you ignore all the XML Editor crashes), but you can't draw in it.

HKH2
0 replies
7h53m

Inkscape is buggy, especially when clipping. Sometimes layers or filters aren't shown properly. Editing filters is a bit arcane.

When I first started using Inkscape, I disliked all the dialog boxes, but I'm used to them now.

Zambyte
0 replies
1d1h

I use Lisp extensions all the time for things people claim GIMP can't do, like draw certain shapes.

GIMP is to Emacs as Photoshop is to Intellij. Both GIMP and Emacs are fairly lean out of the box; it is meant to be molded into what the user wants. The problem is the target audience of Emacs is much more keen on programmatically modifying their systems than the target audience of GIMP.

HKH2
0 replies
8h10m

Krita can't print.

downrightmike
3 replies
1d1h

such a terrible name

aragonite
1 replies
22h51m

Do the users find the name terrible though? I'm pretty sure on at least 3 different occasions I heard someone excitely yelling "time to bring out the GIMP!" or some such when they needed to do some quick photo editing.

Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4CjOB0y9nI&t=2518s

bigstrat2003
0 replies
20h2m

Yeah, GIMP is an awesome name. It's fun and playful, one of the better named programs out there imo.

dclowd9901
0 replies
1d

Nobody’s ever accused open source of being good at naming stuff

hallarempt
2 replies
23h12m

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.

tagawa
0 replies
11h26m

Side note: Thank you for your work! My non-technical partner was able to create and print postcards that had to be in CMYK format, thanks to Krita. You made her very happy :-)

Moru
0 replies
12h24m

Except Krita is a word in Swedish so good luck trademarking that one here :-)

ThrowawayTestr
1 replies
1d1h

I gimped an image with Adobe Photoshop®

aceazzameen
0 replies
15h30m

That sounds accurate.

Zambyte
0 replies
1d2h

While using GIMP

tjoff
6 replies
1d2h

Is genericization really a problem though?

quesera
2 replies
1d

Most annoyingly, IMO: Sriracha.

The Huy Fong guy decided not to trademark the term, and consequently in the last few years, everyone is selling a Sriracha sauce, all of which are grossly inferior to the original.

I've tried many of them, being lately in a Huy Fong desert, and esp during their period of production issues.

There are a couple of also-rans, rating maybe 7 stars out of 10. They do not taste like real Sriracha, but they're OK. If they didn't call themselves Sriracha, I might appreciate them more.

jimbobthrowawy
1 replies
21h50m

I don't think that's any more annoying than "ketchup" or "barbecue" sauce not being trademarked. I hear the sauce made by their original pepper suppliers is pretty good though.

quesera
0 replies
14h57m

I've tried it, and I do not like it. The flavor is boring.

Checking up on Huy Fong today, I discovered that they have announced another production disruption this month, expected to last until Labor Day. Their pepper supply is too green.

I appreciate their dedication to product! Yes it's a serious supply chain management failure, but I can accept that their requirements are difficult for vendors to meet. A substandard Sriracha might be better than no Sriracha, but there are plenty of substandard vendors already. I'll wait for Huy Fong to get the good stuff sorted out.

I hope they resolve this issue soon and permanently. Maybe they and their old pepper grower can make amends, for the good of humanity.

edmara
0 replies
1d1h

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

andai
6 replies
1d2h

I understand the pressure they're under, but nobody's going to say that...

chias
3 replies
1d2h

"Oh you're not actually using Linux, that's GNU/Linux"

DaiPlusPlus
2 replies
1d2h

TIL, "Linux", without the "GNU/" prefix is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks#:~:text=Linux%C2%AE%20is....

So (in the US, at least), it's "Linux(TM)" and not "GNU/Linux" - I'm going to love using this the next time anyone goes uhmackshully to me.

medmunds
1 replies
1d1h

Uhmackshully, since it's registered, it's "Linux®". The ™ is for unregistered trademarks.

DaiPlusPlus
0 replies
1d1h

Hoisted by my own petard!

electroly
0 replies
1d1h

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.

afavour
0 replies
1d2h

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.

somat
1 replies
1d

ehh... I am not sure,

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.

deaddodo
0 replies
1d

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).

maurosilber
0 replies
1d

"Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.

Incorrect: The image was photoshopped.

Correct: The image was enhanced with GIMP software."

ian-g
0 replies
1d

Much more effectively, Velcro's been trying the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY

It still won't work in the long run, but I'm very aware now that Velcro is a trademarked name.

pmcjones
23 replies
22h53m

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.

xd1936
14 replies
22h52m

Thank you for your service. Super cool project. Hopefully they make their way to archive.org or Github someday.

mistrial9
10 replies
22h12m

isn't the topic the Patents, not the code? The code is mired in Mac toolbox details, no?

3abiton
6 replies
18h34m

Can you patent open-source code?

simondotau
4 replies
16h37m

Of course you can. If you invented it, and nobody else has patented it, you can patent it. Opening the source doesn’t invalidate your rights as an inventor or copyright holder, though it can add confusion and/or complexity to the enforcement of both the patent and the open source license.

andyferris
3 replies
15h37m

Yes, but my understanding is that publically detailing how your invention works _before_ trying to patent it means the invention becomes public knowledge/prior art. That is, so long as you submit a patent application before releasing the open-source code, it should be OK, but there's no much you can do once the cat is out of the bag.

simondotau
2 replies
13h31m

I imagine the rules and best practices would vary between jurisdictions, but basically yeah. But as soon as you file for the patent, you can release source and enjoy the confusion.

(Based on 30 seconds of googling, it seems that the USA and Australia gives inventors a 1 year grace period after publishing, but the granted patent might not be valid in other countries.)

p_l
1 replies
10h44m

USA also used to not consider publications or patents published outside USA as prior art, to the point of granting patents that were rewritten from someone else's patent in another country.

Not sure if it got better or worse with WTO patent rules.

Dalewyn
0 replies
8h24m

Considering the history of NAND flash amounts to Toshiba applying to Japan's patent office and getting laughed out of the room, then Sandisk saw it and applied for and received a patent for NAND flash from the US Patent Office, it's probably still the case.

p_l
0 replies
10h45m

Arguably patents as intended should require description of patented device/technique in detail that allows replicating it - effectively open sourcing it.

The patent then serves as temporary moat on applying that specific technique or producing that specific device to refund the inventor.

In practice... well, sometimes patents were used to recover details of closed-source software or hardware.

reaperman
1 replies
21h58m

Even the parents from 1988-2000 would be well expired now

irrational
0 replies
19h59m

Poor moms and dads.

userbinator
0 replies
18h18m

Patents expire after 20 years at most, I believe. Everything from before 2004 has expired already.

jart
1 replies
21h46m

Wow are you the one that posted the original LISP 1.5 source code? I colorized that and used it to good effect in my blog posts. https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/#listing

mistrial9
4 replies
22h13m

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.

mannyv
2 replies
18h46m

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.

yelling_cat
1 replies
15h57m

I hadn't thought about Freehand in a decade and now I'm angry at Adobe for killing it all over again. It never got in your way and let you fully focus on your work. Illustrator never lets you forget that you're using a tool to create things like Freehand did.

p_l
0 replies
10h43m

Is there some good summary somewhere? I remember having, ahem, access to both as a teen but Illustrator had more brand effect behind it.

pmcjones
0 replies
22h10m

Mike Schuster, who by the way is a superb programmer.

nunez
0 replies
16h27m

That's awesome.

Shinchy
0 replies
9h31m

Wow, oddly enough that kind of sounds quite fun.

MontagFTB
0 replies
5h2m

Thank you for fighting the good fight, Paul. We miss you and Alex around here.

stockhorn
13 replies
1d2h

An article from 2013 with an adobe photoshop version 1.x from 1990....

boomskats
12 replies
1d2h

I'm pretty sure half of that code is still running in WASM on photoshop.adobe.com

msk-lywenn
11 replies
1d2h

You mean current photoshop includes pascal code?

wongarsu
4 replies
1d2h

What's wrong with Pascal, apart from the ability to hire developers for it?

p0w3n3d
0 replies
23h7m

Writing in Pascal itself is a Job Preservation Pattern

msk-lywenn
0 replies
5h42m

Nothing wrong, just surprised

miohtama
0 replies
20h26m

Turbo Pascal and later Delphi were really nice, but I guess in the same vertical C won due to its UNIX legacy.

You can pretty much transform 1:1 between C and Pascal code.

PaulHoule
0 replies
20h59m

I hated the dialects of Pascal we were using at school in the early 1980s because they didn’t really support systems programming but after I got a 286 machine I got into Turbo Pascal which did have the extensions I need and that I preferred greatly to C but I switched to C in college because I could write C programs and run them on my PC or on Sun workstations with a 32 bit address space.

madeofpalk
2 replies
1d2h

I would not be surprised if it does. Photoshop is big and has a lot of legacy.

dlachausse
1 replies
1d2h

I have a feeling that much of it was translated to C or C++ at some point for portability and maintainability reasons. There are several automated Pascal to C translators out there, such as the following...

http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/p2c/

Also the languages are similar enough that a programmer with knowledge of both could translate it manually without too much difficulty.

dunham
0 replies
1d1h

Typically TeX is translated from Pascal to C too, via web2c.

But there also is a Pascal to WASM compiler out there, which was written specifically for TeX:

https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

TeX itself is only about 500kb of wasm, uncompressed, but the memory images with LaTeX loaded are quite a bit larger.

callalex
1 replies
1d1h

Tools used for art often get irrationally preserved for the sake of it. For example I have had a conversation with more than one person (well 2 but still) who believed unironically that the wiring inside vintage guitars and amps must be coated with asbestos insulation or it would change the tone/texture of the sound.

PaulHoule
0 replies
21h0m

Don’t crush that in a hydraulic press.

MontagFTB
0 replies
4h47m

It was transpiled to C and then C++ many years ago.

kasajian
7 replies
1d1h

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.

jaredwy
2 replies
14h33m

Worked on photoshop for many years. It’s still there today.

MontagFTB
1 replies
5h4m

There you are! Hope you are doing well my friend.

jaredwy
0 replies
4h16m

Hah! Not sure who this is. But email? jared.wyles gmail.com

irq
1 replies
23h11m

I love this story - code trading is such a cool idea, and one I haven't heard of much before. Anyone else have any code trading stories?

exe34
0 replies
22h2m

in academia/research, it's quite normal. often you wish they hadn't given you the code and provided an equation instead.

mk_stjames
0 replies
23h7m

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"

mistrial9
0 replies
22h11m

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

shivanshu120
6 replies
23h34m

Great article written on some of the best code out there in the market.

dylan604
5 replies
22h51m

best code? Have you ever read people's thoughts on the PSD format? I know the two are not the same, but it does make you wonder how the PSD issues do not present in the app's code as well.

anemoknee
3 replies
21h5m

I haven't myself, but I'm interested to see what folks are thinking. Any resources you can share?

vsuperpower2020
1 replies
19h0m

One of these links is locked behind an account and the other only redirects to a dead repository. Thanks, I guess.

dylan604
0 replies
18h41m

I don't have a reddit account, and I was able to read it after agreeing that I was over 18. After that, it displayed the diatribe just fine for me. <shrugs>

However, feel free to google it yourself

PaulHoule
0 replies
20h56m

If I was going to complain about Photoshop it is that it does most operations in the chosen color space (say sRGB) instead of linear light. This is certainly wrong for operations that are physically motivated like blurs even if people sometimes like the result.

NewsaHackO
6 replies
1d2h

Which do you think has more features, this or current GIMP?

resource_waste
2 replies
1d2h

What has accomplished more work? Photoshop prior to 2013, or Gimp all time?

Lol we all know.

Why is Gimp the knee jerk reaction when its rarely used in the real world? Did we learn it in the 2000s and just keep repeating it? (I say this as a Krita fan)

Zambyte
0 replies
1d1h

Why are you comparing it to Photoshop in 2013? The article is about Photoshop in 1990.

MayeulC
0 replies
1d1h

The source code in the linked article is for Photoshop v1.0.1, published in 1990.

Though I don't think Gimp is as rarely used in the real world as you seem to think. We all live in different bubbles, but I know more people that use GIMP than Photoshop.

Zambyte
0 replies
1d2h

GIMP has a plugin system and this does not AFAIK, so you're comparing unbounded features vs bounded features.

HKH2
0 replies
7h28m

Gimp has got a lot better recently. The smart transform tool is excellent.

Still can't select more than one layer though.

FdbkHb
0 replies
9h4m

GIMP.

But it doesn't take many later versions of Photoshop to start becoming more productive than using GIMP because of functionality it has that GIMP does not:

Adjustment layers were introduced in 4.0 (1996, GIMP didn't even exist yet)

Layer styles were introduced in 6.0 (2000)

Smart Filters were introduced in CS3 (2007)

They're all invaluable tools that provide a non-destructive workflow where you can go and edit a change you made without having to undo everything you did after that change and redoing things again.

If I had to use an ancient version of a program and have nothing but that program until the end of times, I would pick Photoshop CS3.

This entire class of functionality still does not exist in GIMP.

A lot of modern tools can be added to GIMP through the G'MIC plugins (like the healing tool), but the core editing loop functionality, what is in my opinion the most important thing, is extremely primitive and outdated. All of the competition provides non destructive editing. Including other open source software like Krita (which focuses more on painting tools rather than photo editing, leaving a hole in the open source ecosystem).

ge96
5 replies
1d2h

wonder if anybody has it up on github

ge96
0 replies
17h27m

12 yrs old wow. I'm surprised everything is in the root folder... no subfolder/groupings, probably uploader choice not actually how it was written?

SushiHippie
0 replies
22h39m

But that might be violating the Computer History Museum's license:

Yep, TFA includes this sentence:

To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
HumblyTossed
1 replies
1d1h

Does the zip file not work?

ge96
0 replies
17h28m

I just didn't want to download it, just view it, like a PDF that opens in the web vs. auto downloads

lelandfe
2 replies
22h36m

Blown away as I read more posts on this site. Not many people out there with this sort of knowledge. Thanks for the link.

butchlugrod
1 replies
22h9m

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.

araes
0 replies
49m

Suspicion based on some of the other articles is just somebody who's really an in-depth Apple user. Listens to folklore.org, notes in a couple articles that they appear to be on the outside and need to buy stuff just like everybody else. Some of the articles mention "awe" at how tiny the old Mac binaries were. May have been Apple tech support.

In "The Standard File Package" [1] from Saturday, February 27, 2010:

It has never been my job to provide technical support to casual (I mean non-professional) Mac users, but I have helped friends and family members. [araes note: Implies may have been professional technical support]

In "Name it Scrapbook" [2] from Saturday, February 20, 2010:

I am not an iPhone developer, and I don't know everything about it, but I write cocoa programs on Macs, and I have read the iPhone developer documentation.

Seems like somebody who just reads everything about Mac history, culture, and development. Quite plausible the author may actually know "more" than the original developers, because a lot don't care about their own products as much as the user base.

[1] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

[2] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

internetter
1 replies
22h25m

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

hexagonwin
0 replies
21h15m

seems to work just fine for me. maybe it was a temporary issue?

Exuma
4 replies
1d

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

mannyv
2 replies
18h41m

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.

Exuma
0 replies
18h26m

Ahh interesting... so that would explain the function definitions that were missing for certain functions that were called!

logdahl
0 replies
22h10m

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.

smburdick
3 replies
1d1h

John Knoll was the FX lead for the Star Wars prequels, and went on to direct Rogue One.

The behind the scenes documentaries for the prequels have aged well: https://youtu.be/da8s9m4zEpo?si=5y5gHUMxztwVzMny

acidburnNSA
0 replies
12h22m

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.

dlachausse
3 replies
1d2h

Kudos to companies that are releasing the source code to antique versions of their software. I hope more companies do so in the future.

Unfortunately I fear that much of this source code has been lost to time and multiple serial acquisitions over the years. Also, wide spread use of version control is a fairly recent phenomenon, so much of this source code if it still exists at all is on random tape backups and floppy disks or printouts in binders.

derefr
1 replies
1d1h

I feel like, if some organization like the Internet Archive were to offer a "software source-code time-delayed-publication escrow service" (with real boilerplate legal contracts punishing early leaks), a lot of companies would take them up on it.

I imagine such a service could be pretty automated/low-touch. One way it could work:

1. you mirror your git repos to a private server the software-conservation org controls.

2. The software-conservation org then sets up matching public repos, initially empty.

3. Every hour, an agent runs, that scans all the private repos for commits with commit timestamps older than ten years (or whatever each company has signed on for as a release period); and syncs just those commits, into that repo's matching public repo.

4. Refs are then also synced, but rewritten, as if `git filter-branch` had been run to remove all commits less than ten years old. Any refs that are empty after filtering are dropped.

schlauerfox
0 replies
18h25m

why is source code submission to the LOC not necessary like a book to register copyright? Seems reasonable they hold it in escrow for 30 years or whatever reasonable term copyright should be.

fermigier
0 replies
1d1h

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

"We collect and preserve software in source code form, because software embodies our technical and scientific knowledge and humanity cannot afford the risk of losing it.

Software is a precious part of our cultural heritage. We curate and make accessible all the software we collect, because only by sharing it we can guarantee its preservation in the very long term."

(Founded by a friend, Roberto Di Cosmo).

ChrisMarshallNY
2 replies
1d1h

I remember seeing Photoshop, when it was pre-Adobe, in a hospital, in Ann Arbor.

I thought it was amazing.

One note: I'm almost certain that the version of MacApp (the Apple Pascal app framework) was still in beta, at the time.

I used some of Tom Knoll's code (a B-spline algorithm), as a base for a curve editor. He had done some work as a contractor for the company I worked at.

astrange
1 replies
13h58m

What was it doing in a hospital?

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
12h6m

One of the tech people in the hospital was friends with Tom Knoll, and had it running on a Mac II (I think). I was taking a class there, and the teacher took us on a field trip, to see it.

This was 1988 or ‘89.

sys_64738
1 replies
17h26m

Early Photoshop was junk compared to Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. History only remembers the winners so it’s unfortunate DPaint gets lost the midst time.

aceazzameen
0 replies
15h27m

DPaint was incredible. But Photoshop was still pretty good on its own too. It just happened to advance at a greater rate than DPaint did.

mrKola
1 replies
16h35m

I would love to see the code of Fireworks. Adobe bought macromedia just to kill the apps.

If I could bring one app back to life, it would be Fireworks. I was soooo good as it, no other software compares.

kibibu
0 replies
16h28m

I don't think that's entirely why. They kept Flash around for a long time

mdaniel
1 replies
1d2h

(2013)

Eduard
0 replies
1d

I find the addition of "(2013)" to the title misleading.

"Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)"

I thought it is about Photoshop source code from around 2013.

Rufus_Tuesday
1 replies
1d2h

Anybody remember BarneyScan XP?

wezdog1
0 replies
19h47m

That pronunciation of Photoshop bugs me. Not everyone has an American accent.

supportengineer
0 replies
23h19m

I prefer Photon Paint or DeluxePaint

nunez
0 replies
16h27m

I took an image processing class during my Comp Eng undergrad. We learned about and implemented (in C, or maybe Java; I think it was C) some of the bitmap processing algorithms that Photoshop incorporated. Some of that math is no joke, and making it tight in the late 80s must have been harder still.

mentos
0 replies
23h46m

I wonder what the biggest semantic similarities are between the source code of the first 1990s Photoshop and today’s.

kls0e
0 replies
14h6m

excellent read, how tangible. love the praise of the code structure. impressed on how consistent photoshop's UI is, up to contemporary versions.

ilrwbwrkhv
0 replies
22h11m

"We developed it originally for our own personal use…it was a lot a fun to do"

I honestly do not think anything cool has ever been built due to capitalism. Great ideas to great products are just musings.

dukeofdoom
0 replies
19h43m

I was looking for a freeish alternative for mac, but so far only found Photopea which is online but has an almost identical interface. Works pretty good basic things, but kind of bad at removing a background. So still searching ...

divyenduz
0 replies
1d1h

Is there a youtube channel or something that does deep dives into antique source code like this or windows XP?