“Adobe has been dropping preview links to its upcoming version of Photoshop CS6 for months now, even hyping it up with a Rainn Wilson cameo at MAX 2011. Photoshop CS6 marks one of the app’s most drastic visual changes, with a darker visual redesign and streamlined toolbars, and it has all sorts of changes to cursors, filters, video editing, and more in tow. We got some quick hands on time with the app, so read on for our take on Adobe’s next-gen installation of Photoshop.”
I wish Adobe would consider a rewrite, or a parallel new web editor.
When Apple rewrote Final Cut Pro X, and released it, there was a big uproar about it. But eventually, Final Cut Pro X is going to allow them to do stuff that the previous code base would just not have allowed them to do.
Photoshop & Illustrator are getting big, unwieldy and buggy. Rather than keeping to adding new features, I really wish Adobe would try to rethink the whole thing. They are the only pro game in town, and no one else seems to have the resources to compete with them, and so they just keep on adding stuff.
You’d think after 20 years, they might consider changing the way their main line apps work, rather than just continuing to do things the same way.
My 2 cents.
Why fix what isn’t broken?
I think the Adobe suite is great in it’s current form. Why change for the sake of change? Must I bring up the disaster that is GNOME Shell?
Why wait until something is broken to fix it? Doesn’t innovation could for anything?
As a designer I use CS4 everyday, but I keep coming up against irritating stuff everyday. There are so many things that could be improved in the workflow and consistency. But there are also a lot of stuff that cannot just be fixed by patching the current app.
It seems like Adobe has forgotten how to be innovative and only knows how to keep adding features.
I’ll probably purchase CS6, but not because of any of the features. I’ll have to upgrade to it since CS4 is really buggy on Lion, and also if I don’t upgrade now, Adobe may not offer an upgrade from CS4 to CS7.
BTW, how many features that you find useful has Adobe added to Photoshop in the last 5 years? Really useful features that are worth hundreds of dollars to upgrade.
Cause I’m upgrading from CS4, and I don’t see anything that I really need. There is one feature in Illustrator that is useful, but I can’t just upgrade one app, Adobe does not allow upgrading just one app of a suite.
Indeed.
Photoshop is getting *very* creaky, and it’s not just the UI. The core codebase has not been substantially overhauled in quite some time, so it just keeps getting stuff added onto it. Heck, you can find relics from Mac OS Classic in the PSD file format!
Contrast to other software packages of the same vintage. Word (1990) has a new rendering engine, a new styling engine, and a new file format. Excel (1987) has new formulas, a new formatting engine, and a new file format.
Photoshop compares poorly even to other Adobe products. InDesign has a much more flexible architecture than Photoshop, because Adobe tossed out Pagemaker and did a ground-up rewrite in the late 1990s. Premiere Pro is a total rewrite of Premiere. But then, those other products faced stiff competition — Quark and Avid.
In contrast, Photoshop has been top dog since 1989. Illustrator is similarly creaky, and for similar reasons.
Comparing to Word or Excel is *really* a bad example. You realize the new file formats are basically the same as the old ones, just with the old binary commands mapped to XML tags? That Word does *not* have a new formatting engine, even though it needs one more than anything else–just a lot of auto-formatting cruft built onto the same old crap from the 90s, which is why you still can’t rely on it to keep your formatting intact for long documents. And Excel–the rendering engine for the worksheets has got to be at least 10 years old, if you pay attention to the quirky behaviors it exhibits. That’s probably also why it’s the only Office app without a multi-window mode. And have you ever looked at the bindings for creating software on top of the Office apps? Behind the scenes, underneath layer upon layer of wrappers, it’s COM… the same thing MS used in Windows 3.1….
Edited 2012-03-24 17:26 UTC
Joel on Software’s law:
* Things you should never do: Rewrite from scratch.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
don’t you mean…Never Never do?
Exactly, just like Apple and Microsoft should have never rewritten their fundamentally flawed OS codebases and have had no success doing so
Exactly!
Also, the example used is Netscape. One thing mentioned is that the old codebase was really bad and so they definitely needed to rewrite it.
So rewriting wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they suddenly decided to rewrite and abandon the old codebase. Instead they should have started working on a rewrite and dropped the old codebase only when the new codebase was done.
And continuing with the same example, do you think that Netscape’s successor Mozilla would have been successful if someone hadn’t redone the entire interface, essentially thought through what the users wanted and made a fresh start, and created Firefox?
Without Google’s money Firefox would never had happened.
Most rewrites just create churn for the sake of it, and take months if not years to achieve and is incredibly painful for everyone.
Sometimes it better to separate what you can out and Rebuild that module in a sane way and go from there.
I’ve been doing that with our new CMS deploy and things are much less painful this way.
Err they haven’t. NT is 18 years old, OSX is at least 12 years old.
Classic and the 9x lines have been killed but quite a lot of code from these OSes I would imagine still exists or did exist until recently.
I was thinking about Mac OS Classic and DOS-based versions of Windows, yes.
These were built before memory protection was the norm, at a time where every developer would access hardware directly. Clearly, this was fundamentally flawed as soon as malware was everywhere, and had to be changed.
Nothing comparable to the appearance of protected mode has happened in the hardware world since Windows NT and OS X have been out. The technology which we use today is highly similar to the technology of these days, although we now have minor changes such as more CPU cores, flash drives, or faster GPUs.
The increasing popularity of mobile devices should have driven the creation of general-purpose OSs designed with power efficiency in mind, like Symbian was, but in practice this has not happened. We have just slapped desktop kernels on cellphones and decided to use bigger batteries and tolerate battery lives that were still barely bearable.
Edited 2012-03-23 18:27 UTC
It is easier to throw hardware at the problem rather than optimize the software. It is a short term solution for now and works well when during a period of churn (like we do with mobiles) … from 1995 – 2008 it really mattered if your PC was good enough to run windows … now even the lowest spec machines can run it fine and tbh most games (I have a 5 year old GPU and can still run most of the newest PC games).
Edited 2012-03-23 19:23 UTC
lucas_maximus,
“It is easier to throw hardware at the problem rather than optimize the software.”
My experience in the industry is that many managers just say throw hardware at it. One of my old employers bought software which intercepted web service requests from one proprietary system and proxied them over to another using a different mechanism. It was written as a tomcat application server and that’s literally all it did. Our network admin installed it in a VM with a gig or so of ram and it was crashing left and right. I
worked with tech support and they wanted us to install it on dual core with at least 2GB of ram, and sure enough that fixed it. Things like that make me cringe.
Fast hardware can reduce the effects of certain types of inefficiencies, but sometimes it’s still there. We can look at inefficiencies in economic terms too, like placing a figure on having millions of users waiting a few extra seconds every day. I’m willing to bet that cost quickly overtakes the cost of developers fixing the inefficiency, but of course companies like MS don’t really care about those external costs even when they are responsible for them.
Perhaps if companies were to internalize those costs, then they’d change their tune! (Of course I am biased, I’d like to see more demand for my optimization skills).
I agree totally, but unfortunately if the budget allows it then it is fine.
You can see adobe doing this with edge, they are basically rewriting flash, with more efficient web based technologies that don’t require plugins. Edge is very fast and works well. It’s only going to take some time for them to implement all of the features.
And in the process lost a significant part of their customers that upgraded to competing products.
Hopefully once Wayland gets stabilized and has completely replaced X11, Adobe will start to offer a Linux version. It could still be another 5 to 10 years, but I will wait patiently.
OS’s based on the Linux kernel using X has nothing to do with why Adobe does not offer Photoshop for OS’s based on the Linux kernel. You’ll be waiting a whole lot longer..
An OS is much more than a kernel.
True, but that comment has no relevance to any of the posts that precede it
Just as the post before that provided no relevance as to why Photoshop does not exist on Ubuntu / Debian / Fedora, etc.
Exactly, but I don’t expect the peebs to get it.