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Founder came back after 8 years to rewrite Flash photo editor in Canvas/WebGL
- westurner 7y agoAnd it works on my phone now?!
- poniko 7y agoIt's just the beta for desktop, phone ui will be released in a few weeks. A dedicated version is made for smaller screens and touch.
- knolax 7y agoI forgot about Pixlr. I have many fond memories of making bad pixel art on it. It really was a step above all the other photo-editing webapps available at the time.
- kjaftaedi 7y agoI was randomly just looking for a site to do online photoshop yesterday and abandoned this one due to the flash requirement.
- oblib 7y agoWow! That's just awesome!
- IvanK_net 7y agoHi, I am the creator of https://www.Photopea.com https://www.Photopea.com and I am a bit sad, that you did not start to work on it earlier. Wish you good luck! :)
- poniko 7y agoThanks Ivan, still lots of fun to move pixels around :)
- IvanK_net 7y agoYou are welcome :) BTW. you can open Pixlr PXD files in Photopea (including text layers, layer styles, save them as PSD, etc) Actually, it is the 19th most frequent format of files opened in Photopea :) https://twitter.com/photopeacom/status/1172183966125871105 https://twitter.com/photopeacom/status/1172183966125871105
- lxe 7y agoPhotopea is awesome. Thank you for building it.
- basch 7y agoI am continually impressed with how amazing photopea is. Probably one of the most impressive web apps ever.
- wtvanhest 7y agoWow. I just used it for 2 minutes. Its like photoshop a few versions ago, on my phone browswer. How???
- proxygeek 7y agoAbsolutely my feelings! Jaw dropped when i realised the "screenshot" of the editor is actually the editor. On my phone! Of course I've used Pixlr and i love it bur will definitely try PeaApp more
- 7y ago
- andrewstuart 7y agoCan someone give context to this please? It leads to an image editor but no explanation of how a founder is coming back to rewrite flash.
- tylerhou 7y agoThe title is confusing. The image editor was previously written in Flash; the founder rewrote it in WebGL/Canvas.
- andrewstuart 7y agoOK I thought someone had implemented Flash in WebGL.
- poniko 7y agoThe service was grown to over 60 million users back in ~2012 and got aquired by Autodesk. After some years most, if not all people working with the product was reassigned and or left. Still with millions of weekly users but no one that cared. Autodesk sold it for near to nothing and the new owners contacted me (org founder) and asked me if I wanted to get involved somehow. So we build a new product from scratch since the original app was 100% Flash and we are just month away from a completely browser block :)
- teddyuk 7y agoYou know you have another year? “The Flash” the film character dies in December 2019, flash the shitapp dies in December 2020
- poniko 7y agoYea until 100% RIP. But a couple of weeks ago ppl with flash activated get a big warning in chrome and google is penalizing flash in search etc. We are cutting it close.
- chii 7y agoit'd be interesting to know about the tech behind this rewrite. E.g., what language/stack, how did you do it (or any frameworks of interest used), and what, if any, did you learn from the flash version that helped in this rewrite?
- poniko 7y agoIts 99% Typescript and we don't use any premade js frameworks, everything was written from scratch (except for some font loader and zip), ui, rendering, webgl filters etc etc. All the knowledge of how Photo Editing works came out of building the original products back in the day, there is more information about the field today to be found written online but much is still secrets kept at a few companies. The browsers is really a shitty environment to be writing this kind of apps in, performances is a struggle in every step :)
- harrisreynolds 7y agoWould be awesome if there was more of a story behind this. Clicking the link just leaves me scratching my head. Even with the comments it isn't clear what the story is (at least at time of 15 comments)
- jstsch 7y agoEditor looks great, very performant! Is there a way to integrate this in an existing webapp? E.g. open pixlr in a new window, do some edits, get the asset back?
- amelius 7y agoHow are the fast pixel-wise operations (color transformations, alpha composition, etc) coded? Is this something that WebGL or Canvas supports?
- poniko 7y agoAll the filters and adjustments are implemented in webgl. Some of the local brushes do per pixel adjustments on the 2d canvas.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ZenPsycho 7y ago1. Adobe is/was on the standards groups and stnadardised all the photoshop blend modes into browsers a long long time ago. 2. Alpha composition? Are you sure that's what you mean? we've had that universally in browsers since IE7. I am continually stunned at how little most developers know of what browsers are capable of.
- amelius 7y ago> I am continually stunned at how little most developers know of what browsers are capable of. I guess it's because developers don't always need to know everything. The browser platform has turned native computational capabilities into a "hodge podge" of functionalities that a developer needs to pick from, so programming becomes more like shopping than like building things. Not every developer likes that mindset.
- rahuldottech 7y agoContext for those who don't know what going on: Pixlr was (well, still is) a flash-based webapp that allows you to edit images in your browsers, and apparently had ~60 Million users back in 2012. It was sold to Autodesk, they didn't do much with it. Then Autodesk sold it to new owners, who invited the original founder to come and work on it, and as a result, this canvas/WebGL version was launched.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rahuldottech 7y ago@mods: Perhaps rename the submission to "Pixlr founder returns after 8 years to rewrite web-based photo editor interface in canvas/WebGL" to avoid confusion.
- jdsully 7y agoI think the only title that would satisfy site guidelines is the name of the app. They should have written a blog post with the story if they wanted to use this title.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoI replaced "photoshop" with "photo editor" above. I don't see anything wrong with the title otherwise. The project creator wrote it, so it isn't editorializing.
- jdsully 7y agoThis was one of the few times I was genuinely confused by a link on HN. I didn’t realize there was an author exception to the title rules and I’m not sure there should be. Its not the end of the world but one of the things I like best about HN is trustworthy titles. This erodes that. Just my 2 Canadian cents.
- dang 7y agoI don't see what's untrustworthy about the title here. If it were misleading we'd change it, but it doesn't seem misleading to me. It's important that HN's front page not be completely predictable, so we allow variations sometimes. The rules here are called guidelines for that reason. HN is a spirit of the law place, not a letter of the law place, and the spirit is curiosity.
- jdsully 7y agoI don’t think its misleading in a malicious way. But it is misleading in the sense that the title did not at all describe the ultimate content. I would not have clicked if I knew where it lead. The confused comments here show I'm not the only one. The actual story behind this is quite interesting. I wish there was a blog post with more details. Perhaps if they were forced to use proper titles we might have got that. I don’t argue with your authority to vary the rules. I just wanted to provide feedback.
- throwawaySG 7y agoIs there a good vector graphic version of this that folks might recommend? I'm thinking in particular of when you need to do some quick work on (data-related) graphs.
- ralusek 7y agoFigma has pretty good vector editing.
- artursapek 7y agoI worked on this toy project for a while, but it's not nearly as complete as these photo editors https://ballpoint.io/about https://ballpoint.io/about
- d0100 7y agoBest I found was designer.gravit.io
- londons_explore 7y agoLooking at the javascript file... Why are all variable names hex strings like _0x56fb578a ? Is this some debug mode of a minifier? Is it supposed to make reverse engineering harder? (it seems to make it easier to me IMO)
- pmichalina 7y agoThey could be using this: https://github.com/javascript-obfuscator/javascript-obfuscator https://github.com/javascript-obfuscator/javascript-obfuscat...
- lioeters 7y agoI'm guessing it was written in another language and its compiler produced the final JavaScript code.
- jmull3n 7y agoIt's obfuscated to protect their source code. https://github.com/javascript-obfuscator/javascript-obfuscator https://github.com/javascript-obfuscator/javascript-obfuscat...
- londons_explore 7y agoCan you tell us how much effort it was to build this? Either in hours or dollars?
- poniko 7y agoIt's been better part of a year for two people team (me and my brother) to build this product. We released one product first we called x with a subset of features to get code out the door.
- overgard 7y agoThis is great! Any plans for apple pencil or wacom support?
- bwang29 7y agoI'm the founder of Polarr , https://photoeditor.polarr.co https://photoeditor.polarr.co , if anyone wants to hack Canvas/WebGL based photo editor with a full team of Canvas/WebGL hackers, DM me!
- chatmasta 7y agoCan anybody name a successful autodesk acquisition? Their record seems quite embarrassing, filled with lots of acquisitions of unrelated tech for inflated prices that they ultimately shut down. (No offense meant to the companies being acquired, they’re usually great. Autodesk is the one who seems to screw everything up.)
- m463 7y agoIt's extremely hard for large companies acquiring smaller ones to do it well. Kind of interesting to look through these and wonder what (if anything) survived: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...
- skrebbel 7y agoI'm still impressed that Java appears to be getting better faster under Oracle than it did in the Sun days. I mean, Oracle! How?
- inapis 7y agoJava and its ecosystem is a cash cow. Any company will be happy to tend to a cash cow
- pjmlp 7y agoSomething that many keep forgeting with their Oracle hate, is that Oracle has been part of the Java eco-system since the early days. They did the NC Java station alongside Sun, were the first RDMS to support Java stored procedures, ported their installers and GUI tooling to Java, created their own JVM, later bought BEA, and created their own JEE implementation, among other Java frameworks.
- vishnuharidas 7y agoExtremely curious to see a blog post explaining the story behind rewriting the editor in Canvas/GL.
- rstuart4133 7y agoFar out. A javascript photo editor running in a browser that feels faster than a native application like the Gimp. What an extraordinary achievement. But it's not just the underlying speed. It's GUI interface design is simply beautiful. It's also intuitive, and discoverable. God how I wish other young designers would follow this example. I suspect you are going to struggle commercially against "free" from the likes of Gimp unless you can survive on advertising revenue, but you've done well so far - bought out, run into the ground, sold back for pennies. It doesn't get much better than that. Given the quality of this product who knows, it may happen again. I wish you and your product the best of luck - you deserve it.
- missingstack 7y ago@poniko How did you convert typescript into some hex strings js file?