8 ms·

Compare photoshop between the 90s and now. 10x on features. Size of photos grown exponentially as well.

by adflux 6y ago

e_proxus 6y ago
Perhaps, but size of photos should affect load times when starting the app (and in my opinion, so shouldn’t most feature either, but that depends on your architecture I suppose).
thefz 6y ago
Yeah Jonathan Blow isn't exactly a luminary in computer science. I once read him going on a meltdown over linux ports because "programming is hard". This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?"
- movedx 6y ago
  It's easy to take a stab at someone online, behind a keyboard, but I'd suggest you show us all your work and we'll judge your future opinions based on it.
  - majjgepolja 6y ago
    preferably future work and dreams and ramblings too.. preferably over a twitch stream..
  - thefz 6y ago
    By no metric I am comparatively as successful as the guy, but I am still able to disagree on his point that Linux is held back by its tools. The fact that he did not want or had the time to learn Linux's tooling don't mean anything in particular except that he's either very busy or very lazy. Any interview I read with him he's just ranting and crying over this or that "too complex" matter. If he does not want to deal with the complexity of modern computers, he should design and build board games. As an example, read how the one-man-band of Execution Unit manages to, in house, write and test his game on three operating systems. https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-windows-mac-and-linux/ https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-... It's not a matter of "this is too hard", Blow just does not want to do it, let's be honest.
- neuronic 6y ago
  The entire point of computers is to make things easy. The Apple question "why isn't this easy" is missing from 95% of UX in modern software. Stop acting as if software devs are the only users of software. And even then: computers should do work and not produce work or mental overhead.
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Are you implying Apple software and devices are "easy"? I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience. Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing. It's a 5 minute process, and there's very little to it that it's not optimized for ease. Any champ can do it, and millions do. Not sure what you're on about. >I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience. Yes, all those people are delluded.
      - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
        Clearly you've never tried it, because it's certainly not 5 minutes, it's optimized for selling you bullshit Apple services and it's buggy as hell, with no feedback to the user why everything is broken and why you're having to re-authenticate five times in a row. And good luck if you're setting up a family account for several devices with different iOS versions. You're gonna really need it.
        monkey_monkey 6y ago
        Honestly, literally millions of people do this every year, and for most of them, it's like 10 minutes, plus the time waiting for the iCloud restore. Even my dad was able to set up his new iPad, and he's as techophobic as it gets.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?" So the kind of minds we want? "Why isn't this easy?" should be the bread and butter question of a programmer...
  - thefz 6y ago
    Except for problems that are hard. I wholeheartedly disagree, Blow showed many times he has not the right mindset.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?" I dunno, personally that's why I've used Apple products for the past decade, and I think it's also maybe part of why they have a 2T market cap, and are the most liquid publicly traded stock in the world?
  - thefz 6y ago
    So making simplistic products that treat users as dumb is profitable, yeah, I agree with that.
    - meepmorp 6y ago
      Believe it or not, lots of people have more important things to do with their computers than dick with them to make shit work. Most people don't really know how their car works, and shouldn't have to. Same goes here.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      Where's your evidence for that? The argument that it "treats users as dumb" and that doing so is "profitable" is oft trotted out, but I never see any substantiation for it. Plenty of companies do that. What's so special about Apple, then? I mean, it's gotta be something. You gotta be careful about these arguments. They often have a slippery slope to a superiority complex (of "leet" NIX users over the unwashed "proles") hiding deep within. Needlessly complex or powerful user interfaces aren't necessarily good. They were quite commonplace before Apple. Apple understood the value of minimalism, of cutting away interaction noise until there's nothing left to subtract. Aesthetically speaking, this is approach has a long, storied history with respect to mechanical design. It's successful because it works. What Apple understood really acutely and mastered is human interface design. They perfected making human centric interfaces that look and feel like fluid prosthetic extensions of one's body, rather than computational interface where power is achieved by anchoring ones tasks around the machine for maximal efficiency. Briefly, they understood intuition. Are you arguing that intuition is somehow worse than mastering arcana, simple because you've done the latter? Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. I love my command line vim workflow dearly, and you'll have to pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. But there's definitely the idea of "right tool for the right job" that you might be sweeping by here. Remember, simplicity is as much a function of cherished *NIX tools you probably know and love. It's where they derive their power. Be careful of surface level dismissals (visual interfaces versus textual) that come from tasting it in a different flavor. You might miss the forest for the trees!
- pjmlp 6y ago
  If I wanted that experience I would kept my PC with MS-DOS 3.3.
movedx 6y ago
I see the point you're trying to make, however the increase in features (and their complexity) plus the size of the average graphic that a high-end professional has maybe grown by 300-500% since the 90s. In fact I'll tell you what: I'll give you a growth of 10,000% in file sizes and feature complexity since the since the 90s... ... computational power has grown ~%259,900 since the 90s. The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster. Optimising the code AND introducing incredibly hardware to the consumer market should see Photoshop loading in milliseconds, in my opinion.
- tasssko 6y ago
  To me it feels as though the last decade and a half computational power has not grown vertically. Instead Intel and AMD have grown computational power horizontally (i.e adding more cores). I'm looking at the difference the M1 has had on compute performance as a sign X86 strayed.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    It has also grown substantially vertically: single-core speeds keep going up (about 10x from a decade and a half ago), even as core count increases. (and M1 is not substantially faster than the top x86 cores, the remarkable thing is how power efficient it is at those speeds).
    - phonon 6y ago
      This was state of the art 15 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) Modern processors are nowhere near 10x faster single core. Maybe 4x. If you take into account performance/watt you do get 10x or better.
      - irthomasthomas 6y ago
        The 3.4ghz P4 was released 2004 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_processors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_proc... If the trend had continued we would have 1500Ghz cores by now.
lostlogin 6y ago
> Size of photos grown exponentially as well. Photoshop can grow them itself and the below looks no and thread are amazing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448986
b212 6y ago
Back in the day I was using Intel Celeron 333 MHz and then AMD Duron 800 MHz. I did not know how to use Winamp playlists because Winamp has been "an instant" app for me, I just clicked on a song and it played within miliseconds. That was my flow of using Winamp for years. This did not change between the Celeron and Duron, the thing was instant on both Celeron and Duron. Then Winamp 3 came out and I had to use playlists because a song once clicked took good second or two to start playing. Winamp 5 from 2018 still starts slower than my beloved 2.73* did 20 years ago. On Celeron 333 and 5400 RPM HDD with 256 MB of RAM. I think even the good old Winamp 2.x is not as fast as it was on Windows 98/XP. Something went wrong. * not sure if it was 2.73, but I think so Note: I realise Winamp 3 was crappy as hell, but still...
- mlok 6y ago
  This is why I did choose and stick to coolplayer at the time (before I converted to Linux) : no install, so light, so fast, and it had everything I needed. I loved it when I could find such an elegant a versatile app. I don't need to get "more" every 6-12 months. I learned that every time you gain something, you also loose something without realizing it, because you take it for granted.
- movedx 6y ago
  This is sad to read :( I remember having a 486 my self and everything being so damn snappy. Sigh.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Are you me? Perhaps a little bit later on and a different set of signifiers (foobar2000/xp/celeron 1.7) but the same idea. Things were so much snappier back then than on my previously-SOTA MBPR 2019. Sigh.
- desktopninja 6y ago
  Winamp 2.73 is still my default player and works Win10 Pro 64x build $LATEST. I will never change. It is 2MB pure gold.
rograndom 6y ago
I was at a graphic design tradeshow back in the mid 90's and there was a guy there demonstrating this Photoshop alternative called Live Picture or Live Photos or something like that. And he had a somewhat large, at the time, print image on the screen, probably 16mb or so, and was zooming in and out and resizing the window and it was redrawing almost instantly. This was AMAZING. Photoshop at the time would take many many seconds to zoom in/out. One person in the group asked, "Yeah, but how much memory is in that machine?" The guy hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said "It's got a bit, but not a lot, just 24mb." "Yeah, well that explains it." Nobody had 24mb of RAM at that time. Our "big" machine had 16mb.
- brandonmenc 6y ago
  This might be a long shot, but did the demo include zooming in on a picture of a skull to show a message written on one of the teeth? If so, I've been trying to find a video of it for years.
  - rograndom 6y ago
    No, it was a photo of a building. The "demo" was the guy right there playing with the software, no video.
- shrubble 6y ago
  Live Picture was the first to use what I think are called image proxies, where you can have an arbitrarily large image and only work with the screen-image sized image. Once you have applied all the changes and click save, it will then grind through the full size image if needed. A feature that Photoshop has since added, but it appeared in Live Picture first.
  - rograndom 6y ago
    Yup, that must have been it. I think Adobe implemented that as a feature into Photoshop within a year of us seeing that other software.

Compare photoshop between the 90s and now. 10x on features. Size of photos grown exponentially as well.

by adflux 6y ago

Compare photoshop between the 90s and now. 10x on features. Size of photos grown exponentially as well.

Perhaps, but size of photos should affect load times when starting the app (and in my opinion, so shouldn’t most feature either, but that depends on your architecture I suppose).

thefz 6y ago

Yeah Jonathan Blow isn't exactly a luminary in computer science. I once read him going on a meltdown over linux ports because "programming is hard". This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?"

movedx 6y ago
It's easy to take a stab at someone online, behind a keyboard, but I'd suggest you show us all your work and we'll judge your future opinions based on it.
- majjgepolja 6y ago
  preferably future work and dreams and ramblings too.. preferably over a twitch stream..
- thefz 6y ago
  By no metric I am comparatively as successful as the guy, but I am still able to disagree on his point that Linux is held back by its tools. The fact that he did not want or had the time to learn Linux's tooling don't mean anything in particular except that he's either very busy or very lazy. Any interview I read with him he's just ranting and crying over this or that "too complex" matter. If he does not want to deal with the complexity of modern computers, he should design and build board games. As an example, read how the one-man-band of Execution Unit manages to, in house, write and test his game on three operating systems. https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-windows-mac-and-linux/ https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-... It's not a matter of "this is too hard", Blow just does not want to do it, let's be honest.
neuronic 6y ago
The entire point of computers is to make things easy. The Apple question "why isn't this easy" is missing from 95% of UX in modern software. Stop acting as if software devs are the only users of software. And even then: computers should do work and not produce work or mental overhead.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Are you implying Apple software and devices are "easy"? I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience. Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing. It's a 5 minute process, and there's very little to it that it's not optimized for ease. Any champ can do it, and millions do. Not sure what you're on about. >I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience. Yes, all those people are delluded.
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      Clearly you've never tried it, because it's certainly not 5 minutes, it's optimized for selling you bullshit Apple services and it's buggy as hell, with no feedback to the user why everything is broken and why you're having to re-authenticate five times in a row. And good luck if you're setting up a family account for several devices with different iOS versions. You're gonna really need it.
      - monkey_monkey 6y ago
        Honestly, literally millions of people do this every year, and for most of them, it's like 10 minutes, plus the time waiting for the iCloud restore. Even my dad was able to set up his new iPad, and he's as techophobic as it gets.
coldtea 6y ago
>This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?" So the kind of minds we want? "Why isn't this easy?" should be the bread and butter question of a programmer...
- thefz 6y ago
  Except for problems that are hard. I wholeheartedly disagree, Blow showed many times he has not the right mindset.
yowlingcat 6y ago
> This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?" I dunno, personally that's why I've used Apple products for the past decade, and I think it's also maybe part of why they have a 2T market cap, and are the most liquid publicly traded stock in the world?
- thefz 6y ago
  So making simplistic products that treat users as dumb is profitable, yeah, I agree with that.
  - meepmorp 6y ago
    Believe it or not, lots of people have more important things to do with their computers than dick with them to make shit work. Most people don't really know how their car works, and shouldn't have to. Same goes here.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Where's your evidence for that? The argument that it "treats users as dumb" and that doing so is "profitable" is oft trotted out, but I never see any substantiation for it. Plenty of companies do that. What's so special about Apple, then? I mean, it's gotta be something. You gotta be careful about these arguments. They often have a slippery slope to a superiority complex (of "leet" NIX users over the unwashed "proles") hiding deep within. Needlessly complex or powerful user interfaces aren't necessarily good. They were quite commonplace before Apple. Apple understood the value of minimalism, of cutting away interaction noise until there's nothing left to subtract. Aesthetically speaking, this is approach has a long, storied history with respect to mechanical design. It's successful because it works. What Apple understood really acutely and mastered is human interface design. They perfected making human centric interfaces that look and feel like fluid prosthetic extensions of one's body, rather than computational interface where power is achieved by anchoring ones tasks around the machine for maximal efficiency. Briefly, they understood intuition. Are you arguing that intuition is somehow worse than mastering arcana, simple because you've done the latter? Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. I love my command line vim workflow dearly, and you'll have to pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. But there's definitely the idea of "right tool for the right job" that you might be sweeping by here. Remember, simplicity is as much a function of cherished *NIX tools you probably know and love. It's where they derive their power. Be careful of surface level dismissals (visual interfaces versus textual) that come from tasting it in a different flavor. You might miss the forest for the trees!
pjmlp 6y ago
If I wanted that experience I would kept my PC with MS-DOS 3.3.

movedx 6y ago

I see the point you're trying to make, however the increase in features (and their complexity) plus the size of the average graphic that a high-end professional has maybe grown by 300-500% since the 90s. In fact I'll tell you what: I'll give you a growth of 10,000% in file sizes and feature complexity since the since the 90s... ... computational power has grown ~%259,900 since the 90s. The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster. Optimising the code AND introducing incredibly hardware to the consumer market should see Photoshop loading in milliseconds, in my opinion.

tasssko 6y ago
To me it feels as though the last decade and a half computational power has not grown vertically. Instead Intel and AMD have grown computational power horizontally (i.e adding more cores). I'm looking at the difference the M1 has had on compute performance as a sign X86 strayed.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  It has also grown substantially vertically: single-core speeds keep going up (about 10x from a decade and a half ago), even as core count increases. (and M1 is not substantially faster than the top x86 cores, the remarkable thing is how power efficient it is at those speeds).
  - phonon 6y ago
    This was state of the art 15 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) Modern processors are nowhere near 10x faster single core. Maybe 4x. If you take into account performance/watt you do get 10x or better.
    - irthomasthomas 6y ago
      The 3.4ghz P4 was released 2004 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_processors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_proc... If the trend had continued we would have 1500Ghz cores by now.

lostlogin 6y ago

> Size of photos grown exponentially as well. Photoshop can grow them itself and the below looks no and thread are amazing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448986

b212 6y ago

Back in the day I was using Intel Celeron 333 MHz and then AMD Duron 800 MHz. I did not know how to use Winamp playlists because Winamp has been "an instant" app for me, I just clicked on a song and it played within miliseconds. That was my flow of using Winamp for years. This did not change between the Celeron and Duron, the thing was instant on both Celeron and Duron. Then Winamp 3 came out and I had to use playlists because a song once clicked took good second or two to start playing. Winamp 5 from 2018 still starts slower than my beloved 2.73* did 20 years ago. On Celeron 333 and 5400 RPM HDD with 256 MB of RAM. I think even the good old Winamp 2.x is not as fast as it was on Windows 98/XP. Something went wrong. * not sure if it was 2.73, but I think so Note: I realise Winamp 3 was crappy as hell, but still...

mlok 6y ago
This is why I did choose and stick to coolplayer at the time (before I converted to Linux) : no install, so light, so fast, and it had everything I needed. I loved it when I could find such an elegant a versatile app. I don't need to get "more" every 6-12 months. I learned that every time you gain something, you also loose something without realizing it, because you take it for granted.
movedx 6y ago
This is sad to read :( I remember having a 486 my self and everything being so damn snappy. Sigh.
yowlingcat 6y ago
Are you me? Perhaps a little bit later on and a different set of signifiers (foobar2000/xp/celeron 1.7) but the same idea. Things were so much snappier back then than on my previously-SOTA MBPR 2019. Sigh.
desktopninja 6y ago
Winamp 2.73 is still my default player and works Win10 Pro 64x build $LATEST. I will never change. It is 2MB pure gold.

rograndom 6y ago

I was at a graphic design tradeshow back in the mid 90's and there was a guy there demonstrating this Photoshop alternative called Live Picture or Live Photos or something like that. And he had a somewhat large, at the time, print image on the screen, probably 16mb or so, and was zooming in and out and resizing the window and it was redrawing almost instantly. This was AMAZING. Photoshop at the time would take many many seconds to zoom in/out. One person in the group asked, "Yeah, but how much memory is in that machine?" The guy hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said "It's got a bit, but not a lot, just 24mb." "Yeah, well that explains it." Nobody had 24mb of RAM at that time. Our "big" machine had 16mb.

brandonmenc 6y ago
This might be a long shot, but did the demo include zooming in on a picture of a skull to show a message written on one of the teeth? If so, I've been trying to find a video of it for years.
- rograndom 6y ago
  No, it was a photo of a building. The "demo" was the guy right there playing with the software, no video.
shrubble 6y ago
Live Picture was the first to use what I think are called image proxies, where you can have an arbitrarily large image and only work with the screen-image sized image. Once you have applied all the changes and click save, it will then grind through the full size image if needed. A feature that Photoshop has since added, but it appeared in Live Picture first.
- rograndom 6y ago
  Yup, that must have been it. I think Adobe implemented that as a feature into Photoshop within a year of us seeing that other software.