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Every once in a while I need to edit an image on macOS. I used to open GIMP, wait on the loading screen for 3 minutes so that it rebuilt the font cache ("Looki

by lukax 4y ago

Every once in a while I need to edit an image on macOS. I used to open GIMP, wait on the loading screen for 3 minutes so that it rebuilt the font cache ("Looking for data files: Fonts (this may take a while)"), open the image, use Cage Transform (wait 30 seconds for it to process the image), save to my home dir, because on recent versions of macOS it does not properly handle permissions to write in Documents folder ("Could not read the contents of Documents"). Now I open GIMP, remember that Photopea exists, quit GIMP, open Photopea, drop the image, transform it (every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app) and just export the image to my Downloads folder. I'm so happy I don't have to use GIMP anymore.

wildrhythms 4y ago
Photopea is amazing, but for more complex edits on Mac OS I started using Pixelmator Pro and it's miles better than Photoshop's increasingly bloated and slow experience. I genuinely don't understand how Photoshop has gotten worse since the CS3 era, it's baffling.
cxr 4y ago
> every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app That shouldn't be surprising. Ivan Kutskir (the Photopea guy) is not an NPM programmer. The slowness that you're accustomed to today from the modern Web and the average Electron app is not a JS problem. It's a modern-Web-and-the-average-Electron-app problem, i.e., a doing-it-the-NPM-way problem. JS runtimes are fast, and well-written programs written in JS are fast, too. (In fact, mediocre programs were generally fast enough even when the runtimes weren't especially performance-focused.) The problem is that mainstream JS development took a left turn around 10 years ago. We have enough evidence by now to say that this really is the ailment. What happened is that what the community considers best practices today are actually bad practices. If you look at the serious applications of JS that otherwise break from the NodeJS/NPM crowd's conventional wisdom (incl. Firefox, Gnome, and projects like this one, for example, that don't buy in as heavily on GitHub trends and other résumé-driven development), they're snappy. Indeed, they're snappy enough that many people are generally not even aware that it's JS (or, in the case of Photopea, wouldn't know it if it weren't for the obvious/unavoidable indicators of what's behind the curtain).

by lukax 4y ago

wildrhythms 4y ago

Photopea is amazing, but for more complex edits on Mac OS I started using Pixelmator Pro and it's miles better than Photoshop's increasingly bloated and slow experience. I genuinely don't understand how Photoshop has gotten worse since the CS3 era, it's baffling.

cxr 4y ago

> every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app That shouldn't be surprising. Ivan Kutskir (the Photopea guy) is not an NPM programmer. The slowness that you're accustomed to today from the modern Web and the average Electron app is not a JS problem. It's a modern-Web-and-the-average-Electron-app problem, i.e., a doing-it-the-NPM-way problem. JS runtimes are fast, and well-written programs written in JS are fast, too. (In fact, mediocre programs were generally fast enough even when the runtimes weren't especially performance-focused.) The problem is that mainstream JS development took a left turn around 10 years ago. We have enough evidence by now to say that this really is the ailment. What happened is that what the community considers best practices today are actually bad practices. If you look at the serious applications of JS that otherwise break from the NodeJS/NPM crowd's conventional wisdom (incl. Firefox, Gnome, and projects like this one, for example, that don't buy in as heavily on GitHub trends and other résumé-driven development), they're snappy. Indeed, they're snappy enough that many people are generally not even aware that it's JS (or, in the case of Photopea, wouldn't know it if it weren't for the obvious/unavoidable indicators of what's behind the curtain).