10 ms·

Live Picture: Software that was way ahead of its time

46 points by yottoy 14y ago

yottoy 14y ago
Or is it 'should have killed Photoshop'...
- eitland 14y ago
  no need to kill photoshop. Then we'd just have another monopoly.
  - yeap 14y ago
    The problem is no open source (or even closed) come even close to the Photoshop workflow, and also integration with other monopolized software like Illustrator and Fireworks. It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people can't switch to Linux, winin' it is just not good enough
    - krapp 14y ago
      I've worked professionally with Photoshop and After Effects and access to Adobe software is the only reason I still have a Windows computer. I don't even want to try getting it to work in Wine, and dual-booting just to be able to use them seems like a waste of time. And until professionals use it in large numbers and are comfortable around it and potential employers want to see it on a resume, other solutions aren't going to matter.
      - chii 14y ago
        > potential employers want to see it on a resume this is a problem imho - why should a vendor specific product be a defacto qualification for a job? I know it is, and plenty of office clerk jobs "require proficiency" in office/word/excel. I say, instead of requiring a product name on your resume, you instead have to show you can achieve a particular effect (say, describe a procedure to achieve a rock texture in the abstract).
        krapp 14y ago
        I suppose it can matter if that vendor's product is what they use in house and if whatever the other thing is that you know, isn't. They may be worried about the amount of effort they'd need to put into training you to do things their way.
igul222 14y ago
Site appears to be down. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3mYJsJ:http://www.pixiq.com/article/live-picture%2Bhttp://www.pixiq.com/article/live-picture&hl=en&client=safari&nomo=1&biw=320&bih=416&prmd=ivns&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3...
rikacomet 14y ago
A monopoly can also be seen as, a pioneer making something useful, others being unable to replicate or challenge with their own. take gimp for example, it is nowhere near the dominance of adobe. its like windows-macintosh of the computer graphics world.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  Even apps like Pixelmator don't quite get enough in there to adequately replace Adobe's offerings. In fact, I can only think of Dreamweaver as the prime example of something that has plenty of superior competition, attacking from a variety of angles.
  - rikacomet 14y ago
    indeed, thats a very good example, but still, what we are forgetting is the insane amount of money it costs to buy adobe software, even if they have lesser market share, they sure make up for it. Supposedly, their customers are all the artist, for whom 1000-2000$ is like buying new clothes. This allows adobe to further seal its position, through spending on R&D to pull further ahead of the competition. so we can say, adobe would not stand challenged until someone can beat them on this part, with a proper strategy. Which is true for its current competitors, all of which only try to make the best from their current possibilities.
pyalot2 14y ago
1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images. 2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as well as "instant" anything is just hyperbole. There's no such thing in software. It might've been cleverer than photoshop about things, but unlimited and instant? No. 3) The claim to complete resolution independence is false. You might store editing operations/layers as parameters, but the source material is still resolution bound. 4) 48-bits is not that great honestly. At RGB (no word about alpha) that's 16-bit per channel. If it's normalized that's 64k graduations vs. 256 graduations. If interpreted as half float you'll only get 2 bits more per channel (half-floats use a 10-bit significand). That's cool, but not all that cool, either you get a non HDR format with a cool channel resolution, or you'll get a HDR format with 4x more graduations than 8-bpc. No you know what's cool? 32-bit single precision floats. 4 bytes, 32-bits per channel, 128-bit per pixel. You'll get 23 bits in graduations and HDR. Desktop graphics cards use this format internally anyway.
- jawngee 14y ago
  As someone that used it, it did indeed have all of those features. Sorry to burst your bubble. As for resolution independence, what they mean is that all of the operations and manipulations you performed were resolution independent. If you upscaled the image, any manipulations weren't simply upscaled, but reperformed at the new scale which provided significantly better results. It was indeed instant. You could load a 500 meg image on a machine with a quarter of the ram and zoom, pan and mess with it in realtime. It was amazing at the time.
  - pyalot2 14y ago
    Sorry to burst your bubble, if you think there's such a thing as unlimited and instant you're sorely mistaken. It might've been fast in simple cases compared to the alternatives, but there's no two ways about it that all computation takes time, and you can make tradeoffs where you cache more and compute less, but that's it. It's not instant and unlimited. It's Limited and fast, or more limited and faster, or more ram and faster, or more data and slower.
norswap 14y ago
The article praises Live Picture, but offer no hints as to why it failed to "kill" or even simply concurrence Photoshop.
- pronoiac 14y ago
  I heard that it was due to the lack of plugins, and that was in turn due to a tricky and complicated API. Live Picture used some interesting and complicated data structures to work its magic, but all of that complication was exposed to and required of plugin authors.
jawngee 14y ago
I used to use live picture back in the day. It was pretty amazing, but we never really fit it into our workflow because we were a very heavy digital shop and photoshop still had a leg up in a few areas (this was a digital pre-press and multimedia dev shop back in the early 90's). Interestingly, we were also one of the first shops to have a digital camera for use in pro photo shoots. It was a Leif back that fit onto a Hasselblad. It would take one photo for each color plane, R, G, B, and each shot took about 30 seconds. You couldn't photograph people because of how long it took. But it was good for catalog and still life and high resolution enough for print. I think it cost about $10K if my memory serves.
valley_guy_12 14y ago
Here's a brief comparison of Live Picture vs. PhotoShop. It says Live Picture is sluggish and only better than PhotoShop on really large images. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0yXQkoJ:philip.greenspun.com/wtr/live-picture-v-photoshop.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0y...
- revelation 14y ago
  It also seems to be from the 90s. Edit: Maybe I'm mistaken and the linked site is talking about _software_ from the 90s? It's down, so I really don't know. All I know is that they need to stop calling that an "app", then.
aneth4 14y ago
Why does Photoshop need to be killed? Seems like a good, powerful piece of software loved by many.
- shanelja 14y ago
  I agree, but I feel the wording of the article title is the issue here, I feel that while Photoshop is a great piece of software, there is room for improvement, if this program can achieve that, kudos to the developers.
- frozenport 14y ago
  Adobe must die. I set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked. InDesign CS5.5 came out and they refused to sell me CS5.0. They introduced no new features, but the export as HTML option started producing random crashes. I spoke with their engineers and they said they would fix it in the next version. We still experience a random crash in 1/30 automated jobs - which requires us to redo a large portion by hand. I don't know if they had fixed it, but I know they want thousands of dollars to upgrade to CS6.0. Why did this problem happen? Because they released a new version called CS5.5 that introduced only bugs. Using Adobe software feels like you are being robbed. Adobe must die.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    Still you're using it, because there is no alternative. Since it's the best software for what it does, your idea that "Adobe must die" is based solely on a fantasy notion that whatever replaces it wont have bugs, and will be all unicorns and love. Not to mention that the bugs you mention are mostly specific to your workflow (specific automated jobs et al), and don't mean that the most used software in the industry is problematic in general. I've never been biten by any bugs in other parts of 5.5 I use, like PS and Premiere, for example. I also don't see why you were quick to jump to 5.5 since you "set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked.".
    - frozenport 14y ago
      I didn't want to use 5.5 I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the CS5.5 version. I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more bugs and no useful features. This is is a direct consequence of adobe's monopoly, which disregards the needs of its users in favor of push new versions down our throats. Reminds of Windows ME.
chestnut-tree 14y ago
The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not). It would be really useful to see a few side-by-side comparisons of how a task is accomplished in LivePicture compared with Photoshop. Although Photoshop is powerful and feature rich, I find the interface clumsy and awkward (Illustrator, in my opinion, has an even clunkier interface). Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface? Apple's Final Cut Pro clearly had some influence on subsequent releases of Premiere Pro, but there's no serious competitor to Photoshop that I can think of (yes, there are alternatives, but none that are likely to take users away from Photoshop). What's more, many people simply don't go looking for alternatives. Mastering Photoshop or Illustrator will stand you in good stead in the employment market if you're looking for a visual design job. And if you get stuck with an application task, there's a good chance you'll find a solution by searching for it online. There is an absolutely enormous number of supporting resources around Adobe's Creative Suite of products: tutorials, training, books, discussion sites etc. All that helps to maintain the status quo and makes it much harder for competing apps to gain attention.
- ghaff 14y ago
  >Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface? It's probably more a case of pros who have invested a great deal of time in adapting themselves to Photoshop's workflow and quirks would be really upset if they rethought the interface--however excellent a job they did. FWIW, Adobe did a really excellent job when they had a clean sheet of paper with Lightroom, although it took a couple iterations to get there. (Mostly--it's more modal than I'd prefer in some respects.)
- DanBC 14y ago
  > The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not). The scary thing is that some of these great features can never be used without fear of a huge legal attack over patents. EDIT: >Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface? I don't think so. I think the enormous user base prevents them from changing the interface. That's probably a good thing, even if the interface is sub-optimal. AutoCAD has a very powerful interface, with a mix of WIMP and typed commands, with some scripting. In theory GIMP being open source means anyone can give it a new interface, but even though the interface is one of the biggest reasons many people give for not liking the GIMP there are few projects that have given it a saner interface.
msohcw 14y ago
I'd like to see the 'impossible image' that was created with LivePicture and impossible for Photoshop...
wyck 14y ago
Could have..would have. There is one thing than can still kill Photoshop, something on par for linux. ps. do not say gimp, really.
- schraeds 14y ago
  Kill photoshop by attacking the underserved 2% of the marketplace?
henningtegen 14y ago
We are currently working on a application with similar features called Leonardo although Leonardo is streamlined for digital painting, not photo editing. Leonardo is still at least 6 months away from being released but all the features like "unlimited canvas", "instant painting" and handling of "huge files" are already in place. Main website: http://www.getleonardo.com http://www.getleonardo.com (not much there yet) We also just started a Vimeo channel were we "blog" about the progress of Leonardo: https://vimeo.com/channels/sol/ https://vimeo.com/channels/sol/ Unfortunately there is no video right now showing the "unlimited canvas" and "instant painting", but I can make one within the next couple of hours... :)
mathnode 14y ago
The photoshop competition was all on IRIX, and was a LOT better. Matador and Amazon were great applications, and better performers on 64bit MIPS hardware. Some got ported to Linux, but were then not maintained, or integrated into other codebases. Old / dead image editors (with deep colour) better than Photoshop at the time: * IFX Amazon * Alias Eclipse * Da Vinci or something? Not the Colour/DI suite. * Deep Paint * Avid Matador * I actually used Combustion for years. You can keep your photo-pap! Alive alternatives: * Cinepaint (Yes it works fine) * GIMP 2.9 or GIMP 2.10 when it is released * Node based compositing apps i.e. Nuke.
lucian303 14y ago
Just another case of superior tech losing out. Sad but true. All too often.
gallerytungsten 14y ago
I recall trying Live Picture a few times, back in the early 90s. It was promoted in the same kind of breathless tone as this article. My recollection is that it in no way lived up to the hype. It was slow and crashed a lot.
virtualritz 14y ago
The probable reasons this app failed, and any app that competes with PS will (regardless of how well it tackles the resolution independence/feedback speed issue): are two things: 1. Workflow must match PS 1:1 for the majority of everyday image editing operations. People that use PS are mostly creative folks who do no understand image editing from a technical perspective. Solving a problem (a use case) to them means to internalize a workflow. Mastering a 'deep' app like PS this way takes years. If you write a competitor to PS and dont honor this experience that took your target users years, often over a decade to aquire, you're shooting yourself in the foot too hard to ever gain enough momentum on a market that is dominated by PS (resp. its users). This is imho also the reason why Adobe hasn't touched basic workflow in PS, ever. Because if they did this, they risked alienating users and driving them to test a competitor's product. Recall when Apple 'improved' the UI/workflow of FinalCut Pro? The screams of outrage echoing through the web? :) 2. Feature set must be more or less identical to PS. You can 'plus' in some areas but you can't 'minus'. If you have a use case that is not covered by your app but by PS and it is even used by the average target user only once a week in PS, this will be enough reason for them to not consider your app a worthwhile alternative, even if you do get 1. right. 1. is not too hard to do, engineering wise. But 2. is a huge task. PS simply has a lot of features.

46 points by yottoy 14y ago

yottoy 14y ago

Or is it 'should have killed Photoshop'...

eitland 14y ago
no need to kill photoshop. Then we'd just have another monopoly.
- yeap 14y ago
  The problem is no open source (or even closed) come even close to the Photoshop workflow, and also integration with other monopolized software like Illustrator and Fireworks. It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people can't switch to Linux, winin' it is just not good enough
  - krapp 14y ago
    I've worked professionally with Photoshop and After Effects and access to Adobe software is the only reason I still have a Windows computer. I don't even want to try getting it to work in Wine, and dual-booting just to be able to use them seems like a waste of time. And until professionals use it in large numbers and are comfortable around it and potential employers want to see it on a resume, other solutions aren't going to matter.
    - chii 14y ago
      > potential employers want to see it on a resume this is a problem imho - why should a vendor specific product be a defacto qualification for a job? I know it is, and plenty of office clerk jobs "require proficiency" in office/word/excel. I say, instead of requiring a product name on your resume, you instead have to show you can achieve a particular effect (say, describe a procedure to achieve a rock texture in the abstract).
      - krapp 14y ago
        I suppose it can matter if that vendor's product is what they use in house and if whatever the other thing is that you know, isn't. They may be worried about the amount of effort they'd need to put into training you to do things their way.

igul222 14y ago

Site appears to be down. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3mYJsJ:http://www.pixiq.com/article/live-picture%2Bhttp://www.pixiq.com/article/live-picture&hl=en&client=safari&nomo=1&biw=320&bih=416&prmd=ivns&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3...

rikacomet 14y ago

A monopoly can also be seen as, a pioneer making something useful, others being unable to replicate or challenge with their own. take gimp for example, it is nowhere near the dominance of adobe. its like windows-macintosh of the computer graphics world.

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
Even apps like Pixelmator don't quite get enough in there to adequately replace Adobe's offerings. In fact, I can only think of Dreamweaver as the prime example of something that has plenty of superior competition, attacking from a variety of angles.
- rikacomet 14y ago
  indeed, thats a very good example, but still, what we are forgetting is the insane amount of money it costs to buy adobe software, even if they have lesser market share, they sure make up for it. Supposedly, their customers are all the artist, for whom 1000-2000$ is like buying new clothes. This allows adobe to further seal its position, through spending on R&D to pull further ahead of the competition. so we can say, adobe would not stand challenged until someone can beat them on this part, with a proper strategy. Which is true for its current competitors, all of which only try to make the best from their current possibilities.

pyalot2 14y ago

1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images. 2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as well as "instant" anything is just hyperbole. There's no such thing in software. It might've been cleverer than photoshop about things, but unlimited and instant? No. 3) The claim to complete resolution independence is false. You might store editing operations/layers as parameters, but the source material is still resolution bound. 4) 48-bits is not that great honestly. At RGB (no word about alpha) that's 16-bit per channel. If it's normalized that's 64k graduations vs. 256 graduations. If interpreted as half float you'll only get 2 bits more per channel (half-floats use a 10-bit significand). That's cool, but not all that cool, either you get a non HDR format with a cool channel resolution, or you'll get a HDR format with 4x more graduations than 8-bpc. No you know what's cool? 32-bit single precision floats. 4 bytes, 32-bits per channel, 128-bit per pixel. You'll get 23 bits in graduations and HDR. Desktop graphics cards use this format internally anyway.

jawngee 14y ago
As someone that used it, it did indeed have all of those features. Sorry to burst your bubble. As for resolution independence, what they mean is that all of the operations and manipulations you performed were resolution independent. If you upscaled the image, any manipulations weren't simply upscaled, but reperformed at the new scale which provided significantly better results. It was indeed instant. You could load a 500 meg image on a machine with a quarter of the ram and zoom, pan and mess with it in realtime. It was amazing at the time.
- pyalot2 14y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble, if you think there's such a thing as unlimited and instant you're sorely mistaken. It might've been fast in simple cases compared to the alternatives, but there's no two ways about it that all computation takes time, and you can make tradeoffs where you cache more and compute less, but that's it. It's not instant and unlimited. It's Limited and fast, or more limited and faster, or more ram and faster, or more data and slower.

norswap 14y ago

The article praises Live Picture, but offer no hints as to why it failed to "kill" or even simply concurrence Photoshop.

pronoiac 14y ago
I heard that it was due to the lack of plugins, and that was in turn due to a tricky and complicated API. Live Picture used some interesting and complicated data structures to work its magic, but all of that complication was exposed to and required of plugin authors.

jawngee 14y ago

I used to use live picture back in the day. It was pretty amazing, but we never really fit it into our workflow because we were a very heavy digital shop and photoshop still had a leg up in a few areas (this was a digital pre-press and multimedia dev shop back in the early 90's). Interestingly, we were also one of the first shops to have a digital camera for use in pro photo shoots. It was a Leif back that fit onto a Hasselblad. It would take one photo for each color plane, R, G, B, and each shot took about 30 seconds. You couldn't photograph people because of how long it took. But it was good for catalog and still life and high resolution enough for print. I think it cost about $10K if my memory serves.

valley_guy_12 14y ago

Here's a brief comparison of Live Picture vs. PhotoShop. It says Live Picture is sluggish and only better than PhotoShop on really large images. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0yXQkoJ:philip.greenspun.com/wtr/live-picture-v-photoshop.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0y...

revelation 14y ago
It also seems to be from the 90s. Edit: Maybe I'm mistaken and the linked site is talking about _software_ from the 90s? It's down, so I really don't know. All I know is that they need to stop calling that an "app", then.

aneth4 14y ago

Why does Photoshop need to be killed? Seems like a good, powerful piece of software loved by many.

shanelja 14y ago
I agree, but I feel the wording of the article title is the issue here, I feel that while Photoshop is a great piece of software, there is room for improvement, if this program can achieve that, kudos to the developers.
frozenport 14y ago
Adobe must die. I set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked. InDesign CS5.5 came out and they refused to sell me CS5.0. They introduced no new features, but the export as HTML option started producing random crashes. I spoke with their engineers and they said they would fix it in the next version. We still experience a random crash in 1/30 automated jobs - which requires us to redo a large portion by hand. I don't know if they had fixed it, but I know they want thousands of dollars to upgrade to CS6.0. Why did this problem happen? Because they released a new version called CS5.5 that introduced only bugs. Using Adobe software feels like you are being robbed. Adobe must die.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  Still you're using it, because there is no alternative. Since it's the best software for what it does, your idea that "Adobe must die" is based solely on a fantasy notion that whatever replaces it wont have bugs, and will be all unicorns and love. Not to mention that the bugs you mention are mostly specific to your workflow (specific automated jobs et al), and don't mean that the most used software in the industry is problematic in general. I've never been biten by any bugs in other parts of 5.5 I use, like PS and Premiere, for example. I also don't see why you were quick to jump to 5.5 since you "set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked.".
  - frozenport 14y ago
    I didn't want to use 5.5 I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the CS5.5 version. I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more bugs and no useful features. This is is a direct consequence of adobe's monopoly, which disregards the needs of its users in favor of push new versions down our throats. Reminds of Windows ME.

chestnut-tree 14y ago

The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not). It would be really useful to see a few side-by-side comparisons of how a task is accomplished in LivePicture compared with Photoshop. Although Photoshop is powerful and feature rich, I find the interface clumsy and awkward (Illustrator, in my opinion, has an even clunkier interface). Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface? Apple's Final Cut Pro clearly had some influence on subsequent releases of Premiere Pro, but there's no serious competitor to Photoshop that I can think of (yes, there are alternatives, but none that are likely to take users away from Photoshop). What's more, many people simply don't go looking for alternatives. Mastering Photoshop or Illustrator will stand you in good stead in the employment market if you're looking for a visual design job. And if you get stuck with an application task, there's a good chance you'll find a solution by searching for it online. There is an absolutely enormous number of supporting resources around Adobe's Creative Suite of products: tutorials, training, books, discussion sites etc. All that helps to maintain the status quo and makes it much harder for competing apps to gain attention.

ghaff 14y ago
>Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface? It's probably more a case of pros who have invested a great deal of time in adapting themselves to Photoshop's workflow and quirks would be really upset if they rethought the interface--however excellent a job they did. FWIW, Adobe did a really excellent job when they had a clean sheet of paper with Lightroom, although it took a couple iterations to get there. (Mostly--it's more modal than I'd prefer in some respects.)
DanBC 14y ago
> The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not). The scary thing is that some of these great features can never be used without fear of a huge legal attack over patents. EDIT: >Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface? I don't think so. I think the enormous user base prevents them from changing the interface. That's probably a good thing, even if the interface is sub-optimal. AutoCAD has a very powerful interface, with a mix of WIMP and typed commands, with some scripting. In theory GIMP being open source means anyone can give it a new interface, but even though the interface is one of the biggest reasons many people give for not liking the GIMP there are few projects that have given it a saner interface.

msohcw 14y ago

I'd like to see the 'impossible image' that was created with LivePicture and impossible for Photoshop...

wyck 14y ago

Could have..would have. There is one thing than can still kill Photoshop, something on par for linux. ps. do not say gimp, really.

schraeds 14y ago
Kill photoshop by attacking the underserved 2% of the marketplace?

henningtegen 14y ago

We are currently working on a application with similar features called Leonardo although Leonardo is streamlined for digital painting, not photo editing. Leonardo is still at least 6 months away from being released but all the features like "unlimited canvas", "instant painting" and handling of "huge files" are already in place. Main website: http://www.getleonardo.com http://www.getleonardo.com (not much there yet) We also just started a Vimeo channel were we "blog" about the progress of Leonardo: https://vimeo.com/channels/sol/ https://vimeo.com/channels/sol/ Unfortunately there is no video right now showing the "unlimited canvas" and "instant painting", but I can make one within the next couple of hours... :)

mathnode 14y ago

The photoshop competition was all on IRIX, and was a LOT better. Matador and Amazon were great applications, and better performers on 64bit MIPS hardware. Some got ported to Linux, but were then not maintained, or integrated into other codebases. Old / dead image editors (with deep colour) better than Photoshop at the time: * IFX Amazon * Alias Eclipse * Da Vinci or something? Not the Colour/DI suite. * Deep Paint * Avid Matador * I actually used Combustion for years. You can keep your photo-pap! Alive alternatives: * Cinepaint (Yes it works fine) * GIMP 2.9 or GIMP 2.10 when it is released * Node based compositing apps i.e. Nuke.

lucian303 14y ago

Just another case of superior tech losing out. Sad but true. All too often.

gallerytungsten 14y ago

I recall trying Live Picture a few times, back in the early 90s. It was promoted in the same kind of breathless tone as this article. My recollection is that it in no way lived up to the hype. It was slow and crashed a lot.

virtualritz 14y ago

The probable reasons this app failed, and any app that competes with PS will (regardless of how well it tackles the resolution independence/feedback speed issue): are two things: 1. Workflow must match PS 1:1 for the majority of everyday image editing operations. People that use PS are mostly creative folks who do no understand image editing from a technical perspective. Solving a problem (a use case) to them means to internalize a workflow. Mastering a 'deep' app like PS this way takes years. If you write a competitor to PS and dont honor this experience that took your target users years, often over a decade to aquire, you're shooting yourself in the foot too hard to ever gain enough momentum on a market that is dominated by PS (resp. its users). This is imho also the reason why Adobe hasn't touched basic workflow in PS, ever. Because if they did this, they risked alienating users and driving them to test a competitor's product. Recall when Apple 'improved' the UI/workflow of FinalCut Pro? The screams of outrage echoing through the web? :) 2. Feature set must be more or less identical to PS. You can 'plus' in some areas but you can't 'minus'. If you have a use case that is not covered by your app but by PS and it is even used by the average target user only once a week in PS, this will be enough reason for them to not consider your app a worthwhile alternative, even if you do get 1. right. 1. is not too hard to do, engineering wise. But 2. is a huge task. PS simply has a lot of features.