Photoshop 1.0 Recreated On iPhone 103
Posted
by
timothy
from the when-time-loops-collide dept.
from the when-time-loops-collide dept.
Dotnaught writes "Photoshop co-creator Russell Brown asked Ansca Mobile to re-create Photoshop 1.0, originally introduced in 1990, for the iPhone. The resulting app, created in three days using the Corona SDK, was distributed to 50 attendees of an event celebrating Photoshop's 20th anniversary. Programmer Evan Kirchhoff in a blog post explains that Ansca took the project on to prove its claims about how Corona makes iPhone development faster."
oblig "gimp vs photoshop"/"iphone vs n900" (Score:5, Informative)
And my N900 can run the latest and greatest version of the Gimp. Big whoop.
Control area (Score:2, Informative)
"How big should touchable areas be? I recall Verizon's mobile style guide recommending nothing smaller than 44 by 44 pixels;"
I lost a little respect for the developer when I read that. Pixels are meaningless as they are affected by the display's DPI. Considering Verizon doesn't even sell the iPhone, obviously their style guidelines are specific to some other hardware. My HTC has a DPI of 259 versus the iPhone's 163, so a 44x44 pixel area is rendered with vastly different scale from device to device.
Re:Unimpressed (Score:3, Informative)
The iPhone can do doom, quite easily. And Wolfenstein. And Quake. Hell, my third generation iPod can run Doom - yes, the one with 4 color (white, black, and two grays) screen.
Re:Photoshop without patent problems! (Score:4, Informative)
Expiration is 20 years after patent application or 17 years after patent acceptance, whichever comes last. (That is, you're guaranteed 20 years after filing for the patent, if it's accepted. If it takes more than 3 years to work through the patent office, you're guaranteed 17 years after it's accepted.)
Re:Photoshop without patent problems! (Score:5, Informative)
how do patents work in america?
Easy. You write something that you think it too long and complicated for a patent examiner to fully undertand in the 17 hours he/she will be allocated. Then it gets granted and for twenty years you can threaten anyone that developers or distributes software that does anything resembling your patent. (You, the writer of a patent, are a protected innovator. Those guys writing software are nasty pirates - watch out!)
When someone receives your threat letter, they become formally aware of your patent and they now risk triple damages plus paying your lawyers' fees! Win! To avoid this, they could ask their own lawyer for a certificate of non-violation, which costs $40,000. So, if the original letter (which cost 39c to send) asks for $35,000, there's a good chance you'll simply get your money. (As explained by patent attorney Dan Ravicher [swpat.org] in this presentation [pubpat.org])
Or, you could contest the patent and kill your company by spending 5 years paying legal fees and having a cloud of uncertainty around your business making you untouchable for investors. (As is the case with the 1-click patent [swpat.org])
But, don't worry, patent law does contain a consideration for the public: the nightmare ends after 20 years, so that's why we're all really excited now about Photoshop 1.0 finally becoming patent-free. I hear there's a great operating system that will be patent-free in 2015!
Re:oblig "gimp vs photoshop"/"iphone vs n900" (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Control area (Score:5, Informative)
I lost a little respect for the developer when I read that. Pixels are meaningless as they are affected by the display's DPI. Considering Verizon doesn't even sell the iPhone, obviously their style guidelines are specific to some other hardware.
Yeah, I knew I wrote that part a little too quickly! More specifically, Verizon was recommending that figure on circa-2008 guidelines aimed at their earliest iPhone-style touchscreen phone, which had a DPI that was more or less the same as iPhone, so it's a reasonable rough-and-ready number to cite. (I was at Adobe working on FlashCast, aka "Verizon Dashboard", at the time, so I randomly happen to remember that guideline.) The iPhone HIG is obviously a better reference, but in this app it's sort of moot anyway because the real limit was "as much touch area as we can squeeze out of 20-year-old WIMP GUI". If I can figure out how to boil all this into a few words, I'll clarify the article.
Re:Photoshop without patent problems! (Score:3, Informative)
If you RTFA, it says that the app was commissioned by Adobe.
That's not Photoshop (Score:5, Informative)
It's a neat tribute, but that's not Photoshop.
It's just a Photoshop startup screen and a fudged reproduction of the "Levels" tool.
I don't see that taking 3 days on the project was a great achievement. He could have probably done it using Apple's developer tools in the same time period.
Again, I'm not poo pooing the idea or execution. It's sweet and I'd enjoy messing with it on my own iPhone. But it's not Photoshop and I don't think that it effectively demonstrates that their product speeds up iPhone development.
The description implies some advantage in memory-management with that image-swapping and masking going on in the demo, but I'd have to reproduce the demo in Xcode and run the two apps side by side to figure out if that's so and I suspect that for an app of that modest complexity any difference that would make would be imperceptible on all but the earliest iPhones.
Re:Unimpressed (Score:3, Informative)
This doesn't look as impressive as it sounds. It seems all the app can do is display a histogram and adjust the levels and then save the result. So its more like a little toy then a full application.
Re:Photoshop of a Monochrome Mac? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, yes, it ran ok on an SE/30 if memory serves... however it was mostly only useful on that platform to people doing 2-bit graphics or for someone who was just doing file format conversions... Mind you at the time 2-bit graphics were no laughing matter considering the lack of color output options or existing standards for same. A lot of DTP was output in 2-bit, until people started outputting gray-scale photos etc on laser printers, and there was nearly no electronic publishing method like the www. People forget that it was only well after the IIx came out that 24(and then 32)-bit color was even supported at the system level. It was all 8-bit before that.
BTW: here are the original sys reqs for PS 1.0.7:
Macintosh SE, SE/30, II, IIx, IIci, IIcx with a minimum of 2 megabytes of RAM
System software 6.0.3
Oddly, the SE had the same 8mhz 68k processor as the Plus, and both were upgradable over the 2MB minimum, so I'm not sure why the Plus was excluded. Might be worth a try.
Re:Photoshop of a Monochrome Mac? (Score:3, Informative)
Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously? What's the point in that?
Photoshop was made for the needs of the publishing industry, not specifically photographers. Photographers would want precision and fidelity at every turn, which would definitely limit the program's usefulness, but printers just care that photographs get printed to the paper in a way that it still looks good. In 1990, most of newspapers were black and white. Heck, in 2010, a lot of newspapers are still black and white - printing in one ink is cheaper than printing in four.
If you want to process photographs for black and white newspaper, all you need is the ability to touch up greyscale images - or, you can scan in colour photographs, and process individual components, as long as the end result is represented in greyscale. Going from greyscale to B/W, you get dithering on screen, and you want halftones on final printed page.
Obviously there's much use for graphics editing on B/W, even when the application is obviously not as capable as the current programs.
Re:Photoshop without patent problems! (Score:1, Informative)
You're both right, kinda. 20 years from filing is the base term. But if an application was unreasonably delayed at the PTO, the term can be "adjusted" to compensate the applicant for the delay. Adjustment rules are complicated, but in practice it comes out to the old 17-year term.