Photoshop for OS X

MolGOLD writes: "Well, finally OS X users are getting their wish: Adobe has finally made good on their promise to bring native OS X support to their graphical applications. C|Net is running a story on the upcoming version of Photoshop, which will feature native OS X support. Now that Photoshop 7 will run natively under OS X, will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"

Comments

Killer App!

[SJ]

Wooo Hooo!!! Now I can write PHP scripts and colour-correct my CMYK pRon on the same machine! YAY for multitasking!

Re:Killer App!

[Ford Fulkerson]

Why stop there. You could write a PHP script that calls an AppleScript that colour-corrects your CMYK pr0n using Photoshop!

Big day for Apple

[ciryon]

I pretty sure they'll sell quite some more OS X packages now. I know many people have been waiting to upgrade from 9.x and Photoshop has been the main reason.

Ciryon

Re:Big day for Apple

[SilentChris]

" pretty sure they'll sell quite some more OS X packages now. I know many people have been waiting to upgrade from 9.x and Photoshop has been the main reason."

Probably because their primary user base continues to be artists and publishers, which is a bit disturbing. PC users don't upgrade their OS's every time one particular app gets upgraded (although it helps). I've seen users run Office XP on first editions of Windows 98.

Re:Big day for Apple

[Shadowlion]

PC users don't upgrade their OS's every time one particular app gets upgraded (although it helps).

To be fair, you're comparing apples and oranges. The last time the PC world saw such a tremendous shift in the capabilities of the base operating system was August 1995, when Windows 95 was released. After that, it's been incremenetal upgrades to the OS.

In late 1995, quite a lot of people were upgrading their applications (at least, the ones from MS) in order to take advantage of what Windows 95 offered. In this case, the particulars may be different, but the essence is the same: a lot of people want to upgrade their software to take advantage of what Mac OS X brings them.

Re:Big day for Apple

[KarmaPolice]

I pretty sure they'll sell quite some more OS X packages now. I know many people have been waiting to upgrade from 9.x and Photoshop has been the main reason.
Why would that be? OS X can run MacOS 9.x programs as well as MacOS 9.x - it just loads the classic inviroment like OS/2 loaded the windows 3.x program manager to run windows software. It's a bit slow to start but otherwise it works like a charm...

Re:Big day for Apple

[marmoset]

No, you are wrong.

The equivalent in the PC world was the shift to the Win32 API (debuted (really) in Windows 95) from 16-bit apps, which happened in 1995. The equivalent shift in the mac world is OSX with the Carbon and Cocoa API's, in 2001. What application running under Windows 3.1 are people still running without upgrading -- I'd like to know!

Re:Big day for Apple

[llamalicious]

PS on OSX is certainly a major reason, but there a few "critical" apps left to go. The ones I actually need before I can make the leap:

Dreamweaver UltraDev
Flash
Director

Re:Big day for Apple

[arhra]

No, it is more akin to the shift from the old DOS/9x codebase to the NT kernel. It's just that MS managed the transition better, since they provided an API (win32) that ran on both, and didn't confuse the situation with another API that ran only on the NT kernel. Apple could have had a similar transition using Carbon, which runs on both OS9 and OSX, if they'd planned ahead better, rather than fscking about with the whole Copland ("hm, no, maybe not, it's crap and we aren't getting anywhere..."), Rhapsody ("yes! a decent OS that actually WORKS! What do you mean people don't want to rewrite everything from scratch to target a new API that has precisely nothing in common with the old one?"), OSX ("OK, we'll clean up the old Mac Toolbox API, and port it to OSX, so you can target both the old OSes and the new one at the same time. We'll just not actually finalize the spec for the new api until after we've released the first version of the new OS!!"). If they'd come up with Carbon when they first bought Next, they could have rolled carbonlib out with OS9 (or maybe even 8.5 maybe? i'm not sure of the timeline), and got most apps targeting it relatively easily. Then when OSX was released, they could have had Photoshop et al running natively right from the start.

Re:Big day for Apple

[ciryon]

No, Windows XP is not very compatible with older Win apps. It has happened so many times now I seriously consider installing Windows 98 instead, for those crucial apps I really need. Or perhaps one would buy a VMWare licence so I can run them without rebooting from Linux. :-P

Ciryon

Re:Big day for Apple

[dbrutus]

Actually, artists who are heavily using Photoshop buy machines frequently to take advantage of better hardware speeds. It's just that they've been taking their machines and telling them to boot into OS 9 instead of OS X.

This holds back adoption of OS X because there's no compelling reason to invest in cocoa for such a small base and even carbon can be put off until you start getting requests for it. Well, now all those artists are going to start swapping over and that's going to make it easier to shift the programmers as well.

Upping the OS X adoption rate and moving forward with their competitive strategy is important for Apple because it provides unique abilities that you don't get on Windows boxen (like system wide spell checking for all Cocoa apps). It's going to be nice to be able to have functionality bought once and spread throughout your application irregardless of vendor. Apple wants us to get to that nice world fast because *that's* going to get a lot more boxes sold.

Remember, Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. They like OS X primarily because it's a driver of their hardware sales, and only secondarily because of the money they get directly from it.

They need to sell more boxes because if they get to a magic point, one very clear advantage will appear, PPC chips are smaller and cheaper to produce at like volumes. At that point, Macs will not only become the easier to use alternative, they will become the cheaper alternative as well.

Re:Big day for Apple

[piecewise]

Apple is absolutely a software company. iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, iPhoto, AppleWorks.

All *very* important to Apple's strategy. Without Apple's groundbreaking software, the hardware sales would be hurt quite a bit.

My neighbors bought iMacs for the house. They don't care about Photoshop. What sold them was the idea of iMovie and iTunes. That's what sells a ton of people.

Apple's a 60/40 hardware-software company, I'd say.

Re:Big day for Apple

[rizzy]

because most mac users *hate* that "slow start".

the thought process is basically "why would i run photoshop in os x under emulation [ yes, that's the mindset] when i can run it natively under os 9?".

Re:Big day for Apple

[TotallyUseless]

Yes, the main point of the excellent Apple software is to generate more hardware sales. This is of course Apple's biggest source of revenue. They are a hardware company because they get most of their revenue from new machine sales, but they are also a software company because those nice new machines would be nothing without the excellent Apple software.
Apple makes great hardware, then develops software which encourages people to go out and get that hardware. I think this is a win-win situation. Apple is motivated to make top of the line software, much of which they release for free... and we are motivated to buy new machines. For some people it is still a better idea to stick with their old trusty machines they have had a few years, but for those of us that are interested in burning our own movies and such, Apple makes it worth it to be a customer

Re:Big day for Apple

[TotallyUseless]

but.... the old photshop is still compatible... it runs in the Classic compatability layer, and quite well I might add. If you are so inclined, you could keep running the classic version of photoshop, presumably forever. How is that a lack of compatability? The problem with photoshop wasn't that people couldn't run the old one, it was that they wanted the native version. No on HAS to buy this new version of photoshop, as you seem to imply. Same with Office and countless other apps. If people are happy running them OS9 style then more power to them

Re:Big day for Apple

[thrig]

What application running under Windows 3.1 are people still running without upgrading -- I'd like to know!

In my experience, lots of Medical devices are still running off of Windows 3, DOS 6.22, or similar. Probably due to the computer being bundled with the $50,000+ device

Luckily, newer devices come with Windows NT and a seething mass of Oracle, Java, and homegrown code. The software corrupts itself every month or so, and doesnt work if you put a password on the Administrator account.

So as far as Microsoft OS controlled devices go, I prefer ones running on older operating systems to dumb to be cracked.

Re:Big day for Apple

[SilentChris]

"My neighbors bought iMacs for the house. They don't care about Photoshop. What sold them was the idea of iMovie and iTunes. That's what sells a ton of people."

Actually, I know certain average users who won't buy Apple machines today because they think they're primarily for video editing, something they're simply not interested in. Most users still (and a few years ago, when the iMac became a hit) want decent Internet. I know, this flies in the face of most internet appliance sales, but the predominant thing I hear is "I want to do word processing, a few games, and get on the net".

Re:Big day for Apple

[Lars T.]

Yeah, PC users only upgrade their OS when somebody discovers a new security "feature" and a new SP comes out to fix it, or when Linus made a boo-boo and a new Kernel gets released to fix it. They don't wait for an app to actually use the new features of that new OS.

Re:Big day for Apple

[SilentChris]

"How many people do you see running Office XP on a Windows 3.1 machine."

Well, none actually. But that's because Microsoft only supports it back to Windows 98 (Why? Who knows. Probably it uses some kind of IE layer that came with IE 4).

"98 to XP or 2k or NT might be an architectual change, but it's the same application API so you better hope that will work, but then again 95 has the same API and MS has broken compatibility with 95 all over the board."

See above. Actually, think the changes from the 9x series to NT are pretty drastic, and represent a positive step for Microsoft (the more applications I can run without hosing my system, the better). The API may be similar, but many of the underlying file system and process creating calls are completely rewritten. The fact that most 9x programs (which relied on relatively open system restraints where they had pretty much free reign to do anything) run on the NT protected model with little modification at the front end is kind of amazing.

Re:Big day for Apple

[overunderunderdone]

Apple is absolutely a software company. iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, iPhoto, AppleWorks...

Apple's a 60/40 hardware-software company, I'd say.

In terms of money its more like 91/9 hardware-software (At least for this last quarter - $114 Million software revenue; $1.261 Billion hardware revenue) In terms of effort you may be right but that 40% effot in software is done to drive that 90% in hardware revenue.

Most of the software is given away for free with a hardware purchase. Even the software they sell is part of a strategy to sell hardware. Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, etc are intended to be "Killer Apps" that drive hardware sales in a particular niche market. The 9% of revenues is just a nice bonus. The only software that doesn't fit this bill (though it used to) is Filemaker, which for that reason is not part of Apple but was spun off as a subsidiary.

What OS? I dodn't catch it...

[Nailer]

Photoshop for OS X
[OS X (Apple)] Posted by michael on Sun February 24, 06:21 AM
from the brighter-colors-and-whiter-whites dept.
MolGOLD writes: "Well, finally OS X users are getting their wish: Adobe has finally made good on their promise to bring native OS X support to their graphical applications. C|Net is running a story on the upcoming version of Photoshop, which will feature native OS X support. Now that Photoshop 7 will run natively under OS X, will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"

NO

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been said a hundred times. The problem you'd encounter when porting an application from OS X to *ix is that OS X apps use Cocoa, which doesn't exist for your fave open source OS. Some years ago Photoshop (3.0) was ported to Irix using a MacOS->motif toolkin. It sucked ass. You won't see any OS X app running on *ix/X anytime soon.

Re:NO

[D_Fresh]

The problem you'd encounter when porting an application from OS X to *ix is that OS X apps use Cocoa, which doesn't exist for your fave open source OS.

Just because an app runs in OS X doesn't mean it's automatically Cocoa - most apps ported from OS 9 to X use Carbon, which, while it can still be a task, takes nowhere near the time it would take to port to Cocoa.

You won't see any OS X app running on *ix/X anytime soon.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if you are proved wrong within a year. With OS X infiltrating the hardcore *ix crowd, it's only a matter of time before someone climbs the Carbon learning curve and ports some cool stuff over. I suggest you educate yourself a little on the Carbon/Cocoa difference before you go batting others down.

Re:NO

[legis]

> The problem you'd encounter when porting an application from OS X to *ix is that OS X apps use Cocoa,
> which doesn't exist for your fave open source OS.

I disagree, it should be easy once the GUI-kit of GNUstep is complete which should be later on this year.

Re:NO

[jcr]

Just because an app runs in OS X doesn't mean it's automatically Cocoa - most apps ported from OS 9 to X use Carbon, which, while it can still be a task, takes nowhere near the time it would take to port to Cocoa.

Actually, this isn't true in all cases. OS 9 apps tend to carry around a whole lot of code that becomes redundant in Cocoa. I've seen cases where a Cocoa re-write was done in less time than was originally planned for a Carbon port.

As for the availability of Cocoa on other platforms, check out www.gnustep.org. They're making amazing progress for being basically un-funded.

-jcr

to clear up some misconceptions

[Hadlock]

just b/c it's ported to os x, doesn't mean you can automatically port it to linux, or any other variant. photoshop 7 will be run on top of aqua, which in turn runs on top of darwin, among other things. apple has a great explination on their http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/ os x site. in neat aquazied-graphics even.

porting photoshop 7 to linux/KDE/ect would be about as easy as porting age of empires w/o wine. did i miss anything? i hope that clears up alot of porting questions

Re:Is this really news?

[SJ]

Trying not to be flamebait, but could you please show me a Free Software project in the same category as Photoshop (read, Graphics app) that even come close to matching PS's feature set and usability. And No... GIMP isn't even in the same league as Photoshop. I have tried both and speak from experience. Thats not to say GIMP isn't a good program, because it is.

I understand that you value free software, and for good reason. But Photoshop is THE app for OSX, as far as Apple's core graphics market is concerned.

Give please at least give credit where credit is due.

It's a great application

[Anonymous Coward]

I've played with it at work for about 15 minutes, they beta test, and it's easily as good as inn OS 9. They get an A.

other neat features

[mashy]

besides being OS X native, photoshop 7's text engine is gonna have spell check! whoo hoo!


<offtopic> just love the aqua-like slashdot logo on apple.slashdot.org</offtopic>

Re:other neat features

[Knobby]

People don't do word processing per se, but if you're laying out a fairly complex advertisment with a half dozen lines of test, wouldn't it be nice to run a spellchecker over it quickly to make sure all's well?.. It's one of a handful of tools that Apple has included in the OS as a service and it's nice that companies are taking advantage of them..

Re:other neat features

[MaxVlast]

I use a browser written in Cocoa (OmniWeb.) Since it uses the Cocoa text objects, I get ten years of work on interoperability (including a modular spell-checking system) for free. It's convenient, automatic, and gets the job done without me worrying about it.

How refreshing.

Re:other neat features

[bay43270]

I don't understand the spell check. Do people do wordprossesing in PS? I never really understood this attitude. Every computer program should have access to spell checking. Why should I have to open word and copy/paste text into it every time I want to post on /.? I suggested adding spellchecking to my favorite Java IDE recently, and everyone thought I was joking. I just want it to check spelling in my Javadoc comments... how hard is that? Its funny, how even (especially) the die-hard geeks, still don't understand that no human should have to do extra work that the computer is capable of doing on its own.

Re:Perfect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I tickle at the thought of starting Photoshop from the command line. =) You can already do it- run "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop 5.0\Photoshp.exe"

...and there was much rejoicing.

[solios]

I use computers for one thing only: content creation. This includes Photoshop, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Fireworks... essentially, media creation and manipulation. I've tried every toy I can get my hands on, and have come to the conclusion that what works best for me is the Adobe and Macromedia suites on a Macintosh.

UNIX/Linux/BSD is neato, but I failed math, suck at logic, and can't grep to save my life. I'd like to play around with it and learn it, but I have no real reason to- and my experience with Free Software has been pretty nasty- I bitch about nonexistant intallers, suck-ass window managers, poor hardware support, and I'm told "FIX IT YOURSELF!"... and as a non programmer, I'd rather stick with something that already works for me to begin with.

Apple has brought UNIX to the desktop. Now I can run all of my happy fun day to day tasks and learn the bash (well, ZSH), discover the joys of suing to root and doing a kill 0 to see what happens, and generally have the best of both worlds. I see this as being rather relevant, really- if the company known for making "idiot friendly" machines can make UNIX useable for an idiot (or those of us that know a few lines of HTML, Lingo and BASIC)...and the companies that support that company port their apps.... then what the hell is keeping the rest of the world from following suit? Hmm?

Hell. With OS X, I can run Apache, X-11 apps, Gimp, Photoshop, Maya, Combustion, Quake.... dear gods, it can do absolutely EVERYTHING I NEED. I only need to run ONE OS for all of my art geek and computer geek needs. Hot damn. THAT is relevant.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[SteveM]

Again - what's the point?

The point is the right tool for the job.

As you clearly point out in your post, "... I like being able to choose my own processor and motherboard and then the case I want to put it in...", you have a much higher comfort level with computer technology then does Solios.

Thus the right tool is a Mac because that is what works for him/her.

It is not clear if you have ever used a Mac for any length of time. And your comment, "... and I'm proud to say not one is a Mac ..." makes clear your anti-Mac bias. So despite claims to the contrary it would appear that you avoid Macs not because you don't see the point but because you don't like Macs.

I don't know how many computers there are in a bunch. I have four on my home network. Two Macs and two PCs. I run Mac OS (9 and X) apps, Linux apps, Windows apps, Darwin apps, and even the occasional Palm app (via an emulator).

My prefered system is my TiBook running OS X which also allows me to run OS 9 and Darwin apps. I've installed VPC on it and can run Windows apps as well (albeit slowly).

For me the TiBook is the right tool for the job. And as I said above, that is the point.

Steve M

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[fferreres]

I think your point is valid. And as you can see, the problem is not Unix itself but something really deeper.

Companies, in general, want NOT to release their source code.

Companies do like people that are willing to PAY for software (as in advanced cash).

Desktop users want computers where programs INSTALL easily.

Desktop users want computers where hardware configuration is TRIVIAL

And that's why OSX is perfect for you. It addresses your needs. Of course, it doesn't address the need of people that need freedom and flexibility for EVERYTHING that runs under their computers. I don't use Linux because GIMP is better than Photoshop, i use it because GIMP has what i need and i know that GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop.

In some way, i think i use Linux because i feel i'm on the right side. Microsoft used my money to lock me into their OS and after doing that, all my money started funding them so they could lock me into more of their stuff (like Office). I don't like that and many companies are starting to feel this way too.

Note: this is only my opinion. Please disregard it completelly if you don't agree. It's ok and i understand it.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[mrpull]

Now I can run all of my happy fun day to day tasks and learn the bash (well, ZSH),

If you prefer to use the bash shell (as I do) in OSX point your browser here.

mr.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[schvenk]

I'll echo an earlier response in pointing out that your mind already seems quite made up, between being proud of not owning a Mac and wondering why the story is slashdot-worthy. (Answer: Because it's news about the computer industry, like many other posts on slashdot.)

And if you absolutely must build your own PC, then no, don't get a Mac. If, on the other hand, you'd like an OS that lets you perform similar configuration at the software level, but still runs major consumer apps, OS X is a great choice.

Beyond that, when you're working in Photoshop or Word, you're not gonna notice a whole lot of significant differences between platforms. I share the view of a lot of Mac users that the user experience is better in a number of ways, but if you're happy with your Windows machines, no, there's probably no hugely compelling reason to switch, just as there's no real reason to be quite as anti-Mac as you seem to be.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[MicroBerto]

Posts like this REALLY make me want OS X. And i would get it and use it!

That is... if I didn't have to pay for their hardware.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[mikemcc]

You write, "I truly cannot understand what's so great about Macs." Then you state, "...there are only two [computers] I use regularly:" a Linux server and a win2K/winXP/linux desktop.

You should be able to answer your own question. You use an operating system (Linux) in preference to other options for a particular task (as a server) because you think it's best for that task. For every task you can think of, there is probably an os/app combination that you feel will be the best environment for you to accomplish that task.

Many people believe that the Macintosh is the best platform for a set of tasks. You don't claim to have used a Macintosh, or benefitted from the graphics friendly technology which is baked into that OS, yet you suggest that you're correct and they're wrong.

Perhaps the work that you're producing on a Win32 machine is better than that of your coworkers. How much of that is because of the operating system involved? Perhaps the answer for you is "none," and since the OS doesn't help you on your current platform, you assert that it won't be a factor on other platforms.

But what if, after the unavoidable learning curve of a new platform, you discovered that you were 10% more productive on a Macintosh, because of the design and technology of the OS? What if it were only 5%, or the improvement were as great at 15%? What is 10% more time worth to you?

You don't use a Windows server. Why not? Isn't the windows server Good Enough? Or did you want the Best Available Option? Did you arrive at that opinion by reading trade magazines? By listening to your coworkers? Or by direct experimentation and observation?

If you're using your Windows desktop and Win32 ports of your preferred applications because they're Good Enough, that's your prerogative, but at least recognize your stance. But if you are interesting in using the best tool for the job, it is self-limiting for you to dismiss the Mactinosh without seriously exploring the platform.

Your final two questions:
"what's the point?" and
"why is this story even slashdot worthy?"
should also be immediately obvious. Because the availability of Photoshop for Mac OS X will go a long way toward making or breaking the short term success of Mac OS X. Photoshop dominates its market, and its not a trvial market. This release will directly lead to increased sales for both Apple and Photoshop. In a time when many tech companies are struggling, Apple and Photoshop will post numbers that are better than their neighbors. This will translate into increased positive media attention, which will create a more receptive management, which will lead to more OS X Macs in your office.

One last question:
Why is it a source of pride that none of your home computers is an Apple?

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[Ryan Amos]

Sorry, this is probably a bit offtopic.. but it really irks me how people compare GIMP and Photoshop. GIMP is a cool program, don't get me wrong, but if you're doing any sort of serious image manipulation, it's not even close to Photoshop. There's a reason that Photoshop is the only program that anyone professionally considers for graphics manipulation.

Sure, GIMP is about as good as Photoshop 3.0. But keep in mind that Photoshop 3.0 was released about 7 or 8 years ago. GIMP is great if you're just going to stick with web graphics, but if you ever have to do any print quality stuff, you'll see why the Adobe line of software is so popular. Where Photoshop really starts to kick ass is with large files (>200 MB, yes, this size files are common, many people work with them on a daily basis.) GIMP would slow to an unusable crawl just trying to render the 15 or so layers, but Photoshop is so highly optimized that it doesn't even flinch. In fact, the main speed bottleneck in Photoshop is the hard drive, not the program. Photoshop is one of the few expensive pieces of software that I consider worth the price.

The moral of this story is that while yes, GIMP is sufficient for people's needs (read: web site graphics, basic file resizing type things, etc,) it's not in the same ballpark as Photoshop. It's not even playing the same game, and it's ludicrous to say that "GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop." If you think that, you've never really used Photoshop.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[q-soe]

Actually i agree - i would love a mac myself, but at australian prices i cannot ever hope to afford it.

www.apple.com.au\store

Summary
800MHz PowerPC G4
256MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
40GB Ultra ATA - 7200rpm
CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500 dual
56K internal modem

$3695 PLUS monitor

This is a machine with zip or removable drive (a must have for my needs)

ADD 256MB ram - $252 (why is thi so dear?)
Bring the HDD up to the same as my PC (80gb) $231
Add a monitor - 17" cheapest $2299 (gues what YOU cannot buy a G3 from them with a CRT only a flatscreen)
Zip Drive $231
I want a DVD like my PC - $231 (superdrive not available in this box)

Our 'Cheap' mac is now Subtotal $6,929.00

Thats exactly 3 times the cost of MY 1.5gb PC and i used name brand gear (motherboards etc) to build it.

A notebook

yes a notebook i hear you say

OK on my desk i have a Dell Latitude C600 with 80gb HDD,512mb ram, Nvidia Video Card, Wireless 100mb network, CDRW/DVD, 15.1 screen etc. The apple i need to match it is a G4

So lets go entry level.

Summary
256MB SDRAM - 1 SO DIMM
550MHz PowerPC G4 @ 100MHz - 16MB VRAM
20GB Ultra ATA drive
15.2-inch TFT display
Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW)
Gigabit Ethernet
56K internal modem
1 FireWire 2 USB ports
Mac OS 9 boot-up (Mac OS X included)

Subtotal $5,495.00

Add RAM - $242
Add HDD (only goes to 48gb) $935
Add Air Port - $199

Subtotal $6,871.00

I mean MY dell cost $5100 and it was DEAR.\

I love Apple - i supported them for 2 years in advertising and would kill for one but at these prices i couldnt afford the badge - and thats BEFORE $3500 for a copy of photoshop.

Re:...and there was much rejoicing.

[Explo]

's not even playing the same game, and it's ludicrous to say that "GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop." If you think that, you've never really used Photoshop.

It's ludicrous to say that it's impossible. Not extremely probable, but it's not realistic to say that it can't happen in any case ever.

Re:weird idea maybe

[sconest]

I can't tell if this new PhotoShop is a carbon app or cocoa app from the tiny screenshot at c|Net.

I'd say carbon since it still runs on Mac OS9

More in-depth view at MacCentral

[JimRay]

MacCentral is running a much more in-depth article, complete with screenshots you can actually see. Also included are a hands-on review and some intelligent commentary missing from the very PC-centric C|Net.

Macromedia & OSX

[Brento]

will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"

I bet you'll see a press release from Macromedia soon, but that'll be it for a while. They're behind schedule releasing Dreamweaver 5 and Ultradev 5, which is rumored to support dot-Net, and they've gotten to the point where they're just putting out open-ended Microsoft-style vaporware press releases instead.

Not to disrespect Mac folks, but I bet the profit involved in putting out Ultradev 5 with dot-Net authoring will result in a lot more sales than Dreamweaver in native OSX, but of course, that's just my betting. Then again, maybe this is the reason DW/UD5 is so behind schedule - maybe they're trying to release everything at once, including native OSX support and dot-Net authoring. I'm getting to the point where I wouldn't accept anything less when this thing finally comes out.

Re:Macromedia & OSX

[JasonOrrill]

Not to disrespect Mac folks, but I bet the profit involved in putting out Ultradev 5 with dot-Net authoring will result in a lot more sales than Dreamweaver in native OSX

That may be true, but they've also got to worry about the potential of lost sales. At the moment I'm using Dreamweaver 3 in Classic mode, which works fine but as more and more apps run native it becomes increasingly painful to have to do that. If GoLive is native before Dreamweaver, I may well consider switching.

As a side note, it's not just OS X support that is lacking. Full OS X support still isn't here yet. I just upgraded to Freehand 10 and have been dismayed to learn that pressure-sensitivity for my Wacom tablet isn't supported yet with it. So it's back to Freehand 9 in Classic for that, or look to Illustrator, which I hear does support it.

Re:Macromedia & OSX

[ahfoo]

Personally I think the main reason Microsoft doesn't compete with Macromedia is largely because they are already one and the same company from a management perspective.
They'll devote a few people to Mac stuff now and then --you know throw a bone to the Mac people-- but for a company that started out Mac, their efforts are pretty lame especially when you get into the top of their higher level tools like Director and Authorware. It's pathetic that Authorware has become almost totally MS Windows(TM) focused to the point that you have to do your design work in Windows even if you're going to build your project with a Mac runtime if you plan on using one of the more recent versions of the product.
From what I've gotten off their corporate news server, that's the way THEY like it. They take a rather dismissive view of Mac in their Director/Authorware discussion groups and boy don't you even mention Linux unless you want to get all these communist stereotypes laid on ya. I wouldn't hold my breath for innovation from Macromedia on the Mac despite the similarity in the names and the former association that was implied by that connection.
The only solution is a decent icon/flow control development package for Linux, but we're still a long way from that. Until then, Macromedia is the solution to Microsoft's problems, not Mac's or Linux's.

Re:Macromedia & OSX

[Lysander Luddite]

" Not to disrespect Mac folks, but I bet the profit involved in putting out Ultradev 5 with dot-Net authoring will result in a lot more sales than Dreamweaver in native OSX, but of course, that's just my betting."

You're probably right. But, OSX has been out almost a year. While not finished, it is further along than dot net, so why not work on that until dot net gets figured out?

Or are you saying that dot net features of UltraDev/Dreamweaver won't be on the Mac?

Re:Why hurry?

[Beetjebrak]

Adobe's market is HUGE in the apple section, the Wintel market for their products pales in comparison. Practically every publishing shop in the world runs on Apple hardware using Adobe and Quark apps. So yes they're in a hurry. It's their biggest market.

Re:Is this really news?

[Penrod Pooch]

Because OSX is like a really, really cool toy, like. And 'round here we really, really, like cool toys. It is much more important than freedom because you can't use freedom as a really, really cool toy.

Therefore we choose to ignore the proprietary nature of OSX and Photoshop, we choose to ignore that Apple threatend to sue people who make themes that looked like OSX and we choose to ignore that Adobe invoked the DMCA to have Dimitry Sklyarov arrested because apple and adobe makes really, really cool toys. And nothing is more important to us slashdot-dwellers than really, really cool toys.

Re:porting with gnustep

[legis]

> I am pretty sure GNUStep is WAY out of date with Cocoa. I don't think it would be an easy task to update it either.

No, GNUstep actually follows the Cocoa API very closely. One of its goals is easy porting of Cocoa and GNUstep apps.

It screams ...

[d0n quix0te]

It is bloody fast on OS X. Beats the hell out of OS 9 as far as speed is concerned. And of course it toasts the XP version by a large margin. Expect Steve to do a OS 9/ OS X/ XP bake-off at MacWorld Tokyo.

Looks like the threading model and the new disk drivers have made a huge difference.. And of course better memory management

Here's a snippet from another BB.

Anyhow, I recently had made available to me a 'future copy' of PS running on X natively. The 'carbon' version that comes after 6.0. I have been using PS 6 on XP and thought things were slower so i did some testing. If you are interested in the results, here they are:

The systems:

The Mac-
OSX 10.1.3
PowerMac G4 'Sawtooth' 533 Dual Proc.
768MB PC133, 40GB DiamondMax 7200rpm
nVidia GF2 MX w/32mb

The PC
Win XP
Athlon XP 1800+
512MB 266DDR, 40GB DiamondMax 7200rpm
GF3 Ti200 w/64MB DDR
(the GF3 is overclocked and runs @ Ti500 speeds)

Photoshop tests

MacAddict actions and 15mb Steve Jobs.tiff from the 03/98 Mag cd

results:

Beige G3/266: 2min 48sec (reference from Mag)

PS 6.0 -- Win XP: 36.5 seconds
PS 6.0 -- Classic 9.2.2 24.5 seconds
PS 7.0b -- OSX 10.1.3 12.5 seconds

I am gonna be running more items in other programs, but i could not believe the result and the difference.

....

This isn't scientific test, of course. FWIW

Re:It screams ...

[Waffle Iron]

Here we go again. With this new release the Mac people are going to be once again touting the same old obscure algorithm in Photoshop that is custom tuned for the bizzare custom coprocessing unit in their 12MHz processors. They will try to extrapolate that to the general case to prove that Macs are always faster than PCs.

PC users know better though. The truth is that the only valid metric of computer performance is Quake III frames per second. :-)

Re:It screams ...

[sg3000]

> touting the same old obscure algorithm in Photoshop
> PC users know better though. The truth is that the only
> valid metric of computer performance is Quake III frames per second. :-)

As soon as Mac users can figure out how to make money playing Quake III as opposed to using Photoshop, I'm sure they'll be willing to switch their performance metrics.

Re:It screams ...

[Andy_R]

"bizzare custom coprocessing unit in their 12MHz processors"

umm, I think you're mixing up your Amiga fanatics with your Mac fanatics here?

Re:It screams ...

[Waffle Iron]

As soon as Mac users can figure out how to make money playing Quake III as opposed to using Photoshop, I'm sure they'll be willing to switch their performance metrics.

That's easy. There is no shortage of positions where you can make money playing Quake III. Just find a company with a project that has no clear direction and poor management.There are countless thousands of these situations available at any given time.

I've seen highly paid engineers go for months at a time doing nothing but playing Quake and surfing the web. These positions don't tend to last that long, though, so you'd have to be prepared to move arouind a bit.

It also helps to find a group with a good technician/sysadmin who orders workstations outfitted with the right "goodies".

Re:It screams ...

[renoX]

Your test is interesting, but it miss one major component: $$!

How much does each configuration cost?

No, I'm not trolling I'm just curious..

Re:It screams ...

[Bodrius]

Money? You post on slashdot and you want to make money?

Everyone here knows that you can only save the world by playing Quake and giving free broadband to everyone in Angola.

Why would you want to make money?

Are you with the MPAA/RIAA or something?

Not quite

[stux]

having played with PS betas, I'm pretty confident in saying that Adobe Photoshop 7 for OSX is a Carbon application.

All this means is that its linked to the Carbonlib (think share library)

rather than the Cocoa frameworks.

They're both native, its just that Cocoa apps get more features for free from the OS, which means they implement more of the standard OSX features.

Carbon apps can implement just as many of those features... but tend not to because it takes a lot of work to implement them (for instance, BBEdit supports the Services menu)

Photoshop will probably implement a lot of the Cocoa features even though its a Carbon app, simply because Adobe has the resources to do this (Just like Microsoft)

Another serious difference is that Cocoa can only currently be targetted via Objective C (ObjC++ too), Java and AppleScript (this is another major reason to use Carbon for Photoshop.

And thats about it.

Re:Eh Eh, you cant

[moof1138]

You cannot "run" them directly from the Terminal, but there are a few tricks that you can use to control them from the Terminal a little less directly. As was mentioned above you can use the 'open' command to launch a GUI app. Beyond that if the app is scriptable to do what you want you can use 'osascript' and its brethren to execute AppleScript commands for the command line (making it possible to use shell/Perl scripts to automate functions of GUI apps). 'apropos osa' will find you all the relevant commands, which have man pages. Photoshop in the past was very scriptable, so as long as they have maintained this, you should be able to write shell and perl scripts that take advantage of this, or fire off oneliners in the shell. Since you are using a shell command to execute an applescript it might be a little more complicated in a oneliner than just selecting something from a menu or clicking a button or two. But automating a task in a script could be more worthwhile since you can perform repetitive tasks.

Re:Someone tell me...

[RussGarrett]

One word: Plugins.

There's very little that distinguishes the base image-editing capability of Photoshop ($600) from Paint Shop Pro ($99) and the GIMP ($0). The main differences being good CYMK and colour-matching support (and, personally, I find the GIMP's interface an absolute pain to use).

The range of different Photoshop plugins is what makes it what it is, and nobody's managed to beat it yet.

Upcoming.

[saintlupus]

Well, finally OS X users are getting their wish: Adobe has finally made good on their promise to bring native OS X support to their graphical applications. C|Net is running a story on the upcoming version of Photoshop

It's been upcoming for months. I'll believe it when I can get my mitts on a copy from the Apple Store.

Of course, the way things are going, I'll be able to get that new G4 Amiga first.

--saint

Contention.

[saintlupus]

I'm constantly told that Macs are best for contention creation

Meaning that mentioning Macs is the best way to start a flame war?

Typo, or clever pun? You be the judge.

--saint

Pantone

[paugq]

Pantone is one of the things Gimp will NEVER have. Pantone is a patented technology and requires the Gimp community to pay them $$$ if they want to implement it.

Re:Pantone

[MaxVlast]

That's one of the things I really miss from NEXTSTEP. NeXT licensed Pantone for the syste-wide color picker. For those who don't know, NeXT machines (and operating systems) had a unified color system with a system-wide color picker and tools. I could pick Pantone colors by name/number in any app and know that the colors I was getting would be standardized and output properly. _That_ was a good idea, and it was just one of countless little details that make NEXTSTEP the most user-conscious OS I have ever used. Everywhere you turn, there is a little convenience (where you would expect, but not think of) that makes life just slightly easier for the user. Amazing, really.

Re:Pantone

[jcr]

Pantone numbers were far more important in the days before ColorSync.

OS X does have named color spaces though, so it would be possible for Pantone or anyone else to offer their color libraries up on OS X.

-jcr

Re:Someone tell me...

[marmoset]

So if I were to consider Photoshop, what would it give me over Gimp?

1. Live CMYK editing (essential for real-world print publishing)

2. Font handling well beyond anything available within XFree86

3. Tight integration with tools like Illustrator (e.g. being able to specify vector masks using Illustrator's sophisticated Bezier tools and use them directly in Photoshop) and inDesign.

4. Peerless Postscript/PDF integration (i.e. produce Postscript that will actually rip on a professional imagesetter and produce usable output on the first try, instead of wasting hundreds/thousands of bucks on trial and error while your client stands around angrily looking at their watch)

5. Best of breed built-in algorithms for things like scaling, color correction, etc.

6. Polish.

I've used the Gimp, and I'm impressed by what it can do, but in a past life I also worked in a graphic arts shop, and I cannot stress enough the importance of some of the above items (particularly 1 and 4) in real-world paying applications.

If all you're doing is touching up vacation snaps, then Photoshop's big pricetag probably isn't worth it to you, but if you're trying to make a living pushing pixels, no other app comes close, and the Gimp (as cool as it is) isn't even in the ballpark.

Adobe vs. Corel

[InsaneCreator]

Why is it such a big news that Adobe finally decided to write a native version of Photoshop for OSX, but noone ever mentioned that Corel's Draw and PhotoPaint have been available for OSX quite some time now. Doesn't anyone use them any more or is everyone preocupied with Gimp vs. Photoshop flamewar?

Re:Adobe vs. Corel

[sg3000]

> but no one ever mentioned that Corel's Draw and
> PhotoPaint have been available for OSX quite
> some time now

And Macromedia's vector graphics application FreeHand has been available for almost a year. It has a few quirks in it, so it's clear that they rushed it out, but it was nice to have a native professional-grade vector graphics app available so soon after the OS X launch.

Re:Adobe vs. Corel

[pressman]

What?! A crash prone, buggy version of Freehand?!?! The minds reels!

Re:Adobe vs. Corel

[overunderunderdone]

Why is it such a big news that Adobe finally decided to write a native version of Photoshop for OSX, but noone ever mentioned that Corel's Draw and PhotoPaint have been available for OSX quite some time now.

Because the professional graphics market that is key to Apple's success makes their living using Photoshop and was not even aware that Corel made a 'competing' product.

Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just looking at the feature set of the new Photoshop 7 for OSX on adobe's site. I didn't really see anything too groundbreaking there, maybe it will really help some people. It is as follows:

• File Browser to visually browse and retrieve images
• Healing Brush to effortlessly remove artifacts such as dust, scratches, blemishes, and wrinkles while preserving shading, lighting, and texture
• Web output enhancements to easily apply transparency or partial transparency to Web page elements, including seamless edges that blend into any Web background
• Single, enhanced Rollover palette to manage Web page rollovers, animations, and image maps more easily
• New "selected" rollover state for creating more sophisticated Web site navigation bars without hand-coding
• Customizable workspace for saving the arrangement of palettes and settings for tools, and instant access to a personalized Photoshop desktop
• New Auto Color Command for reliable color correction
• New Painting Engine to simulate traditional painting techniques
• Pattern Maker plug-in to create realistic or abstract patterns such as grass, rocks, and sand simply by selecting a section of an image
• Enhanced Liquify (distorting) tool to allow you to view other layers, zoom, pan, and undo multiple steps -- even save custom meshes and apply them to other files

I don't know about the rest of the community, but while these features will be nice (I guess) the feature I REALLY wanted was running natively on OSX. And that has taken some time for Adobe to deliver.

When OSX came out, everyone asked "Great, when do we get Photoshop to run natively" Adobe's response was "We're not going to change our software release schedule, just because Apple has released a new OS."

Which from a business perspective seems a little weird, why not do a OSX port and charge people for it. There would be no shortage of customers willing to pay.

They chose not to. Ok fine but it seems like quite a long time ago, especially since a year ago, (don't remember, maybe it was 2 years ago) they showed an alpha version of PS 6 running at WWDC, that had been ported to OSX by one of the project managers. One person! And a self-admitted "average" coder. Said it took him a couple of weekends.

I can only guess that there was a heck of a lot of more work to do to create a good carbon app than Apple and Adobe originally led us to believe. Or maybe an earlire release just didn't fit Adobe's financial schedule.

Also of note. Lately Adobe has gotten in this bad habit of "announcing" new software, but not actually having it available, and then slipping on that date as well. See Adobe GoLive as an example. All kinds of press about it's release, a lot of users thinking its available for immediate purchase and use. Not the case though, still not shipping yet. Hopefully Photoshop will not take a similar course. They are saying April as of now.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[MacOSXHead]

This is just my guess as a long time Mac developer. It is likely that Photoshop contained lots of 68k assembly code that had to be rewritten for PPC. Photoshop was written back when you had to squeeze every bit of processing power out of the Mac. While this could work on Mac OS 9 and earlier (Mac OS 9 has a great 68k emulator), this needed to be changed for OS X.

You are wrong about the APIs. The vast majority of APIs still exist in Carbon. It is true there are preferred APIs (e.g Event Handling) that are new. The old APIs are at least 80% intact and native to OS X. This is the whole purpose to Carbon.

Adopting the new event model and porting 68k assembly code would have taken some time in an application as complex as Photoshop.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Chris Johnson]

Because in order to SELL a new version they've got to be coming up with new 'features' to do new and different things.

Unfortunately for them, Photoshop has been damned near utterly feature complete for fine-arts and professional prepress work since what, version 3? I use version 4, which is faintly less stable but includes layers and the layers palette- and that includes ALL the high-end stuff like CMYK work, LAB colorspace for conversions, duotones/tritones/quadtones, the full gamut of overlay/brush modes: all the deep stuff.

It's a hell of a lot like, say, GCC versus some version of Visual Basic that keeps coming out with more pre-built controls: GCC is more 'pro level' but is a working environment way beyond a list of 'features' that it can do. Hell, in Photoshop 4 you could say there are no 'framing' features, you know, those 'make a button for your web page' things that put your image on a bevel or some other embossing effect? Yet through layers, layer position offsets, overlay modes and channel operations you automatically have ALL POSSIBLE 'framing' results, and it's down to how you use them, producing a creative work rather than running some plugin...

Which brings us right back to the original question: once they've sold that, and sold it under a license that allows people to use their copy forever without it expiring, how do they expect to sell it over again? The answer is convenience features, and _supplying_ those 'plugins' so people, given the opportunity for complete flexibility, can get lazy and quit bothering.

Finally, Adobe's actual programming is not that bad for a proprietary software vendor- so they're stuck trying to overcomplicate their code by building in all sorts of 'convenience' short cuts and feature after feature, but they are still making an effort to not crash like a Microsoft program. And that answers your question: they probably could have coded up a version of Photoshop 4 for OSX without too much heartache, but they felt a need to both do that and to up the feature list enough to compel upgrades.

Interestingly this is not confined solely to proprietary guys. I'm facing a very similar situation with "Mastering Tools". As I keep pursuing newer versions (this is a GPLed project, not for pay) I keep coming up with new variations on dithers, new controls for tone shaping etc. and the temptation is to include everything- making the program bloated and unwieldy. Instead I've done some pruning- but I definitely feel the desire to be able to say 'hey, NEW thing! Check out the new thing you can do now!'. If I do, can you imagine how much more pressure the Adobe guys feel?

What about TIFFany

[skribble]

Caffine Software sells TIFFany which very well could be every bit as good as Photoshop. This is actually a cocoa app that was originally designed for OpenStep. On the plus side it's very powerful and very different. On the minus side it's pretty expensive (They really should offer a $149 competitive upgrade from Photoshop!) and it's very different.

Anyway... I'll probably end up with Photoshop (I've been using it since Version 2.5). But there are options for OS X. (And I'm sorry, but GIMP is not an option for professional photo editing... It's a step above most graphics software, but it's not Photoshop or TIFFany. (I actually think people who use and like GIMP on OS X should really download TIFFany3 Trial, I think they'll be pleasantly supprised).

Re:What about TIFFany

[freshmkr]

A quick note for those of you with old NeXT boxes or NEXTSTEP/OpenStep on your PC or workstation: it looks like Caffeine is offering licenses for the older version of TIFFany for free. Check out http://www.caffeinesoft.com/pricing.htm (scroll down to the bottom third of the page).

--Tom

Re:wonderful...

[nycdewd]

as the poster remarked in his reply to you, previous to mine here, Aqua and Quartz are two different animals...

Mousing? ha! MouseZoom, freeware. Great.

Do not confuse yourself by assuming that i am conceding the mouse action in OS X is not up to snuff, it is. But Mousezoom is for freaks like myself who want ridiculous mouse speeds, and don't care to spend any time cooking up their own solutions when they could be doing something more important like using their comps to pay the rent or posting at /.

heh.

just another reason to appreciate OS X, there are so many people making great little apps and tweaks for it...

"lest we forget, the world is so much more than black and white, there are infinite shades of grey" (attribution: me)

OS X still in it's infancy

[discogravy]

That photoshop has just been ported to OS X speaks volumes about how much more OS X still has to go (although that it's been released does give OS X credibility and brings it that much closer to where it's going.)

I mean, is it polished? yes. Is it solid? yes. Is it ready for the people? it already has been. But OS X is basically a new OS and some kinks are still getting worked out. A lack of serious apps, like Photoshop, was one of those kinks that needed to be worked out and it's a good thing that it's being worked out now.

I can't wait for OS Z!

Re:Someone tell me...

[2nd Post!]

You don't have to consider using Photoshop if you're comfortable with GIMP.

However, you can consider this; without Photoshop, GIMP may not have been developed (the way it was), just as Killustrator-->Illustrator and GNUStep-->NeXTStep...

I'm not saying GIMP is a clone or anything, but that Photoshop created the market that GIMP lives in right now.

Re:OT: How to set preferences

[dbrutus]

OK, it's not news for nerds. It is, however, stuff that matters. It's driving the universe closer to a Unix v. Microsoft world by reducing the number of desktops running neither (classic Mac OS). Every desktop that goes OS X incrementally changes the calculation that all developers do when they start programming, who is my target audience and to what platforms do I code?

If Mac OS programmers tweak their code so that Cocoa apps they write run under GNUStep, that's a win for Linux. If traditional Unix vendors tweak their code so their stuff compiles and runs under OS X, that's a win for Apple. If Windows programmers conclude that the collective Unix world is once again large enough to start supporting it's a win for everybody in that world BSD and Linux included.

Get it now? It's important because it goes to market share, specifically desktop market share and the software development houses largely follow market share because they've got to pay the bills.

Re:weird idea maybe

[dbrutus]

Apple probably will encourage a Cocoa around 2005-2007. Photoshop 9 will be Cocoa because Carbon is going to be phased out over time. It's a native transition API.

First Classic's going to be deprecated by OSX 10.5 and probably gone by 11 (whatever they Chiat/Day calls it). After that, the push will be on towrds Cocoa for 12 because development gets very, very easy and you can write very little code yourself and get a functioning application with a lot of work being done via services.

I wouldn't doubt that in such a world Photoshop editing tools being available inside Quark would be a major inducement to the publishing market to pick up more copies of Photoshop. It would also reduce the temptation for people to move away from photoshop because a new tool has a few features the Photoshop of the moment doesn't have. They'll be available in Photoshop via services.

Re:Someone tell me...

[2nd Post!]

Well, sure, but if you're comfortable with GIMP, you're not going to be using CMYK, Pantone, ColorSync, etc.

No need to trivialize what GIMP users do or don't do (like pay the rent)

photoshop??

[jaavaaguru]

But they have GIMP, what more could they need? ;-)

Re:photoshop??

[pressman]

Well, basic CMYK support would be useful. A history palette, non-destructive layer effects, vector text and layers, basic knockout features. Well, hell, there's a lot that Photoshop can do that the GIMP can't. Plus, PS has a very well thought out and useful interface.

The GIMP is a pretty decent application and you can't beat the price, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a standard part of a professional graphic artist's tool box.

Re:photoshop??

[pressman]

I actually never use that, but I can see the usefulness of it. I've generally found that you can navigate via the keyboard just as easily though. Spacebar and command + or - works just as effectively for me.

This just proves that there are as many ways to work in Photoshop as there are users of the program. Hence it's beauty.

Re:photoshop??

[TheAJofOZ]

Actually, you should forget about Xemacs and just use Vim...

Slashdot moderation really needs a "Bastardry" option for this comment.... I just can't decide if it's +1 or -1.....

Flash and Fireworks are in late beta

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that aren't aware, both Flash MX and Fireworks MX are looming large on the horizon. Some of the rumore sites have it right, as I have them myself. :)

Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[Lethyos]

This from another (better) article someone posted...

Secure images before sharing them -- Photoshop now offers complete support for Acrobat 5.0 security settings, allowing you to add passwords and other protections to Photoshop PDF files before sharing them with others online or adding them to Adobe PDF workflows.

That last thing we need is more "security" on content. This "feature" only serves as more nonsense from Adobe to prevent users from gaining access to content they otherwise ought to have. I'm sure it's nothing at all sturdy either... just a thing that Adobe, its parterns, and special interests can use to brandish the DMCA.

I have always loved Photoshop. It's still got a big one-up over Gimp and other free and non-free alternatives. However, I incist that products that include content protection must NOT gain any support from anyone. This is without regard to the other features in a package. I'm sure 99.9% of Photoshop users can do with version 7 that they can do with 5.5 just as easily... without giving up little chips of freedom.

If a content house wants to keep images/documents secure, there's plenty of software to do it (encrypted filesystems, secure OSes, etc.). Encrypting/password-protecting documents with proprietary software is not the answer and must not be acceptable.

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[pressman]

The security implementation in limited to Photoshop PDF fles. They aren't trying to lock you out of your own .psd, tiff, eps, gif, jpeg, etc. files.

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[shinma]

Oh, for God's sake.

The "little chips of freedom" you're so afraid of giving up are the ability to steal. People these days are so busy proving Hobbes right about his opinion of human nature that they don't stop to consider why his "social contract" is necessary in the first place.

As someone whose livelihood depends on his writing, I can tell you that a secure way of distributing electronic media is vital to publishers and authors, both big and small, before they consider the internet anything more than a playground. Password-protected documents are, to me, a much better choice for content distribution than the alternatives, where it can only be used with one e-book reader and/or system.

You do not have a right to access content that you do not own. Ownership implies that you were given the password to access the data.

You don't present any valid reason that it is a bad thing other than your reactionary comment about the DMCA. Care to give some reasons that password-protected files are a bad thing?

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[Lethyos]

You don't present any valid reason that it is a bad thing other than your reactionary comment about the DMCA. Care to give some reasons that password-protected files are a bad thing?

Great. Now I have to preach to the choir. *sigh* I thought we had technical readers on this site that could reason these things out. Here we go...

The schemes are proprietary. Non-public protection schemes can be changed by the owner without the consumers' knowledge. As a result, much power is given in the hands of corporations to limit access to your own content if you do not meet their approval. ("Upgrade to Photoshop 11, or we'll revoke the unlocking scheme in your existing software.") This does nothing but give more power to Adobe down the line. Soon, these protection schemes will work their way into all of Adobe's products and file formats (the latter of which I'm sure have already been implimented). With software becoming more and more connected to the developer, and subscription fees more and more likely on the horizon... what do you think that restricting access to the file actually means? Think about it!

There already exist a plethora of superior, open-standard protection schemes for securing data. These are, but not limited encrypted data storage/transmission (SSH/PGP/GPG/etc for securely sending your PS/PSD/PDF/SUX/etc to your coworkers), one-time access to a resource, and so on. Tools to secure data have been in development since long before Adobe entered the graphics market. These tools and open standards are far superior to any offerings Adobe can make. Why not just use them if you're interested in protecting your IP? I'm sure that Adobe is also not interested in really protecting your data. These schemes are almost always token just so that companies can leverage laws in their favor. This is not reactionary or imaginary. It's reality, stupid. And as mentioned, if you're serious about protecting your data, you use tried and true methds of doing it - not some buzzword feature fizzle in Photoshop. Otherwise, if you're going for protected public distribution, this is utterly useless.

It's stupid. Purely feature bloat. PkZIP added this feature years ago just so you had something to spend more money for. Easily cracked. However, if you crack something like this... you get sued. And not by the owners of the content.

You cannot protect your content once it has entered the public domain. It's not possible. There's always at least one person in the world that's smarter than you and will find a way around your protection. Adobe knows this but people are dazzled by their silliness. They think these features protect them. They don't. Makes Adobe stronger, doesn't increase security, and adds a tiny pebble as a stumbling block to anyone who wants to pirate content.

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[stubear]

PDF content protection is intended, in this regard, for distribution amongst work groups in geographically distant loactions or even to make distribution between clients and designers easier. I can safely send a client a file in Photoshop .pdf with a pre-determined passsword we agree to. This way if someone not approved to view the images were to obtain them, perhaps a competitor working with the design firm (don't laugh - it happens) were to get a hold of the new ad then there could be serious reprecussions both to the client and the design firm. This will allow designers to use the web as a means of client contact thus streamlining the design process. This is an excellent feature that myself, and many designers, welcome openly. Personally, many of us couldn't care less what the Slashdot crowd thinks.

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[pressman]

And how much does Adobe pay Macromedia to license the SWF format? (maybe nothing. I don't know MM's licensing terms) How much for LZW compression and Pantone and who knows what other licenses so that I and millions of other Photoshop and Illustrator can create smaller color corrected graphics.

Damn those closed source proprietary bastards for making my life easier and more profitable!

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[paulbd]

a secure way of distributing electronic media is vital to publishers and authors suppose i were to convince you that no such system exists? what then? what makes you believe that such a system does, or could, exist?

Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?

[Ogerman]

As someone whose livelihood depends on his writing, I can tell you that a secure way of distributing electronic media is vital to publishers and authors, both big and small, before they consider the internet anything more than a playground.

You sir, are a moron. The people who modded this comment up are also morons. That being said, look at the pure stupidity of your comment. If you're talking about protecting content within an organization, people don't need proprietary systems for doing so when there already exist free solutions such as GPG. The only thing this does is ensure that only other Adobe product users can open the files. This is the same concept as Microsoft keeping the Office formats secret so that only genuine MS Office products can properly load documents. So when Gimp gains perfect import of Photoshop documents, it still won't work if they're encrypted using Adobe's proprietary system.

So maybe you were talking about trying to protect content from casual copying by consumers. Well wake up, because it's not possible. Publishers and authors are going to have to realize that the Internet is a different market than they're used to. Ultimately, that means not relying on copyright as a means of ensuring income. The only other option is to take away our constitutional rights, ala DMCA. To suggest otherwise is downright asinine.

Re:Adobe vs. Corel -- I'll take Corel, please

[Reziac]

I use Corel PhotoPaint almost every day; I couldn't do without it. The interface is far better than PhotoShop so every task is easier to accomplish, it runs at least 3x as fast (I am *not* exaggerating) on the same hardware, and it does most things as well and some things better (JPG compression is 2-3x better for the same quality image). Only time I ever need to drag out PhotoShop is for colour masking.

Tried The GIMP but wasn't impressed -- struck me as too much like an update of PaintBrush. Oh well.

It helps make life easer.

[jellomizer]

Linux and Win systems have their place they are inexpensive and get can be configured to get the job done. I have been using Win/Linux Intell type systems for years but after a while I got tired of building my boxes and ballancing the quality vs. cost for every part just got tiring. So after a while I decided to give SUN and Apple a try and I found that using a combanation of a SUN Ultra with Apple TI book it makes a really good combation. Sure they are more expensive but I get what I payed for. The Ultra 10 with solaris makes a great server it dependable, configuration is easy, and it can take a real heavy load much better then a Linux box can do. And my Apple Powerbook with OS X is great for my personal work. Sience they are both unix based I get simular funcationaly and control at the console level so I can do common porgraming jobs on both systems. There are some programs that Fly on on the Ultra Sun but Crawl on the Mac (like compiling code) and there are oposit is true as well (Like heavy graphics manupliation). Intel type Boxes are in the middle systems they they seem to perform in the middle in performance. Sure it is nice to choose you own hardware for the system but think of getting a prebuld system like a Mac and Sun box as an alternate to using PC stuff where you can get specialized hardware with a ballanced archecture to perfom there tasks makes life easier and haveing a custom made OS for the hardware can make life easer. Not to say the PC Boxes are any better or worse there better if you dooing a little bit of everything.

Re: digital camera anyone?

[pressman]

Dust and scratches are just the tip of the iceberg. Very complex photo restoration is very easy with Photoshop. The toolset native to Photoshop is amazing. I've repaired photos that were torn and mangled very very quickly. With the GIMP or anything else it would have taken much much much longer. The care and thought that Adobe put into the engineering of Photoshop is worth the price tag/ Initially $600 and then only $99-149 for upgrades every two years. My copy of photoshop usually pays for itself in the course of one job that takes about 2 days. I actually MAKE money by using Photoshop. I could make money using other tools, but Photoshop allows me to do my work the most efficiently.

If you're looking into good scanners check Agfa out. Expensive, but worth the money, especially if you're into photo restoration.

Be sure to get the whole story...

[J.J.]

Cautious readers will want to be sure to read the whole thread. Take the numbers above with a grain of salt.

These results have not been seen across the board.

J.J.

I see Macromedia going the other way

[devleopard]

I have no doubt that you'll see support for Macromedia products on OS X. However, I don't think it will be native. Macromedia's #2 seller, ColdFusion Server, is going to J2EE. It's rumored that the CF IDE, CF Studio, is being rewritten too, and I don't think it'd be too crazy to see it rewritten in Java. Along the same lines, a Java-base for all products would make it quite easy to move into new platforms, with little or no new development required.

Re:Someone tell me...

[MaxVlast]

Every time I use the GIMP, I run into an odd quirk that invariable becomes a giant pain in the ass. The handling of layers is one such thing. As is selection handling. One of my big pet peeves is when things work and look closely like others, but don't do so consistently. If a UI or functionality looks or works a little like something already established, it better works a lot like it. Or it will be frustrating, make me angry, and will cause me to reject the whole thing (no matter how worthy it is.)

Re:wonderful...

[autechre]

There's a program called Scribus which is released under the GPL and aims to be a free replacement for software like Quark and Indesign. I wrote an article about it a short while ago:

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/04 /1 79247&mode=thread

As I pointed out, it does have some shortcomings (though I was very surprised to learn that Quark has a pathetic undo feature...maybe I shouldn't have been, since I've experienced many bad things with Quark.). However, it already has things such as text kerning which made Quark the default app for publishing (despite the fact that Quark doesn't actually do things well, it just does everything you need well enough that people have gotten used to it...except for opening files across a network without exploding and destroying them).

I think software like this and the GIMP have real promise, though I am aware that there are those few things (like getting colours right for print publications) that still tie many people (like me!) to Quark and Photoshop on MacOS.

Why it took so long...

[PrimeWaveZ]

Before I started taking all of the CS classes I'm in now, I couldn't understand why Adobe was so slow in getting out a native OS X version of Photoshop. However, I've come to these conclusions:

1. Carbonizing seemed easy, at first. When they demoed their "Carbonized" version of PS back in the day, there was really nothing to it. All they had to do was modify the non-complying API calls. However, since OS X's paradigm shifted so much, they also had to remake a lot of the interface to conform and work with Aqua. That is a very difficult proposition when you have a program with a code base such as PS.

2. Their apps also seem to have a lot of legacy 68k-centric code. While I'm certainly not an expert in OS X programming, I'm sure that it doesn't help to have 68k-based instructions when you're trying to have your program run on a modern PPC-based operating system with a new set of APIs. It just doesn't make things easy.

3. Trying to develop Carbonized apps is a difficult proposition because the API isn't set in stone. When the "Carbonization is easy" thing was first floated, most folks probably didn't think it was going to be still under development. A lot of people have likened it to a moving target. I would agree from my point of view, because if you don't know what is going to change from one CarbonLib revision to another, life becomes a bitch

There are probably many inaccuracies in this posting, but from my point of view, Adobe isn't completely to blame. Right now, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed and hope it was worth the wait.

Re:Why it took so long...

[moof1138]

My contact at Adobe said that Carbonizing the app and getting the interface Aquafied took very little time. In fact when Adobe's CEO said at a MacWorld long ago that it took them a weekend to Carbonize PS that was not too far off. But. There was no support for plugins unless they were recompiled for OS X. The thing that took them forever was integrating support for Plugins that were written for Mac OS 9, and there are tons of 3rd party plugins that would be caught in the lurch, quite a few of which are not maintained by the companies that made them, though thay are used by a lot of artists. Those plugs are compiled, so they basically had to implement their own mini-Classic and create a virtual runtime that acted like OS 9 for them.

lawsuit?

[zerOnIne]

so if adobe implements an alpha-blending algorithm in photoshop (i know ... very far-fetched idea, right?), are they infringing on apple's patent on alpha-blended computer graphics?

if so, why is apple so excited to have someone breaking their patent?

Take with 2 grains salt and call me in the morning.

Re:lawsuit?

[pressman]

Well, essentially Apple and Adobe are merketing to the same people and they share a lot of technology. Last I saw, Mac sales of Photoshop accounted for the largest pecentage of the application's sales. 5% of the desktop market creating more than 50% of the demand for Photoshop is signifigant. The same is true for Illustrator and InDesign as well.

The Mac is a huge part of Adobe's market and they know this. They put a lot of effort into the UI design of their programs and let each of the programs share some basic functions of each other reducing the learning curve between apps. I'll gladly pay a premium for a company that caters to me in this sort of way.

When the GIMP and Killustrator can boast this sort of interoperability, I will be duely impressed. Here's to hoping that happens.

Re: digital camera anyone?

[chrsbrwn]

dude, you are so misinformed (or you're trolling, in which case you are misinforming others):

1. Photoshop upgrades are only $150. They usually have at least 1 or 2 significant new features that make the upgrade worth buying (like 5.5->6 added a full vector type engine). Plus, when I was doing photo retouching for a living, $150 was the target price for a single small retouching/restoration job (about 1 1/2 hours of work).
2. Some people aren't satisfied/can't work with a point-and-shoot camera. A decent, professional level digital camera, that works with existing pro lens systems is way more than $600... the Nikon D1x is over $5000. If you don't need the flexibility of a full digital system, but still want the flexibility of interchangeable lenses, it is still cheaper to buy an N90 or N100, some decent lenses, and a film scanner (total of around $1500-2000).
3. Plus, while cameras like the D1x are able to rival some 35mm film stocks in quality, they aren't even close to the quality of a 2-1/4 or 8x10 transparency.

So, basically what I am saying is that there are still a lot of people scanning from transparencies, and that some really good retouching tools (plus being able to deal with large files) are worth the price of Photoshop.

If all you ever have to deal with are teeny RGB images targeted to the web, by all means, use the GIMP... it'll get the job done. But if you ever have a need to edit a 75Mb CMYK image (a 2 page 8/-1/2x11 full bleed spread at 150 line screen), and you'll get fired (or not get another contract from the same people) if the color is off or if there is a huge scratch right through the middle of the model's face, then $150 for a Photoshop upgrade, or even $600 for the full version of Photoshop, starts to look quite reasonable.

Apple is more like a systems company.

[PotatoHead]

What Apple has that the PC world does not is holistic system design.

Since they produce the hardware, OS and key applications they have the ability to provide a well thought out user experience.

Slowly people are beginning to understand that this approach makes a lot of sense.

Apple is like SUN or SGI only they don't target big systems. They do small ones. Machines sold by all three of these companies have value long after they should when performing tasks the machines were designed for. Why?

Because the machine was designed to get the job done right!

PC machines are general purpose. This was an advantage earlier because it was cheaper. Now that more of the high end functionality is cheaper, Apple can come in and make a very nice machine at a price most people can afford.

So really they are a systems company. Their value is in the whole solution, not the cheap combining of parts.

Re:Apple is more like a systems company.

[PotatoHead]

Yep.

That is worth a lot to most people. This combined with the built in Apple software makes for a very nice machine with little hassle.

My next machine will be an Apple for sure. The hardware I have worked with has been fun, (SGI, PC Linux/win32) but OS X is looking better every day.

GIMP v. Photoshop

[call -151]

There has been a lot of comparison, and there
are definitely some nice things about Photoshop
that are more polished than GIMP. Furthermore,
if one is already accustomed to Photoshop, then
it would take a while to get comfortable with
GIMP.

But if not, there is a nice
implementation of
GIMP on Mac OS X that is pretty easy to install and of course
the cost factor is a big plus for those of us
on a budget. I wonder if Adobe's slowness in
getting Photoshop out for OS X has resulted in
more MacGIMP converts.

Nitpick of your Nitpick alert!

[dbrutus]

Let's take a look at the entry you are nitpicking on. You referred to dictionary.com so here's the entry

--begin quote--
irregardless Pronunciation Key(r-gärdls)
adv. Nonstandard

Regardless.
------------
[Probably blend of irrespective, and regardless.]

Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.
--end quote--

If you find a term that is a logical absurdity and fit only for nonstandard speech and casual writing to be unfit for slashdot use than you have a very strange idea of what slashdot is.

DB

Don't bother modding me up, I'm karma kapped

But...

[nougatmachine]

...must of us want the internet to be a playground, not some place where we need to get a hall pass to use a hyperlink.

Re:weird idea maybe

[Lally Singh]

Carbon's been officially deemed a "peer" of Carbon. Apple insists that it's not going anywhere. Now, Apple may change their minds later, but the truth is that due to Apple's deeming Carbon a fine solution, nobody's going to rewrite their apps in Cocoa. So, Carbon's not going anywhere.

Classic's going to be around for quite a while too. Many apps in use no longer have a company to update them.

That would be a fair comparison except...

[Jayde Stargunner]

Adobe still sucks at Win32/x86 development.

I'm not trying to troll or be flamebait here, but it's just damn true. All of Adobe's software that runs on my WinXP Pro machine is simply the worst performing, most sluggish, and has the longest start-of time than anything else. (And I run a lot of other high-end development and graphics programs including Paint Shop Pro 7, Flash 5, Fireworks, etc...)

While Paint Shop Pro 7 certainly does not have all the advanced features of Photoshop, it is generally my workhorse for doing run-of-the-mill image work. Why? Virtually no start-up time at all, amazingly better JPEG compression capabilities, and faster general-purpose filters.

Photoshop 6 can sometimes have almost a 7 second start-up time. That's absolutely absurd! PSP 7 takes less than 1 second to load, as does Flash 5 or Fireworks. (Or just about anything on my souped-up system.) If Photoshop can't even start up in less than 6 second on my P4 1.4 ghz with 512 megs of RAM, something is seriously wrong.

Simply put, I think Adobe's Win32/x86 programming capabilities are absurdly behind what they do on the Mac/PPC platform. It's a shame that Adobe basically has a complete stranglehold on the high-end graphics market, since they will probably never correct this issue nor is there any competitor to force their hand. Paint Shop Pro 7 and Fireworks are really the only things remotely touching it at the moment, but they're still not advanced enough to be more than Web or general-purpose editors to compliment Photoshop sitting around as well.

-Jayde

mod parent up please.

[valmont]

the above post shows exactly why everyone should be buying apple stuff. i've used x86 machines running windows 95 thru XP, redhat linux, apple machines from the old 'mac classic' with 40MB HD and 4MB RAM to early PCI macs (7500) to today's titanium powerbook, on system 6 (with multifinder) thru system 7, 7.6 (very stable), OS 9, linuxPPC Q4 2000 and now ...

OS X on a titanium powerbook.

apple hardware and software has NEVER let me down thru various upgrades off either.

don't get me started on x86/windoz platforms.

i've had my gripes about apple OS 9 bloatware and lack of stability. 'tis why i was on windows 2000 for a while. boy was that painful. right when windows corrupted my hard drive with bad sectors and turned my dell laptop into a door-stop, apple's OS 10.1 was out.

So i switched.

boy. lemme tell you.

computing has never, EVER, been this fun, reliable, painless, stable, solid ... sweet. And every single upgrade to OS 10, to today's 10.1.3 has been painless and brought a whole world of enhancements.

do you have any idea of the uptimes i get on my titanium powerbook? i've gone thru a whole MONTH without rebooting it. And that was to install the next upgrade.

Again, this is a LAPTOP, not a desktop server or workstation.

I take it home, i take it to work, i take it to my gilrfriend's place, i play DVDs, i import photos from my sony digital camera into iPhoto without installing any sony software, i rip CD's in iTunes and stick the songs on my iPod, i connect to the internet thru corporate LAN/static-ip, wireless LAN at my home, modem at my girl's place.

I export iPhoto albums to 'web site' directories in my home directory's linux-equivalent to public_html (~/Sites), i tar'em, i gzip'em, and upload them via ftp to a shell account of mine where i untar/gunzip'em for everyone to see (here). And that's because i was going a little crazy with iPhoto prior to this and filled-up my free 20MB account.

i run the NetBeans java IDE while coding web applications, i do heavy testing of those applications by running them off of a separate installation of tomcat, perform complex and very demanding 'ant' builds. i write shell scripts to perform common tasks. i grep/sed/awk/sort/uniq thru my filesystem.

I have a 435-lines /etc/hosts file filled with hosts pointing to 127.0.0.1 to filter ads.

I removed administrator privileges from my default/every-day user. So any application I run can only write stuff to my home directory. And this is how all OS X apps are designed anyway. Any aspect of an application's preferences are stored in a user's home directory. I can create a small roaming mirror of my home directory with all its libraries and apps preferences onto my iPod. I can go to a friend's house who's also running OS X. He can add me as a user on his box and point my home directory to the one located on my iPod.

and now ...

I can finally run Photoshop.

woohooo.

it just gets sweeter and sweeter :)

Steve has done it. totally. I believe I can say with ample confidence that I'm His Bitch. He has taken me to the Nirvana of Computing and boy, i'm hooked.

And i fucking swear to you, give me 30 minutes with ANY GEEK who has been in the trenches of trying to run a powerful, reliable, flexible operating system for any length of time, for productive and mission-critical use, working out hardware/software/drivers incompatibilities to get it to do what they wanted it to. I'll open a few terminal windows in OS X, point them to a few applications, let them play around. I'll show'em how to 'force quit' out of an application that doesn't respond anymore while not affecting any other resource on the OS. I'll start clicking thru all the application icons i have in my 'dock' and watch them all launch at the same time, independently, while being able to switch thru individual windows of those applications, while the operating system appears to just be sitting there waiting for you to ask more from it.

yes. it is THAT sweet. and more.

why am i rambling? heck i don't know. i don't even own apple stock. Apple has turned the "cool" on, in a big freakin' way, and i just wanna make sure everyone knows about it. bah. just ignore me. i'm owned. heh :)

Back to the Basics

[extrasolar]

"UNIX/Linux/BSD is neato, but I failed math, suck at logic, and can't grep to save my life. I'd like to play around with it and learn it, but I have no real reason to- and my experience with Free Software has been pretty nasty- I bitch about nonexistant intallers, suck-ass window managers, poor hardware support, and I'm told "FIX IT YOURSELF!"... and as a non programmer, I'd rather stick with something that already works for me to begin with.

Call this a huge change in perspective from you to me. But this paragraph makes me sad. You say you failed math and logic. Yet isn't this what a computer is meant to do? Its called a computer because it computes things. There is an entire field called computer science. Ever wonder what this kind of science is about? From the name you might think its about the science of computers. Yet this is rather far from the truth. Its about how to compute things.

You compute things every day. Many of us rely upon calculators but most of us know how to add and divide numbers by hand. You know how to sort a list of names and addresses. You know how to draw shapes and circles. The computer simply does that for us. A computer program is simple a notation for this computation.

You mention grep only to say how you are afraid of it. It simply writes a text file containing every line of another file that has a certain pattern of text. I don't even know regular expressions very well (again, just a notation for specifying patterns of text), I just match words. You don't need grep to do this. But grep makes it quite a bit easier.

After rereading your post, I realize you are trolling. If I am mistaken, then let us know who told you to fix it yourself. But I'll continue because you are moderated highly and others seem to agree with you.

If you truly are an idiot, then what use is a computer for you? You want to draw pictures, you want to make web sites. Yet to do any of these things correctly you need to be smart and you need to learn how. Perhaps you have backed yourself into a corner hoping that these reputable software packages will allow you to get away with not understand how the technology works. If you do understand the technology then the software ends up being only a conveniance over other less-reputable alternatives.

Let me tell you something. I grep; I program; I play with Unix configs. Yet I don't like Unix. It can be a pain to use. Its redeeming feature is that you can customize it away to make it less of a pain. But I stick with it because of the amount of quality free software that comes with free operating systems (free as in freedom, of course).

Oh, less me forget: you don't want to program. You think it is hard. You're afraid of it. But I think a part of computer literacy should be a minimal amount of programming simply because high-level programming gives you another skill in case you need it. Just like a proficient Windows user knows how to use defrag, notepad and MS Paint not because it is the software they'll spend most of their time using but because its handy at times.

I should stop this post here but as an example to the programming neophyte, lets say you want to write a message encrypted (loosely :) by rot13. All it does is take each character of the message and replaces it with the character 13 times upward in the alphabet. I just wrote this script in ten minutes:

(define (rot13 text)
(list->string (map rot13char
&n bsp;(string->list text))))

(define (rot13char char)
(reset-space (integer->char
(if (> (+ (char->integer (char-downcase char)) 13)
&n bsp;122)
(- (char->integer (char-downcase char)) 13)
(+ (char->integer (char-downcase char)) 13)))))

(define (reset-space char)
(if (equal? char #-)
#space
char))

(sorry for some dangling &nbsp;'s in there...can't figure out how to get them out)

This is just a sample of what you can do with a minimal amount of programming know how. Dreamweaver won't do the above; neither will Photoshop. There are packages that will do this. But what about the thousands of monotonous computations that you may have to spend a lot of time doing that the computer could do for you!

I have strayed off topic, I know. This has little to do with Mac OS X or any other operating system but rather I am speaking about the programming spirit. This exists on all operating systems on whatever system a hacker might use. True computational power comes not from the operating system or the applications you use but from whoever is in front of the keyboard.

Re:Back to the Basics

[extrasolar]

I'm sorry if you are offended by my post. I swear it is of the best intentions.

There is no reason why people should need to learn programming. And just because someone can't program. It dosn't mean that they are: a) dumb. Or b) intelligent but affraid/can't be bother to learn programming.

There is no reason why people need to use computers at all. But your proficiency with the computer often makes life easier with using the system. Hence why I think simple programming is a part of being literate with a computer. I used the word "idiot" with the assumption that anyone reading my post would first read the post I was replying to, who declaired himself an idiot with certain things. I could have tackled with this point (in fact I did, implicitly) but didn't really care to digress that much.

There is no one who can't program. Again, I mean a program in an abstract sense which means a notation for expressing computation. Lather, rinse, repeat. Add all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers to get an arithmetic mean. If you mean more than one blocks, add an 's' to the end of the word "block", else omit the 's'.

You give less credit to your brain than it deserves. Of course, programming is a skill that you gain proficiency as you use it. If you don't use it you won't become proficient in it. The likely case is that you never need it. Which is fine. I am more interested in the case when either you do need it or find it useful and you don't use it. Why would this be? Because they are afraid of programming or because they blame their brain was born wrong.

Anyway, I got to go.

Re:Back to the Basics

[extrasolar]

I think you need to do your research. I'm sure you've heard of this thing called genetics? And how if affects how people grow?

I'm sorry but the burden of proof is all yours. I would like some pointers on how people are genetically unable to program.

You say

I'm not saying that people can't learn programming.

but rather matter-of-factly said earlier

There is no reason why people should need to learn programming. And just because someone can't program. It dosn't mean that they are: a) dumb. Or b) intelligent but affraid/can't be bother to learn programming.
Emphasis is mine.

I don't mean to quibble on details but it would be nice if you were consistant. I am actually replying to your posts. I try to respond with thought and am careful not to make any hasty assumptions.

I'm not saying that people can't learn programming. But that it is an awful lot harder for some people than it is for others. So you can't expect everyone to 'get it'. I know people that are quite computer literate, and that benifits them also in what they do. But even start to mention anything concepts like programming, and it just goes straight over their head.

What if you don't call it programming? In the Gimp it is called Script-Fu. I think Photoshop has an equivalent. Emacs uses an extension language. AutoCAD is a leading engineering package and has a built in extension language as well. Apple computers have AppleScript (which reads quite close to english, as I have seen it). Pretty much all operating systems have some sort of a scriptable shell. Bash simply has you type in the commands as you would type them in the command shell with a few simple programming constructs such as if...then conditionals and variables. In Microsoft Word, when you write a macro Word actually writes a VB script that performs the macro. This is transparent to the user but you can modify the macro script if you wish (my knowledge of this may be inaccurate...I don't use Word often).

What you find is that user applications become more and more powerful and these applications begin to require extensibility at the programming level. This is not new and has been happening for some time. But instead of what we would call traditional programmers to build these systems for a generic set of tasks there will, as I see it, be nontraditional user-programmers extending existing systems for very specific tasks. I truly believe this is part of computer literacy. And you know, I don't think this will look like the kind programming you and I know. It will look like something else that your friends can take to that while some of it will go over their heads, some of it will stick, and they will be the better for it.

Re:Back to the Basics

[extrasolar]

As I said before. I'm not saying some people can't program, but that some find it alot harder. I'm sure you know all about the whole right/left brain thing and how it affects the way people think and what skills they are good at etc. Go to google and do some research if you don't know, or are unconvinced.

I've heard about it in passing. But hopefully you'll see this in another light in this message.

What if you don't call it programming? Then it gets called something else. It still dosen't change the fact that it's programming. People aren't suddenly going to understand it better just because the name has been hidden. That's silly. But you already knew that.

Sure. But I am still concerned that you don't understand what programming is in the generic sense I am trying to convey. Its a notation for expressing computation. Everyone computes therefore everyone can program. Its really as simple as that.

Maybe I should have been more clearer. When I meant to say is that some people aren't as good at arithitic, calculations, logic, staistics, numbers etc (all left brain oriented activities). All these things are needed for programming.

First of all, not all them things are needed for programming. Here is something that I suspect may trip you up. What you say is true--people are better at different things. Math is difficult for some people, I know this. I don't mean to say that programming is working with math because that isn't at all true. There are more computations that don't deal with math than that deal with math. However, just because you find a certain computation difficult doesn't mean it isn't useful for you. And if you do make your way through a difficult computation wouldn't you like to store this computation into a computer program so that you can have the computer do every succeeding computation for you?

The your arguments is simple. If you don't know how to compute something, you can't program it. If you don't know calculas you can't create a program that does calculas. However, if you do know calculas it would be useful to put some of the load onto the computer.

Now that I think about it, you are right in one fashion. Programming requires you to be able to express a computation. If you get a result, you have to be able to say to the computer or to other people how you got that particular result. This is a skill that increases over time but is helped by the ability to think in an organized fashion. This could be said to be a left-brain function. But I feel that most people have mastered this function long ago.

What kind of computation doesn't require math? By math, I am assuming you mean high level math. I doubt that people without learning impediments would have trouble with basic arithmetic. (I hope you don't consider this an elitist attitude, I don't expect blind men to see either) Sorting and searching are obvious examples but most people don't actually need to program this. How about doing your taxes? If you know how to do your taxes then you know how to write a program for doing that. Certainly there are software packages that do your taxes for you and I would recommend one of these. But my whole point is for the computer to perform arbitrary computations for you. For you to have the power of the machine and not having to have other developers to bring this power to you. It really is computing power at your fingertips.

It's nothing new...

[Lethyos]

Big Unix software venders have been doing this for years. There's software that authenticates against a license server each time it's run (Maple, large CAD packages, etc). That's easy enough for the "owner" of the package to disable. SCO did something very similar and even had its software report back to them when a license violation was detected. Also, if you had read the post more closely, I mention that subscription software is becoming a hot topic. Companies don't want you to own software anymore. They want to lease it to you in a service format. Don't think the idea of running all your applications from a server on the Internet is too far off. It's a lot closer than you think. Also, there's always the simple solution of Some B. Guy at Adobe calling up his buddies at Microsoft and getting them to fuck with your Photoshop installation.

Your systems aren't safe with proprietary software on them. It's best to assume that companies can do whatever they choose with your computer once you give them access to it. Would you stick a black box full of technology from someone you didn't trust in your house? Could be anything. Same goes for software.

Re:Someone tell me...

[2nd Post!]

Only for now.

You can run a publication business without worrying about color matching or color processes, either. You lose business from people who want to guarantee that print output matches design intent, but you will find people who don't care, either.

Re:weird idea maybe

[dbrutus]

Given the flack they've gotten over it, I doubt they will not rewrite the finder.