Photoshop Graces Mac OS X

cpk0 writes "Well, we finally have Photoshop on Mac OS X. Now that must have been one heck of a year over at Adobe, cause this piece of software is pretty elegent. Even on my iMac 600 it's pretty swift and smooth. There's no official Adobe press release yet, but there's a VersionTracker page for it, and that makes it official enough for me."

Comments

Elements

[TwitchCHNO]

Here's linkage for those w/ out $500+ to spend on image editing software.

Adobe CEO on PDF, Mac OS X, 'Premiere Elements,' more

Yeah I know gimp is free, blah blah OSS or die, blah blah.

Seriously folks I like Photoshop, & Elements is functional enough for my needs (No pre-press support) - definaltey worth the $100 (IMHO)

Re:Elements

[Dark Paladin]

I wouldn't mind trying this out. Right now, I run Gimp through XDarwin, and it works for my needs, which are pretty basic (simple banners, adding text to pictures, etc).

I wouldn't mind something like a Photoshop Lite to see how it works, then if I got powerful, I could pay for the full version later.

New Features

[dthable]

I enjoyed some of the user comments about the lack of new features in the software. How's this for a new feature, it runs under a stable OS without using the error prone Classic envrionment. I would be willing to put up the cash even if they just ported Photoshop 6 to OS X.

Re:New Features

[Havokmon]

How's this for a new feature, it runs under a stable OS without using the error prone Classic envrionment.

That's the ONLY reason I bought it. We just got a new G4, and if only Quark were 'modern', I could dump Classic mode entirely.

I've been using it for a while.

[EnVisiCrypt]

I've been using a, erm, beta copy for a while, and it's been excellent. I've been waiting for the official version to come out so I could ante up my $45,000,000 dollars. Seriously though, it seems rock solid, and the feature set has grown, albeit modestly.

I particularly like the "healing" tool. It works much better than the cludgy old cloning tool, as the healing tool takes shadows, tone and the whole 9 into consideration when cloning bits. It's quite a tool, and my favorite addition since the magnetic lasso.

Did I mention it's stable? I hated (HATED!) running ps6 in classic mode on OS X. Now, I really don't have any OS 9 apps left now that PS7 has left the gate.

In my opinion, if you own a previous version the low upgrade cost is well worth it at $149. If you don't, pay the $609 and get on the train. Or better yet, get the web collection and get Livemotion, Illustrator and Photoshop for $999.

Ugh. Still bundled w/ ImageReady.

[realgone]

Ah, good ol' ImageReady, the Cousin Oliver of the Adobe Bunch; no one really wants him hanging around, but no one has the heart to tell the lil' feller to leave.

Actually, from reading Adobe's product page, you'd think all of ImageReady's features had finally been folded into its parent app, seeing as there's no mention of IR anywhere. It was only after reading this MacCentral article that I realized the unwelcome guest was back yet again. Ugh.

For anyone who does a lot of web work in Photoshop, having to jump back and forth between the two apps is both an inconvenience and a resource hog, particularly since they duplicate many of each other's features. (So much so that the only time I fire up ImageReady these days is to bang out an animated GIF. Everything else can be done better by hand -- image slicing, rollovers -- or in Photoshop itself.)

All that said, of course I'm going to upgrade; the OS X support alone is worth it. (Photoshop and Flash were my last real reasons for running OS 9 day-to-day.)

Quark is all that remains...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, now Quark is the final remaining piece before publishing folks can finally stop using classic. I won't ever convince the long time Quark users to switch to anything else. I don't even want any new features from Quark (except multiple undos). I just want it running on OS X, native.

This is such a gorgeous implementation of truely essential software (PS 7). I didn't mind the wait at all. Seriously, do people mind waiting for a year for really great software, or getting a POS in a few months. Personally, I'd rather let the developers make a fast, production-stable release than get some bloated Freehand 10, Netscape 6 junk.

Re:Quark is all that remains...

[Sentry21]

Considering that Quark's put out two versions in something like 8 years, I wouldn't hold out hope for them to bother with an OS X port. Hell, their last release, almost a year after OS X was released, still isn't OSX native.

We're looking at Adobe InDesign right now. Seems like Adobe clued in that Pagemaker couldn't cut it, so they started over, and boy is InDesign nice. It can even import Quark documents perfectly (better than Quark can, IMO), exports as PDF (and does it well, unlike Canvas :/), and so on. It's really a nice package, and I would suggest downloading the demo and playing with it. The person who does all of our instruction manual design was sold in 2 minutes.

--Dan

Photoshop: The beloved monopoly

[daviddennis]

I have to admit, I find it amusing at times that people protest like crazy about Microsoft the monopoly, but don't say anything about Adobe, which has at least as commanding a presence in graphic arts as Microsoft has in the OS market.

Perhaps it's because people actually LIKE Adobe stuff?

Naaawwww ... that would be too simple :-).

(Okay, this doesn't disturb me at all, actually, but it does make me laugh. Maybe if Microsoft was actually NICE to its customers and partners, it would do better in the PR wars.)

D
(Who has willingly spent over $1,000 with Adobe in the past year).

Re:Photoshop: The beloved monopoly

[pressman]

Adobe really doesn't have a monopoly of any sort. Sure, Photoshop is THE dominant leader in the field of image editing programs. However, it is the leader because it offers a set of features that no other application comes close to matching. However, Adobe does not wield their dominance in the field of image editing to crush competition or create a barrier to entry in the market. Many people use the GIMP and Graphic Converter. The Macromedia diehards use FireWroks, but for the life of me I'll never understand why.

In terms of Adobe's target market as a whole, they have a lot of competition. Quark and Macromedia really give them a run for their money. Illustrator leads the pack for vector graphics, but Freehand is nipping at it's heels. Quark XPress singlehandedly destroyed PageMaker and Adobe was forced to design a better program, InDesign. Even though it is easily the better program of the two, it is having a difficult time penetrating the market that XPress has dominated for so long. Real, honest competition from a determined and strong competitor is the only reason that we have InDesign now. Freehand keeps getting better with each rev and consequently Adobe has to make Illustrator that much better just to retain their lead.

Macromedia has Dreamweaver which is hands down the leader in visual web page layout. Adobe has GoLive which has improved over the years and offers some features that Dreamweaver doesn't, but still has yet to garner a large market share despite being the leader some 5 years ago.

Macromedia has Flash. Adobe has LiveMotion. Although, in many ways, LiveMotion is easier to use, Flash is still the 800 pound gorilla of the web/vector animation market.

Adobe has Premiere for prosumer level video editing. Suddenly Apple comes out with Final Cut Pro (3 in particular) and just blows Adobe out of the market. Now there's Cinema Tools! Oh yeah, and then there are Avid and Media100!

Adobe has AfterEffects which is doing quite well, but has to compete with products from Discreet and Nothing Real (now folded into Apple.) Essentially, AfterEffects is relegated to the prosumer level again and must improve with each rev.

Anyone remember Persuasion? Fabulous presentation software that was totally crushed by PowerPoint.

So, yeah, Adobe is a huge company with a near monopoly of the graphics market, but they are besieged on all sides by fierce competitors and if they get complacent for a single version of their applications, a large chunk of their market can be taken from them. I continue to use Adobe products and willoingly fork out large sums of hard earned cash because their products are so comp[elling. However, I have given up on PageMaker altogether in favor of Quark and am waiting for InDesign to be a bit more polished before I start using it as a regular publishing tool.

I'm sure the people involved in developing Premiere are more than a little pissed at Apple right now. I know I will never willingly go back to Premiere ever again... not after using FCP 3!

Re:Photoshop: The beloved monopoly

[daviddennis]

Network effects give them some insulation from competition. That's most easily shown with Quark; many people now consider InDesign superior, but it's tough to argue with Quark's dominance in the printing market, because of the cooperation you need with printers, most of who only have Quark.

The same is true of Photoshop. Once you've learned their keyboard equivalents, secret workarounds and the like, you have an enormous investment in the product and are unlikely to switch unless a competitor enormously raises the bar. I know that I tried a few different photo editing programs in an effort to avoid Classic, and none of them felt as right as Photoshop. They had all the functions of Photoshop, but, well, they weren't Photoshop.

Another big advantage of Adobe is that they still include old-fashioned paper manuals with their products. That's enormously appealing to me; you get something tangible for your $150-600. Almost nobody does that anymore, and it's a darn shame.

It gives them the image of the Classy Software Company, and I think it's very much merited.

Come to think of it, Final Cut Pro 3 comes with a few bricks worth of manuals. And you're right, once you've seen FCP, Premiere just plain doesn't feel right.

D

Re:Photoshop: The beloved monopoly

[dolanh]

I'm not a macromedia diehard, but I've generally used fireworks over ImageReady because the end product was so much better. Better HTML, better Javascript, better image compression.

Re:Photoshop: The beloved monopoly

[pressman]

I'm not a macromedia diehard, but I've generally used fireworks over ImageReady because the end product was so much better. Better HTML, better Javascript, better image compression.

That's a very interesting point. Being a UI and usability designer, I have a hard time with Macromedia products in general. They make good products in general. Dreamweaver and Flash are irreplaceable, but Fireworks and Freehand I could do without. Illustrator and Photoshop more than meet my needs and I just plain find them easier to work with.

I do do a lot of HTML coding, mostly in BBEdit and Dreamweaver, but all of my image editing is done in Photoshop and now I do a lot of it in Illustrator now that they have the "save for web" feature built in. Fireworks has always been counteruintuitive to me. But then again since I do no JavaScript whatsoever (other than simple Dreamweaver level stuff like rollovers), I don't need that technical end of an image editing app. Just raw usability and flexibility.

Again, Firework's scripting level stuff can be a huge asset. For raw, multi purpose image editing though, I'm gonna stick with Photoshop.

Re:other unix like systems

[sckevyn]

It would be really nice if people would learn, that most of the OS X commerical apps, DO NOT TOUCH the bsd layer, nor require it to work.

Photoshop for OS X, is Photoshop written for the OS X gui, namely Cocoa. It is not a 'bsd app'.

As far as OS X being a BSD based system, perhaps you should go read a little bit more before you claim it's BSD based. It isn't. The kernel is mach, with Cocoa, Carbon and BSD running on top of it as a seperate layer.

If OS X were BSD based, you wouldn't be able to unselect the BSD enviroment during the install =)

kevyn

Moralty vs Product Quality

[daviddennis]

Yes, that was a really sick thing to do; I agree.

I'm not sure if the actual impact was intentional, and to give them credit, once they saw how seriously the government took the situation, they dropped the case. It was the government's decision to continue prosecuting.

But that aside, this is an interesting test case to show that what many of us really hate about Microsoft is not its monopoly, or its bundling policies, or its bullying ways, but a combination of product quality problems(*) and persistent privacy invasions.

If they'd made a wonderful operating system, I'm betting we wouldn't be nearly as mad at them as we are.

Adobe has always made great products, and hopefully will always make great products. So we forgive them their monoply, and I'd say even their treatment of that unfortunate Russian.

If it had been Microsoft, can you imagine the furor?

D

(*) Persistent rumours exist that Microsoft has improved its quality greatly and cleaned up its act. But in a couple of hours of creating a simple resume for a friend using the new MacOS X version of Word for Windows, I got it to crash. Lost a lot of work, too.

Re:Moralty vs Product Quality

[Dephex Twin]

I'm not sure if the actual impact was intentional, and to give them credit, once they saw how seriously the government took the situation, they dropped the case. It was the government's decision to continue prosecuting.

Possible, but it is equally possible that they brought this to the attention of the FBI, and then once it appeared that the FBI was going to pursue the case stopped endorsing the prosecution, so that they could wash their hands of it but still have it happen.

Who knows what the real reason was.

mark

Re:Moralty vs Product Quality

[daviddennis]

The community cares, and has in fact worked hard to get him released.

At the same time, the community also knows what company to go to to get great graphics software.

For whatever reason, the computer biz is about cool products, not morality. Even Steve Jobs of Apple, the cool computer company, is known as a relentless perfectionist who can be staggeringly cruel to his employees. Do we care? No, we keep buying his products because, for better or for worse, he makes the best stuff.

Same with Adobe.

Harsh reality, but that's the way it works.

On the other hand, can you see anyone using Adobe's secure PDF format or whatever the heck it was any time soon? They suffered a genuine defeat with the publicity; they shouldn't have done what they did, even from a pragmatic commercial viewpoint.

D

Re:Moralty vs Product Quality

[daviddennis]

But once he's released, the issue is moot as far as the community is concerned - no?

D

Re:Moralty vs Product Quality

[daviddennis]

Here you go:

http://www.freesklyarov.org/
http://www.wired.c om/news/politics/0,1283,50797,00 . tml
http://www.boycottadobe.com/

That should get you started.

D

Re:Moralty vs Product Quality

[daviddennis]

So the only solution to this would have been to push them to the edge of bankruptcy?

That doesn't seem realistic in the case of Adobe. Killing off the unit that sold the technology that got us in this mess would surely seem sufficient, no? If you're going to force Photoshop to die, you'll have a whole bunch of angry graphic artists crying for blood :-).

Do you know the fate of the technology he reverse-engineered?

D

Re:Moralty vs Product Quality

[mr100percent]

Well, according to the free capitalist market, Macromedia could use the opportunity to take marketshare with their own graphic app.

Re:Finally...

[Surlyboi]

Spring loaded folders open up when you drag a file
over them and then close behind you when you drag
that file into a sub-folder. No unnecessary windows
left open in your wake, less desktop clutter.

Neat little feature. It was introduced in 9 and
hasn't yet made its debut in X. Sure you could just
as easily use the column view and bypass the need
for them entirely, but I'm old and set in my ways...

Re:other unix like systems

[DarkRecluse]

Actually the Mac OS X subsystem is based mostly on FreeBSD 4.4...which you can see if you ever take a look at the header files within the Darwin CVS.

What you think of as layers are actually Frameworks and shared libraries running on top of this subsystem. The subsystem is actually quite stripped down for a unix OS unless you install the Developer package from the Developer CD. The gui is just a Window Server slightly different than traditional XFree86 implementations.

When you say that most apps don't require the subsystem you are partially correct, in that they are not required to be aware of it, but your OS would not be working if the subsystem was not in place....you may think it doesn't exist because it is hidden from the gui, but try booting without your /usr, /sbin, /private, and additional directories...hell, just try removing the symbolic link to /etc and see if your computers boots properly;)

Apple has done a good job of hiding their necessity.