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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."
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.
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.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
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.)
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
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.
:/), 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.
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
--Dan
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!
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