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Microsoft Pauses Work on 'Photoshop Killer'
daria42 writes "According to this article, Microsoft has paused development work on some parts of the pro graphics application it first released in beta back in June 2005. The problem? It appears the software giant doesn't see the application as a stand-alone product, but more of a companion piece to its Expression product line. Plus Vista needs to be released first."
I'm sure the real problem is that they're trying to integrate it with windows so that windows won't work if you delete it...
*cough* *explorer* *cough*
I bet in the end, its just gonna be a fancy version of paintbrush
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
So where does that leave the readers? I'm pretty sick and tired of hearing the word 'killer' used to describe a new product that aims to (hopefully) usurp the leading product in the market. That's it! Let's start using the word 'usurper' over and over to describe a product. It's hip, it generates hype, run with it!
I'm fine with having my intelligence insulted when I read the comments. Hell, I'd even be fine with having low brow advertising on
My work here is dung.
This isn't news, let me know when Google makes one, then I'll be interested
Remember kids, with great power comes great opportunity to abuse that power
The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life... ...also the number of times the Gimp will be mentioned here.
How to Download YouTube Videos
"Hey guys, lets get a lot of photos of people pretending to paint, then copy and paste and rotate them a lot so it looks like a kaleidoscope!"
Genius, I tell you. Pure genius.
I need one of those koosh Microsoft jobs... From where I'm standing, I'm reminded of the Ghostbusters line: "I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
if you haven't tried the beta already, simply press the Windows Key and R, then type 'mspaint.exe' without the quotes.
classic.
If Microsoft think that the scope of the application is too small to be considered a completely separate package, it's not going to be the "Photoshop Killer" that they want it to be.
Will they get it right eventually? Probably. Microsoft can afford to throw money at things until they become good, and they have the added advantage of being able to make any product successful just by making it the "default". For this reason, they get a huge headstart over any competitors. Once competitors like Adobe and Google realise this, they might start thinking that switching customers over to Linux is a good idea. On Linux, no company controls the playground, so every application developing company is in there with an equal chance. There's no "default".
Creative Suite is cross platform, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft to want to take down Adobe. iLife takes customers away from Windows, it makes more sense for them to be making Final Cut and iPhoto killers instead of trying to make another Illustrator & Dreamweaver. Most professional Graphic Designers are still going to use Illustrator instead of Expression anyways...
What are people going to say when a photograph looks fake? It must have been expressed? Doesn't sound right.
Okay, I'll admit that I am somewhat of a Microsoft fan. (see my history...) Yeah, you might think I'm sick. But I do think they put out a lot of good software.
I was excited about this when it was announced. I've downloaded the betas...umm...it just isn't quite good.
Yes, I understand it is a beta.
But this thing is ugly, it's SLOW and it doesn't seem to be anywhere NEAR Photoshop.
I've downloaded tons on Microsoft betas (working on IE 7 now) and this had to have been the worst that I ever used. I just don't know where this one is heading. People up above suggested that this will be an integral part of the OS and bundled in...
I don't see how it has a chance otherwise...
Not to mention the fact that the world isn't even ASKING for a Photoshop replacement.
No reason to lie.
Seems like the Good Ship Redmond is adrift. They are preoccupied by too many projects going on, such as putting the wraps on Vista and Longhorn Server, "Orcas" (successor to Visual Studio 2005, aka "Whidbey"), Office 12... then they still have to deal with antitrust fights all around the world.
I notice too, that they haven't bought anyone out recently. They probably should, because they certainly haven't had much luck with any new product development. UMPC (or, "Newton XP") is going to be DOA.
Instead of "Developers! Developers! Developers!", Balmer needs to be jumping around screaming "Ideas! Ideas! Ideas! Ideas! Ideas! Ideas!"
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Vista needs to be released first
Looks like Vista is the Photoshop-killer-killer
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Did Microsoft ever say this was going to be a "Photoshop killer" or is that just editorial? This kind of editorial doesn't help at all, in fact it muddies the waters if it is not meant to be a product that competes with Photoshop. Editors are supposed to clarify things.
They...stopped working on it?
What happened? Did they run out of programmers?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
If they want to dominate the market, the product pricing has to be between what you would pay for Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. Plus they have to offer a Mac version and a free Wacom tablet.
Nah... that will never happen.
My guess in the whole deal is that they've been working on it, saw that it can't hold a candle to Photoshop and to the fact that Adobe pretty much sets the standard for DTP in Windows, so the whole deal will be revamped as an additional goodie in the Office suite.
That way, some kinda graphics program is already on your machine when you have Office (and what office doesn't?), it's another thing that you can hand to marketing in an attempt to make OpenOffice look worse, and in a generation or two, they might start to create some "professional" or "enterprize" standalone version when they hit Adobe's market hard enough, when people got used to their "standard".
MS isn't in a hurry. Taking over a market someone else claimed takes time, and time is what they have plenty of.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Not to mention the fact that the world isn't even ASKING for a Photoshop replacement."
.png file after editing it, I should just be able to hit "save". Instead, it takes no fewer than 6 clicks to get the darn file saved. Adobe does little or no usability testing, I'm convinced.
The world might not be, but I am. Photoshop, for all its snazzy tools, is in need of a refresh, one it's not going to get from Adobe. Many bugs have persisted in every version I've used, from 4 to 8 (CS), and the basic interface has never changed. There are lot of usability improvements that could be made.*
I'd personally like Apple or a Mac software outfit like Panic to create a Photoshop competitor. With APIs like Core Image and Core Data available now, much of the groundwork is already laid for a great OS X application. And if I were running Adobe, I'd get a small team of engineers like the ones responsible for Lightbox to start building a Photoshop replacement from the ground up.
* Here's an example of what I mean. To save a
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Would you like me to:
1. Overwrite all pixels with #000000
2. Overwrite all pixels with #FFFFFF
3. Corrupt your image
4. Save your image in our proprietary format that even we can't read
5. Take you to the Gimp homepage
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
When I think MicroSoft, I don't think creativity. It seems MS fails to understand the concept of branding. You can't have two different personality traits, one creative and hip, the other nerdy and utilitarian, and sell products under the same banner. It's just doesn't work in the mind of consumers.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
"Now I know a ton of graphic designers who use Windows machines. That was unheard of when I was younger."
What do they do? Surely not prepress. You can get Photoshop for the PC, but trying to ensure colour accuracy on a PC is a nasty, nasty process. It costs far more in time than you save on hardware, and even with the best solutions available you won't have consistent colour across all apps.
Sounds like you know a lot of _web_ designers.
Expression, formerly of creature house, was bought by microsoft a few years ago, company included. It is one of the most innovative packages around. I tracked the tragectory of this technology ever since its first debut at siggraph. Combining deep math and artist sensibility it married vector and bitmaped graphics in truly amazing ways. The key metaphor is that of a brush. Any image can become a brush-stroke, which can make new images which can become further brush strokes. It is extremely intuitive, especially to artists.
My biggest worry is that microsoft might suck the soul out of this truly innovative product. It is light-years ahead of any painting program (Which is why MS had to buy it, because to allow it to be independent might mean that its own paint programs might have been out compete, however unlikely, snce it did not have a major distributer around the time it was bought out by MS.) especially if it is used in the right context.
calling it photoshop-killer or positioning it against photoshop is not really the right strategy. Photoshop's core metaphor is that of a photo, so photoshop is especially deft at after effects applied to a photo or the compositing of existing photos. (I'm sure there are people who break the metaphor and create masterpiece digital paintings from photoshop, but nonetheless, original graphics is not photoshop's main domain.) Expression gives you canvas, paint, and a magical brush.
Time will tell what will happen to this product, here's hoping that it doesn't die at microsoft's hands.
Microsoft can't make their applications the "default" on alternative operating systems. With Microsoft starting to expand their reach, companies like Adobe need to start thinking about what they're going to do when Microsoft has a "default" built-into-Windows program that does the same things that Adobe's programs do.
This concerns all companies that are competing with Microsoft now, or will be in the future. They need to prevent Microsoft from making clones of their programs that will be the Windows "defaults".
I bet IE7 doesn't have Google search as the start page. Can you guess which page might be the default?
Does anyone else think that Microsoft's obsession with integrating every damn piece of software that they release is actually hurting their software rather than making it easier to use?
I worked in Visual Studio 2003 for 2 years and waited with baited breath for 2005 (and all the bugs and new features it was promised to bring), it slipped back more than a year because SQLServer 2005 wasn't ready, then Team System wasn't ready... Now it's finally released and it isn't the fantastic piece of software we thought it would be, partly I recon because the focus wasn't on the IDE, it was on making it and a ridiculous amount of satellite software all work together and integrate seemlessly. Can't help thinking Microsoft would be better off if they *weren't* able to work so closely together!
You stop slicing my back, I'll scratch yours.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I myself am usually a pretty good defender of Microsoft as i find Windows to do everything i need with a bit of tweaking, but this is what bothers me most about them..... They seem to be trying to be all things to all people and losing focus on their prime objectives. As we hear about Microsofts AV software, Graphics software, Google threats, etc etc we hear about features that keep getting sliced out of Vista to the point that its beginning to sound like XP SP3. IMHO they need to focus on a solid, secure OS core that will run this type of software in a stable, usable environment and let companies like Adobe and Macromedia (oops, one in the same now!) worry about specialized programs like this.
Watch this video: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1578 43
You'll see Expression comes in 3 flavours and is geared at a kind of Flash alternative (working with XAML). Only one of the 3 versions is geared for photoshop type useage. It's more geared towards vector graphics from what I can see.
Nothing costs nothing
I'd personally like Apple or a Mac software outfit like Panic to create a Photoshop competitor. With APIs like Core Image and Core Data available now, much of the groundwork is already laid for a great OS X application.
Aperture is one such application, making heavy use of both Core Image and Core Data.
While not a replacement for all of Photoshop, it replaces much of what a photographer would otherwise do in Photoshop. And that helps clear the way potentially for something smaller that does the remaining, more graphic-design and pixel oriented work in a better way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Don't know what it is? Just Google it." (google.com)
"Old and useless? Ebay that shit." (ebay.com)
"Wanna know more about me? Facebook me." (facebook.com)
"Blog it." (blog.com)
"Sneeze? Use a kleenex."
"Red eye? Photoshop it." (Photoshop)
It's not very easy to unseat the champion when its name is synonymous to the activity it is dominating in.
Yeah, yeah, great. Try using the Gimp for, say, color separations and pre-press stuff. Try using Paint Shop Pro for that.
PhotoShop was always more than cropping pictures and optimizing them for the web! It was designed to prepare images for print production. If you don't need those features, then maybe something else will work. If you DO need those features, then PhotoShop is the standard tool, and as usual, the cost of that tool is in the noise compared with the revenue one derives from using it.
Shadows in the Gimp are easy; just a little bit hard to find.
It's in the Script-fu menu, along with some other goodies: the (simple) process is explained here: Drop shadows and borders in the Gimp.
http://blog.grcm.net/
The tool "Microsoft Acrylic Graphic Designer" or "Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer" was NEVER meant to be even in competition with Adobe, especially Photoshop.
Do the idiots writing this stuff or posting reference to this crap even use Photoshop in their life, let alone the MS product?
As a developer, it was VERY CLEAR from MS to us DEVELOPERS that Acrylic was a new XAML based drawing application FOR MAKING WINDOWS WPF/WinFX APPLICATION AND WEBSITES.
PERIOD.
The features it offers are not even comparable to Photoshop, the closest product on the market that would be 'comparable', would be Deneba Canvas, but Acrylic Designer has NO WHERE NEAR the features set or even tries to.
It is made to make Graphics in XAML format to be put into the "Interactive Designer" or dropped directly in a WPF/Vista/WinFX application, as they are in XAML format.
Why XAML? Because the elements are common objects and not just lines, and can be accessed and programmed to react or move as the application requests, not to be a new 'picture' format or even a SVG killer. I can take a freaking XAML ID/NAME tag and have the line move, reshape, float around, respond to a user clicking it, and all in a 3D Space.
And XAML itself can also define 'behaviors' for the elements in the file format. Not something a normal standard like SVG even tries to do. When SVG is for designing Windows applicaions and can define not only visual elements but also can do object collision and movement, then we will talk.
I get so tired of the "SVG Killer, Flash Killer, Photoshop Killer, Acrobat Killer, blah, blah, blah..."
(And Flash is the closest to reality with expression and XAML, as some people have went on to write little application that are Flash based, although it is not powerful enough to write full scale Windows applications, and here is where the difference lies, not to mention the level of programming difference, the full 3D workspace and design environemnt Microsoft has created.)
Flash will live on doing what it does, but it won't be used to make Windows Applications... Geesh.
MS Expression are tools and technologies for DEVELOPING applications in the new 'Presenation Layer' concept of Windows Vista and WinFX runtime components for XP.
If you don't believe me, actually go use these applications in a 'development' environment (they are free downloads even) and see how they are 'designed' to be the new generation of 'development' tools, adding in elements for 'graphic designers' that are programmible. Your first clue would be to notice that code that lays behind the drawing, and all the items of the drawing have the cute little Object properties that looks more like somthing from Visual Stuido/Visual Basic. And trust me, this is not somthing you find in Photoshop.
If you use Acrylic and think it could ever be a Photoshop killer, then you are smoking something the rest of us are not. It is not even the same type of drawing tool - anyone know Vector/Bitmap differences? Anyone?
Please save our sanity and stop the crap about every thing Mirosoft is doing as being a 'Killer' of some other companies products. Especially development design tools killing Photoshop, jeeez.
Even the new Tablet PC from MS were iPod Killers, how far can you go with this? What next, "The new clock in Windows Vista is a Killer of your home grandfather clock."
If you are posting a link to an article, it should at least be something you 'get' or understand, or you should not be allowed to write the pretext for the link. PERIOD.