Photoshop 1.0 Recreated On iPhone

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Photoshop 1.0 Recreated On iPhone

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 20, 2010 @04:00PM from the when-time-loops-collide dept.

Dotnaught writes "Photoshop co-creator Russell Brown asked Ansca Mobile to re-create Photoshop 1.0, originally introduced in 1990, for the iPhone. The resulting app, created in three days using the Corona SDK, was distributed to 50 attendees of an event celebrating Photoshop's 20th anniversary. Programmer Evan Kirchhoff in a blog post explains that Ansca took the project on to prove its claims about how Corona makes iPhone development faster."

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Photoshop without patent problems! by H4x0r+Jim+Duggan · 2010-02-20 16:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

Photoshop from exactly 20 years ago - the only way to reliably avoid software patent problems!

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1. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by bhtooefr · 2010-02-20 16:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Expiration is 20 years after patent application or 17 years after patent acceptance, whichever comes last. (That is, you're guaranteed 20 years after filing for the patent, if it's accepted. If it takes more than 3 years to work through the patent office, you're guaranteed 17 years after it's accepted.)
2. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by SCPRedMage · 2010-02-20 16:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Poorly.
  
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  My sig can beat up your sig.
3. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by H4x0r+Jim+Duggan · 2010-02-20 16:42 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  how do patents work in america?
  Easy. You write something that you think it too long and complicated for a patent examiner to fully undertand in the 17 hours he/she will be allocated. Then it gets granted and for twenty years you can threaten anyone that developers or distributes software that does anything resembling your patent. (You, the writer of a patent, are a protected innovator. Those guys writing software are nasty pirates - watch out!)
  When someone receives your threat letter, they become formally aware of your patent and they now risk triple damages plus paying your lawyers' fees! Win! To avoid this, they could ask their own lawyer for a certificate of non-violation, which costs $40,000. So, if the original letter (which cost 39c to send) asks for $35,000, there's a good chance you'll simply get your money. (As explained by patent attorney Dan Ravicher in this presentation)
  Or, you could contest the patent and kill your company by spending 5 years paying legal fees and having a cloud of uncertainty around your business making you untouchable for investors. (As is the case with the 1-click patent)
  But, don't worry, patent law does contain a consideration for the public: the nightmare ends after 20 years, so that's why we're all really excited now about Photoshop 1.0 finally becoming patent-free. I hear there's a great operating system that will be patent-free in 2015!
  
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4. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by Annymouse+Cowherd · 2010-02-20 17:48 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  If you RTFA, it says that the app was commissioned by Adobe.
5. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by Evan+Kirchhoff · 2010-02-20 17:51 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  To be clear, this was done for the official Photoshop anniversary event, and demoed by Russell Brown at that show. The number of copies we gave out afterwards was limited by Apple's ad-hoc install process for iPhone dev accounts. A wider release would obviously involve some lawyers signing off on things, not to mention all the interface style guide violations in putting 1990 Mac UI on iPhone (I have no idea how App Store reviewers would react to that!)
6. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by Ihmhi · 2010-02-20 18:01 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  Clearly he's talking about Apple's PinkOS.
  
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7. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by toriver · 2010-02-20 22:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You forgot the other way:
  1. You write a confusing patent application that will take two years to process. You submit it in year X.
  2. You keep amending and altering that application every year so the process starts anew. It still shows the X year of filing.
  3. Someone who is actually innovative invents something. You rapidly amend your patent so that it describes that invention.
  4. The patent is eventually awarded, and you sue the actual inventor for infringement because as everyone can see, you held a patent since year X on that particular idea.
8. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by WrongSizeGlass · 2010-02-21 02:21 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Knowing Adobe they'd rebrand it as iPhone CS 1 and want to charge $379.99 for it.
  
  I suppose Adobe Download Manager would soon follow ... oy carumba!
9. Re:Photoshop without patent problems! by FartKnockerz · 2010-02-21 04:46 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  how do patents work in america?
  
  Not very well.
oblig "gimp vs photoshop"/"iphone vs n900" by Sir_Lewk · 2010-02-20 16:06 · Score: 4, Informative

And my N900 can run the latest and greatest version of the Gimp. Big whoop.

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1. Re:oblig "gimp vs photoshop"/"iphone vs n900" by WrongSizeGlass · 2010-02-21 02:28 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  In the end, your post is the perfect example of a troll.
  Hello, Pot. I see you've met Kettle ...
2. Re:oblig "gimp vs photoshop"/"iphone vs n900" by mdwh2 · 2010-02-21 02:45 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  But where was the front page news about GIMP for the N900?
  Oh sorry, I forgot, this is Slashdot. Nostalgia for Apple fans, and stuff that hasn't been released yet.
So now by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-20 16:10 · Score: 5, Funny

you can edit your photos while driving
Re:Oh no, this means in two years... by JorDan+Clock · 2010-02-20 16:15 · Score: 4, Funny

Well, since the Photoshop took about 2 years to reach version 1.0, we can expect Windows 3.1 for the iPhone in another 3 days. In a month we'll have Windows 7 and CS4! Why hasn't anyone thought of this amazing SDK before?!
well by drDugan · 2010-02-20 16:22 · Score: 4, Funny

I'm surprised it was approved by Apple.
1. Re:well by mr_lizard13 · 2010-02-21 00:05 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  This is great news!
  
  A sure sign that Apple will approve the other pending Adobe apps.
  
  --
  "We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Well... by Mike+Hicks · 2010-02-20 16:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

...I suppose I'm the only person who wants someone to recreate Claris CAD.
1. Re:Well... by gyrogeerloose · 2010-02-20 17:20 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  ...I suppose I'm the only person who wants someone to recreate Claris CAD.
  Speaking as someone who was once forced to use Claris CAD daily in his job as a technical illustrator, I'd say "yes."
  
  --
  This ain't rocket surgery.
Re:Unimpressed by Urza9814 · 2010-02-20 16:35 · Score: 2, Informative

The iPhone can do doom, quite easily. And Wolfenstein. And Quake. Hell, my third generation iPod can run Doom - yes, the one with 4 color (white, black, and two grays) screen.
Re:Unimpressed by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-20 16:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

Way to *completely* miss the point.
It's not that a re-creation of Photoshop 1.0 can run on the iPhone. It's that it look three days to write from scratch. It's a demo of the SDK capabilities, not the iPhone's capabilities.
Re:Control area by Evan+Kirchhoff · 2010-02-20 17:20 · Score: 5, Informative

I lost a little respect for the developer when I read that. Pixels are meaningless as they are affected by the display's DPI. Considering Verizon doesn't even sell the iPhone, obviously their style guidelines are specific to some other hardware.
Yeah, I knew I wrote that part a little too quickly! More specifically, Verizon was recommending that figure on circa-2008 guidelines aimed at their earliest iPhone-style touchscreen phone, which had a DPI that was more or less the same as iPhone, so it's a reasonable rough-and-ready number to cite. (I was at Adobe working on FlashCast, aka "Verizon Dashboard", at the time, so I randomly happen to remember that guideline.) The iPhone HIG is obviously a better reference, but in this app it's sort of moot anyway because the real limit was "as much touch area as we can squeeze out of 20-year-old WIMP GUI". If I can figure out how to boil all this into a few words, I'll clarify the article.
Photoshop of a Monochrome Mac? by marciot · 2010-02-20 17:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously? What's the point in that?
Although, if anyone know where I can find a copy of this for my Mac Plus, let me know...
1. Re:Photoshop of a Monochrome Mac? by FranTaylor · 2010-02-20 18:27 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  I should introduce you to my friends Floyd and Steinberg.
2. Re:Photoshop of a Monochrome Mac? by ultramk · 2010-02-20 19:14 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Well, yes, it ran ok on an SE/30 if memory serves... however it was mostly only useful on that platform to people doing 2-bit graphics or for someone who was just doing file format conversions... Mind you at the time 2-bit graphics were no laughing matter considering the lack of color output options or existing standards for same. A lot of DTP was output in 2-bit, until people started outputting gray-scale photos etc on laser printers, and there was nearly no electronic publishing method like the www. People forget that it was only well after the IIx came out that 24(and then 32)-bit color was even supported at the system level. It was all 8-bit before that.
  BTW: here are the original sys reqs for PS 1.0.7:
  Macintosh SE, SE/30, II, IIx, IIci, IIcx with a minimum of 2 megabytes of RAM
  System software 6.0.3
  Oddly, the SE had the same 8mhz 68k processor as the Plus, and both were upgradable over the 2MB minimum, so I'm not sure why the Plus was excluded. Might be worth a try.
  
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3. Re:Photoshop of a Monochrome Mac? by WWWWolf · 2010-02-21 01:59 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously? What's the point in that?
  Photoshop was made for the needs of the publishing industry, not specifically photographers. Photographers would want precision and fidelity at every turn, which would definitely limit the program's usefulness, but printers just care that photographs get printed to the paper in a way that it still looks good. In 1990, most of newspapers were black and white. Heck, in 2010, a lot of newspapers are still black and white - printing in one ink is cheaper than printing in four.
  If you want to process photographs for black and white newspaper, all you need is the ability to touch up greyscale images - or, you can scan in colour photographs, and process individual components, as long as the end result is represented in greyscale. Going from greyscale to B/W, you get dithering on screen, and you want halftones on final printed page.
  Obviously there's much use for graphics editing on B/W, even when the application is obviously not as capable as the current programs.
That's not Photoshop by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-20 18:11 · Score: 5, Informative

It's a neat tribute, but that's not Photoshop.
It's just a Photoshop startup screen and a fudged reproduction of the "Levels" tool.
I don't see that taking 3 days on the project was a great achievement. He could have probably done it using Apple's developer tools in the same time period.
Again, I'm not poo pooing the idea or execution. It's sweet and I'd enjoy messing with it on my own iPhone. But it's not Photoshop and I don't think that it effectively demonstrates that their product speeds up iPhone development.
The description implies some advantage in memory-management with that image-swapping and masking going on in the demo, but I'd have to reproduce the demo in Xcode and run the two apps side by side to figure out if that's so and I suspect that for an app of that modest complexity any difference that would make would be imperceptible on all but the earliest iPhones.
1. Re:That's not Photoshop by commodoresloat · 2010-02-20 19:31 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  You're right; that's not real Photoshop at all. It's clearly photoshopped.
Re:Unimpressed by grumbel · 2010-02-20 18:47 · Score: 2, Informative

This doesn't look as impressive as it sounds. It seems all the app can do is display a histogram and adjust the levels and then save the result. So its more like a little toy then a full application.
Oh really? PS1 "Real pros never need undo" by dbIII · 2010-02-20 19:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

Photoshop doesn't have a simple GUI either, nor does AutoCAD and a pile of other things that give you more options than can be easily thought of all at the same time.
Sometimes people just have to stop whining and read the manual. Gimp gets a rough deal because all those people that spent ages learning photoshop look at gimp and get angry about learning where each option is all over again.
I must be getting close to twenty years since I as a complete photoshop newbie asked on a newsgroup where "undo" was and was mercilessly flamed by about a dozen that said things like "real professionals will never need undo". Photoshop 1 was obviously crap compared to both the current photoshop and the current gimp. Later it was fairly dismal compared to the gimp of the time with no undo and very limited support for different image formats - even though gimp was aimed at simpler stuff than photoshop. I never intended to be a "pro" and the gimp did the job I wanted so I've never been able to justify the expense since.
In this case "Colors" is probably the better app to compare it with on an iPhone or NDS anyway.
Steve says... by Nyder · 2010-02-20 20:15 · Score: 2, Funny

Steve Jobs must be hating Adobe now.
Them with their old tech, trying to bring it to new tech.

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