While Paint Shop Pro 6 is the most beloved version, PSP 7 and (particularly) 8, took the software in a very interesting direction. I remain convinced that this directly lead to Corel acquiring it with the unstated but definite intention of crippling it.
See, 6 and below were fairly traditional raster-based editors. But starting in 7, and with substantial improvements in 8, PSP introduced the concept of raster and vector editing capabilities, in the same document. You could create raster layers, and do traditional drawing and filtering, and you could also create vector layers, where you could draw shapes and paths which would remain editable and would be rasterised on the fly.
It took a while to get your head around this capability, but once you did, it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about. Coupled with the rate at which its general raster editing capabilities were improving, I suspect Corel feared not just that PSP was becoming a more serious competitor in the raster space, but that it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.
In the past few years, mixed paradigm vector/raster editors like Sketch have become more common. But download a copy of PSP 8 and you'll see that Jasc got there years before the rest of the industry, to such an extent it meant PSP had to be killed.
Similarly, Fireworks felt like it died the day Adobe acquired Macromedia. While it had a number of versions released after that it never felt like it was getting very much attention. A shame.
Yep, it still is puzzling why Fireworks never got the recognition it deserved -- the amount of unnecessary suffering UI designers went through for 10 years they could have avoided by just switching tools is mind boggling.
I don't think it ever got enough recognition for handling UI designs and everyone just gravitated towards Photoshop or Illustrator.
I think its heyday was when HTML table layouts were still how you had to layout websites and it's slicing capabilities were really convenient. I suspect that was the killer feature for a lot of people but once CSS layouts took over, Fireworks really fell out of favor and Adobe never bothered to reposition it as a UI tool.
I still use it to this day for my limited editing/mockup needs. The new workflow seems to be mockup tool (like Balsamiq) -> Photoshop design -> HTML/CSS, but for my needs, I can get reasonably close enough in both layout and design in Fireworks just do Fireworks -> HTML/CSS.
I don't know if a tool that is close enough to Fireworks to be a good replacement has come around, but I know it's definitely not Photoshop, which I find far too complicated for the basic tasks I need.
It's still available if you dig around on Adobe's site.
Despite having the full creative suite I still turn to Fireworks for quick jobs sometimes when I need to do a fast crop or slice job, or put together a simple 'constructed' image element.
Funny enough, at first I thought that the article was about that, although the name didn't seem quite right, and obviously the years and outcome were wrong.
SuperPaint was by far the best graphics editor I ever used, on any platform. Nothing today even comes close in terms of usability, although many apps today beat it in features. I was extremely disappointed when Adobe acquired Aldus and killed it as I knew they would.
There is a searing pain I feel when I know precisely what I want to do in "modern" editors and simply can't find the command buried in the menus somewhere, and have to resort to forums to find the answer. I never got that with SuperPaint.
> SuperPaint was by far the best graphics editor I ever used, on any platform. Nothing today even comes close in terms of usability,
That was my idea too, but since my experience with graphics editors is ridiculously small, I shut up about it. But yeah, it was very nice to use, and I haven't met its match since.
I wonder if that's the reason that Corel acquired Xara back in the nineties?
I discovered the program around 1995, after Corel acquired them. I figured it would be a 'cheap' version of Corel Draw. Instead, it was quite a bit better! Particularly for the time, there was nothing faster that I was aware of. (In 1995 memory was prohibitively expensive, and Xara was very efficient.)
I still use it to this day, though the software reverted back to it's original owner long ago.
Not exactly. Fireworks was a raster-based graphics program that behaved like a vector program -- everything you drew was an object that could be moved backward and forward on its layer, with opacity, clipping, blending style, etc., set independently. There was no real distinction between vector shapes, text shapes, and raster shapes; all operations were available on any graphics object at any point in time.
The clearer way to describe it is that Fireworks was a reuse of the Macromedia Flash drawing engine. So you had shapes, and these shapes had z-axis positions, a stack of active filters, and a reference to a texture.
A Fireworks PNG document, then, was a pile of shapes (just like a Flash animation frame), with each shape referred to as a "layer"; along with a pile of mutable texture data for the shapes to use, with each texture bound 1:1 to a particular rectangle shape, with the shape and its texture together referred to as a "raster image."
Every time you changed anything, the whole thing just got re-rendered onto a canvas using the Flash rendering logic. When you saved the PNG "document", it kept all the document chunks, but added the baked rendered representation it had been using for previewing as a basic PNG chunk at the end of the document. Thus, it was kind of an actual PNG file. (But the flattened PNG chunk was only "the document" as much as the JPEG cover image inside an .epub is "the book.")
I'd forgotten that sort of clever craziness with Fireworks PNG files! For a while after discovering the program I thought, "Wow, PNG does a whole lot of neat stuff I didn't think it could." Later I learned, no, Fireworks was just stuffing a whole lot of Fireworks-specific data into private chunks. :)
> it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.
PSP is only potentially a replacement for PhotoPaint, which was always bundled with Draw. It would never be a threat to their other raster tools like Painter. Nor would Draw be threatened by a tool with vectors grafted on. Corel just wanted to bring in a successful product for the entry level market.
Corel also notably let PhotoPaint wither on the vine even though it was vastly superior to the contemporaneous Photoshop version in its earlier incarnations. They just weren't willing to invest the dev resources to add more sophistication.
Checking wikipedia PSP got vector tools in version 6, released in 1999. Photoshop got them also in version 6, released in 2000. So, yeah, PSP was pushing it early, but it didn't take that long for PS to get on the train too.
Yes, PSP 6 was the first release with vector capabilities. That's what made it so great for web development. I'm not sure what happened with the renderer in version 7, but the editor lost its pixel-perfect precision and became too hard to edit mixed graphics in a WYSIWYG way.
Photoshop's raster functionality was very limited? Photoshop surely has some of the best raster drawing functionality in any product? It's the core functionality.
> the painting tools and the commands that are used to add effects can be applied only on raster layers. If you try to use a raster tool while a vector layer is selected, Corel® PaintShop Pro prompts you to convert the vector layer into a raster layer.
See, 6 and below were fairly traditional raster-based editors. But starting in 7, and with substantial improvements in 8, PSP introduced the concept of raster and vector editing capabilities, in the same document. You could create raster layers, and do traditional drawing and filtering, and you could also create vector layers, where you could draw shapes and paths which would remain editable and would be rasterised on the fly.
It took a while to get your head around this capability, but once you did, it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about. Coupled with the rate at which its general raster editing capabilities were improving, I suspect Corel feared not just that PSP was becoming a more serious competitor in the raster space, but that it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.
In the past few years, mixed paradigm vector/raster editors like Sketch have become more common. But download a copy of PSP 8 and you'll see that Jasc got there years before the rest of the industry, to such an extent it meant PSP had to be killed.