The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not).
It would be really useful to see a few side-by-side comparisons of how a task is accomplished in LivePicture compared with Photoshop.
Although Photoshop is powerful and feature rich, I find the interface clumsy and awkward (Illustrator, in my opinion, has an even clunkier interface). Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?
Apple's Final Cut Pro clearly had some influence on subsequent releases of Premiere Pro, but there's no serious competitor to Photoshop that I can think of (yes, there are alternatives, but none that are likely to take users away from Photoshop).
What's more, many people simply don't go looking for alternatives. Mastering Photoshop or Illustrator will stand you in good stead in the employment market if you're looking for a visual design job. And if you get stuck with an application task, there's a good chance you'll find a solution by searching for it online. There is an absolutely enormous number of supporting resources around Adobe's Creative Suite of products: tutorials, training, books, discussion sites etc.
All that helps to maintain the status quo and makes it much harder for competing apps to gain attention.
>Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?
It's probably more a case of pros who have invested a great deal of time in adapting themselves to Photoshop's workflow and quirks would be really upset if they rethought the interface--however excellent a job they did.
FWIW, Adobe did a really excellent job when they had a clean sheet of paper with Lightroom, although it took a couple iterations to get there. (Mostly--it's more modal than I'd prefer in some respects.)
> The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not).
The scary thing is that some of these great features can never be used without fear of a huge legal attack over patents.
EDIT:
>Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?
I don't think so. I think the enormous user base prevents them from changing the interface. That's probably a good thing, even if the interface is sub-optimal.
AutoCAD has a very powerful interface, with a mix of WIMP and typed commands, with some scripting.
In theory GIMP being open source means anyone can give it a new interface, but even though the interface is one of the biggest reasons many people give for not liking the GIMP there are few projects that have given it a saner interface.
Comments
The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not).
It would be really useful to see a few side-by-side comparisons of how a task is accomplished in LivePicture compared with Photoshop.
Although Photoshop is powerful and feature rich, I find the interface clumsy and awkward (Illustrator, in my opinion, has an even clunkier interface). Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?
Apple's Final Cut Pro clearly had some influence on subsequent releases of Premiere Pro, but there's no serious competitor to Photoshop that I can think of (yes, there are alternatives, but none that are likely to take users away from Photoshop).
What's more, many people simply don't go looking for alternatives. Mastering Photoshop or Illustrator will stand you in good stead in the employment market if you're looking for a visual design job. And if you get stuck with an application task, there's a good chance you'll find a solution by searching for it online. There is an absolutely enormous number of supporting resources around Adobe's Creative Suite of products: tutorials, training, books, discussion sites etc.
All that helps to maintain the status quo and makes it much harder for competing apps to gain attention.
>Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?
It's probably more a case of pros who have invested a great deal of time in adapting themselves to Photoshop's workflow and quirks would be really upset if they rethought the interface--however excellent a job they did.
FWIW, Adobe did a really excellent job when they had a clean sheet of paper with Lightroom, although it took a couple iterations to get there. (Mostly--it's more modal than I'd prefer in some respects.)
> The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not).
The scary thing is that some of these great features can never be used without fear of a huge legal attack over patents.
EDIT:
>Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?
I don't think so. I think the enormous user base prevents them from changing the interface. That's probably a good thing, even if the interface is sub-optimal.
AutoCAD has a very powerful interface, with a mix of WIMP and typed commands, with some scripting.
In theory GIMP being open source means anyone can give it a new interface, but even though the interface is one of the biggest reasons many people give for not liking the GIMP there are few projects that have given it a saner interface.