This is very impressive, but it got me thinking about what makes something like Photoshop what it is. I feel like there’s a lifecycle for software, especially for commercial offerings:
Provide something novel or simply better than existing tools to solve a real problem or create a new space
As you grow in popularity, provide high quality support, documentation, and training to grow your userbase beyond early adopters and top professionals
Stagnate and rest on your laurels, raking in the cash from your entrenched users (this is mostly a problem with proprietary commercial software, less so with FOSS)
Obviously, Adobe is in that third phase with things like Photoshop. You could argue they’ve been in that phase for over 20 years. Even so, there’s so much more to Photoshop than the UI and capabilities. As someone who’s spent many years as a full-time trainer for Microsoft Office using content from companies who specialize in producing training materials for popular software, I have to assume the same materials and trainers exist for Photoshop and other Adobe tools. As awful as I think Adobe and Microsoft are, there is evidence that they do listen to their professional users and fix and change things to appeal to them.
I want all software to be free and open-source. I want us all to work together to build and support everything we depend on. If we’re going to do that, we still need to provide those aspects that are often associated with big commercial offerings: responsive support, quality documentation, training materials, high visibility of what the users want and a development team ready to implement those things, etc. I believe we can have both. I don’t know if a project like PhotoCraft will play a notable role in that transition, but maybe it can. I want everyone to use Blender, Krita, LibreOffice, etc. They’re going to need a lot of help making that transition. Maybe having something that looks and feels just like Photoshop will tip the scales.
How much of the learning curve is really about how things look and where the tools are? How much of it is when you get stuck and need help?
This is very impressive, but it got me thinking about what makes something like Photoshop what it is. I feel like there’s a lifecycle for software, especially for commercial offerings:
Obviously, Adobe is in that third phase with things like Photoshop. You could argue they’ve been in that phase for over 20 years. Even so, there’s so much more to Photoshop than the UI and capabilities. As someone who’s spent many years as a full-time trainer for Microsoft Office using content from companies who specialize in producing training materials for popular software, I have to assume the same materials and trainers exist for Photoshop and other Adobe tools. As awful as I think Adobe and Microsoft are, there is evidence that they do listen to their professional users and fix and change things to appeal to them.
I want all software to be free and open-source. I want us all to work together to build and support everything we depend on. If we’re going to do that, we still need to provide those aspects that are often associated with big commercial offerings: responsive support, quality documentation, training materials, high visibility of what the users want and a development team ready to implement those things, etc. I believe we can have both. I don’t know if a project like PhotoCraft will play a notable role in that transition, but maybe it can. I want everyone to use Blender, Krita, LibreOffice, etc. They’re going to need a lot of help making that transition. Maybe having something that looks and feels just like Photoshop will tip the scales.
How much of the learning curve is really about how things look and where the tools are? How much of it is when you get stuck and need help?
score 1 · canonical