"I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
jwz.livejournal.com
"I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#2PSD was never intended to be a data interchange format: it is the serialization format of a single program that has more individual unrelated features that actual people rely on than almost any other piece of software and has maintained striking amounts of backwards compatibility and almost unbroken forwards compatibility during its over two decades of existence. This product's "file format" needs to be critiqued in this context, along with similar mega-programs like Office.
I am thereby having a difficult time fathoming why anyone would think that a PSD file is thereby going to be some well-organized file format that they should easily be able to parse from their own application is just naively wishful thinking: even other products from Adobe have limitations while opening these files; to truly manipulate these files you really need to be highly-compatible with Photoshop's particular editing model (hence the conceptual difference between these two classes of file format).
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#3Is this a comment or rant ?
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#4PSD was never intended to be a data interchange format: it is the serialization format of a single program that has more individual unrelated features that actual people rely on than almost any other piece of software and has maintained striking amounts of backwards compatibility and almost unbroken forwards compatibility during its over two decades of existence. This product's "file format" needs to be critiqued in…
Perhaps some people care more about what would be convenient to them than whatever laziness or lock-in Adobe intended. Or maybe they believe that Photoshop might have better interchange with future versions of itself if its file format was sane.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#5PSD was never intended to be a data interchange format: it is the serialization format of a single program that has more individual unrelated features that actual people rely on than almost any other piece of software and has maintained striking amounts of backwards compatibility and almost unbroken forwards compatibility during its over two decades of existence. This product's "file format" needs to be critiqued in…
Perhaps some people care more about what would be convenient to them than whatever laziness or lock-in Adobe intended. Or maybe they believe that Photoshop might have better interchange with future versions of itself if its file format was sane.
What decade was Photoshop first written in and how long did it take to open a file?
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#6I like the 'sanity check' at the bottom. :)
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps some people care more about what would be convenient to them than whatever laziness or lock-in Adobe intended. Or maybe they believe that Photoshop might have better interchange with future versions of itself if its file format was sane.
What decade was Photoshop first written in and how long did it take to open a file?
This is a very important point to make: data interchange formats typically much slower to manipulate and require much more RAM to do so, as they will require mapping back and forth to the internal data structures actually used at runtime. If you take a look at an older (pre-"x" formats) Office document, you will find a lot of its complexity (in addition to the aforementioned backwards compatibility and "numerous unrelated features" issue) relates to figuring out how to edit and resave enormous documents quickly.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#8Has been on HN before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575122) but it was years ago. I mention this just in case others are having the same feeling of deja vu as me.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#9PSD was never intended to be a data interchange format: it is the serialization format of a single program that has more individual unrelated features that actual people rely on than almost any other piece of software and has maintained striking amounts of backwards compatibility and almost unbroken forwards compatibility during its over two decades of existence. This product's "file format" needs to be critiqued in…
This is true, but there are container formats just as old like .mov that are quite nice to work with. (While your still sniggering, keep in mind that .mov has a lot in common with MPEG4.)
Whenever I need to write a binary serialization format, I usually copy .mov's tree of structs format, it's ridiculously fast, extensible, and keeps people away from C++ terrible stream operators/Java's BinaryReaderWhateverFactoryErrorProneOneIntAtATimeReader.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#10I appreciate the first code comment more after the introduction:
if(sign!='8BIM') break; // sanity check