Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#101

Post by mprev » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #77

My copy was legit, paid for by work. I made weather icons with it in 8 bit colour with transparency - think of animated GIF's. The hardware was a Compaq Deskpro with 2Mb of video RAM. I was a mere techie with 8 bit home computing experience, not a trained graphic artist. My employers were not the sort to have pirated software on the premises, however, the process if getting a purchase order for £30 software rather th…

Thanks for sharing that. I worked in broadcast tv briefly and remember fondly the strange world of tooling.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#102

Post by badsectoracula » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:14 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #63

StavrosK wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 16? Why do you think that? As another commenter said, Winamp is still the best player for Windows.

Because most of us have a hard time contextualizing and assessing the universal importance of our personal formative experiences.

FWIW i'll echo StavrosK experience with PSP (which i used since Windows 3.1 up until PSP7 well into my early 20s... although i distinctly remember disliking it after a specific version - probably 7 - because its circle tool wasn't making perfect circles anymore) and to a lesser extent, WinAmp - and i've tried both again recently. Even though i use GIMP for many years, i still consider the MDI interface, dockable toolbars and the use of the right button as a secondary tool much easier to use than GIMP (which after using it for more than a decade i also know very well and have developed an intuition for how to do stuff with it). Note that i also find Photoshop's (and Photoshop inspired, like Krita's) UI to also be inferior to PSP.

I'm not that particular about Winamp's exact interface, but i vastly prefer audio players with a compact layout that is made up by an area displaying the current song, a slider for seeking, play, pause, stop, prev, next buttons and a floating playlist you can change and hide on the fly.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#103

Post by duggan » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:15 PM UTC

Animation Shop, PSP's sibling application for creating animations, is something I still keep on a VM for making highly customized gifs - timing for frames, pixel modification, compression, etc.

Corel had made it available via Jasc's FTP server for free a number of years back when I went looking for it again.

I check every now and then, but I've never found anything nearly as useful. Other software seems to have a much reduced feature set, be extremely slow or unstable, and maddeningly, not offer any control over individual frames.

It's possible there's something in the Adobe suite, but I (alone, of seemingly everyone on the Internet) never pirated Photoshop, and wasn't willing to fork out the asking price.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#104

Post by johnvanommen » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #9

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 vec…

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.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#105

Post by mark-r » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

kmeade wrote: post #100

mark-r wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version 5 was also the first one that forced you to pay after the trial period was over. Did that have anything to do with your decision?

No, I was using a paid for version. I just noticed you can buy a brand-new copy of Paintshop Pro for $48 (cheap!) at https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/stand... I'm thinking about it.

It occasionally goes on sale for even cheaper. Plus you can find it bundled for free sometimes, e.g. with a Panasonic camera lens: https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#106

Post by rzzzt » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

ssharp wrote: post #86

gfodor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 both…

Macaw felt close to Fireworks, but is now sadly discontinued (although one can play around with the last released version): http://macaw.co/

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#107

Post by Infernal » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #64

chatmasta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also had to be an expert in multiple levels of the technology stack to build any program with cross platform support. Yes, packages were smaller, but developers had to do way more work and so applications were released less frequently. It would be very hard back then to make a cross platform program as a weekend project.

PSP was not cross platform, it was Windows only. I don't know if that's changed recently but I suspect it hasn't.

I think the point was that it was lean (didn't need 100MB to draw a screen) because it /wasn't/ cross-platform - more tools are cross-platform by default now because it's easy (which leads to the abstractions that give you requirements of 100MB to draw a screen).

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#108

Post by mark-r » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 10:38 PM UTC

Infernal wrote: post #107

mark-r wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSP was not cross platform, it was Windows only. I don't know if that's changed recently but I suspect it hasn't.

I think the point was that it was lean (didn't need 100MB to draw a screen) because it /wasn't/ cross-platform - more tools are cross-platform by default now because it's easy (which leads to the abstractions that give you requirements of 100MB to draw a screen).

Modern software has certainly become abstraction-heavy, hasn't it? It's not just the GUI libraries. Paint Shop Pro was lean and mean because it had to be, the targeted hardware just wouldn't support anything bloated. Not to mention that many copies were downloaded by modem.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#109

Post by deathtrader666 » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

rzzzt wrote: post #106

ssharp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 both…

Macaw felt close to Fireworks, but is now sadly discontinued (although one can play around with the last released version): http://macaw.co/

Macaw is now Invision Studio - http://macaw.co/invision/

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#110

Post by zackmorris » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 11:03 PM UTC

ableal wrote: post #33

stupidcar wrote: post #9

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 vec…

> PSP introduced the concept of raster and vector editing Actually, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperPaint_(Macintosh) is where I first saw that (wiki says released 1986, sounds right.) 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.