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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

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

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

StavrosK wrote: post #6

PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of the golden age of user experience for me. They had a lot of functionality but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

Seconded. My memories from those days were that software offered more functionality while being leaner. Doubly so when we compare the old software to web versions of today, that are all feature poor and resource heavy.

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

#62

Post by ellyagg »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
pvg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old were you when you encountered them? Both are important programs but this sounds a little bit like people's recollections of their favourite games.

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

As a counterpoint, I couldn't stand WinAmp. To me, its interface was a mess of tiny inscrutable controls. When I started using SoundJam on the Mac, which was later bought and turned into iTunes, it was a breath of fresh air.

iTunes has obviously turned into something else at the time, but SoundJam was fantastic.

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

#63

Post by pvg »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
pvg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old were you when you encountered them? Both are important programs but this sounds a little bit like people's recollections of their favourite games.

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.

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

#64

Post by mark-r »

chatmasta wrote: post #10
StavrosK wrote: post #6

PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of the golden age of user experience for me. They had a lot of functionality but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

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.

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

#65

Post by fdej »

StavrosK wrote: post #6

PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of the golden age of user experience for me. They had a lot of functionality but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

Agreed. I still boot up my Windows computer just to use PSP 6 occasionally when I need to do some raster graphics editing!

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

#66

Post by l_t »

rhymenoceros wrote: post #57
l_t wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't seen it, check out foobar2000 [1]. It was created by the same dude that made the original Winamp (which is now owned by Yahoo, IIRC). [1]: https://www.foobar2000.org/

According to WinAmp folklore, he was a contractor for WinAmp 3 skins and not necessarily a full-time dev: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192 You might be thinking of Justin Frankel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel The connection is still kind of cool though!

Ah, thanks for the correction. I remember being told they had the same creator; that's what got me interested in foobar2000 in the first place, years ago.

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

#67

Post by agumonkey »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #22

I apologize if this an insensitive question, but a Google search wasn't very enlightening. Did Robert Voit die, or was this prompted solely by the author's reminiscence?

I worried about the same. I'm very happy he's alright.

I forgot about PSP. But Reading about it brings lots of memories. It was a great program, just like its author.

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

#69

Post by chipotle_coyote »

cpach wrote: post #15
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…

Wasn’t Macromedia Fireworks also capable of doing both raster and vector?

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.

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

#70

Post by untog »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #28
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…

> it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about Fireworks was also doing this around the same time but seems to have been completely been forgotten because of Photoshops dominance.

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.
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