I see the point you're trying to make, however the increase in features (and their complexity) plus the size of the average graphic that a high-end professional has maybe grown by 300-500% since the 90s. In fact I'll tell you what: I'll give you a growth of 10,000% in file sizes and feature complexity since the since the 90s...

... computational power has grown ~%259,900 since the 90s.

The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster. Optimising the code AND introducing incredibly hardware to the consumer market should see Photoshop loading in milliseconds, in my opinion.

>The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster.

Has it though? Without measurements this is just idle talk.

And I've used Photoshop in the 90s and I use it today ocassionally. I remember having 90s sized web pictures (say, 1024x768) and waiting for a filter to be applied for tens of seconds - which I get instantly today with 24MP and more...

And if we're into idle talk I've always found Photoshop faster in large images and projects than competitors, including "lightweight" ones.

It's hella more optimized than them.

In any case, some e.g. image filter application (that takes, e.g. 20 seconds vs 1 minute with them) just calls some optimized C++ code (perhaps with some asm thrown in) that does just that.

The rest of the "bloat" (in the UI, feature count, etc) has absolutely no bearing as to whether a filter or an operation (like blend, crop, etc) runs fast or not. At worst, it makes going around in the UI to select the operations you want slower.

And in many cases the code implementing a basic operation, filter, etc, hasn't even been changed since 2000 or so (if anything, it was optimized further, taken to use the GPU, etc).

I recall my dad requiring overnight sessions to have Photoshop render a particular filter on his Pentium 166MHz. That could easily take upwards of an hour, and a factor 10 more for the final edit. He'd be working on one photo for a week.

To me it feels as though the last decade and a half computational power has not grown vertically. Instead Intel and AMD have grown computational power horizontally (i.e adding more cores). I'm looking at the difference the M1 has had on compute performance as a sign X86 strayed.

It has also grown substantially vertically: single-core speeds keep going up (about 10x from a decade and a half ago), even as core count increases. (and M1 is not substantially faster than the top x86 cores, the remarkable thing is how power efficient it is at those speeds).

This was state of the art 15 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) Modern processors are nowhere near 10x faster single core. Maybe 4x.

If you take into account performance/watt you do get 10x or better.

The 3.4ghz P4 was released 2004 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_proc...

If the trend had continued we would have 1500Ghz cores by now.

Clock speed != single-threaded performance. Clock speeds plateaued a long time ago, single threaded performance is still improving exponentially (by being able to execute multiple instructions in an instruction stream in parallel, as well as execute the same instructions in less clock cycles), though the exponent approximately halved around 2004 (if the trend had continued we would be at about a 100-500x improvement by now).

https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data

Hard to say it's still "exponential"...what do you think the current constant doubling period is now?

Here's the single thread raw data from that repo. If you take into account clock speed increase (which, as you agree, have plateaued) we're looking at maybe a 2x increase in instructions per clock for conventional int (not vectorized) workloads.

Is there even another 2x IPC increase possible? At any time scale?

https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data/blob/m...

No one is choosing Photoshop over competitiors because of load time

And somehow Photopea is fast, free and in browser and suffices for 85% of whatever people do in Adobe Photoshop.

Those people for whom Photopea is fast and suffices didn't need Photoshop in the first place.

Opening PSDs is a big reason. A lot of designers will send PSDs and usually you also want them to check layers, extract backgrounds etc.

Yes, I use Photoshop because, as it happens, I need to do 100% of my job.

Back in the day I was using Intel Celeron 333 MHz and then AMD Duron 800 MHz.

I did not know how to use Winamp playlists because Winamp has been "an instant" app for me, I just clicked on a song and it played within miliseconds. That was my flow of using Winamp for years. This did not change between the Celeron and Duron, the thing was instant on both Celeron and Duron.

Then Winamp 3 came out and I had to use playlists because a song once clicked took good second or two to start playing. Winamp 5 from 2018 still starts slower than my beloved 2.73* did 20 years ago. On Celeron 333 and 5400 RPM HDD with 256 MB of RAM. I think even the good old Winamp 2.x is not as fast as it was on Windows 98/XP.

Something went wrong.

* not sure if it was 2.73, but I think so

Note: I realise Winamp 3 was crappy as hell, but still...

This is why I did choose and stick to coolplayer at the time (before I converted to Linux) : no install, so light, so fast, and it had everything I needed. I loved it when I could find such an elegant a versatile app. I don't need to get "more" every 6-12 months.

I learned that every time you gain something, you also loose something without realizing it, because you take it for granted.

Winamp 2.73 is still my default player and works Win10 Pro 64x build $LATEST. I will never change. It is 2MB pure gold.

This is sad to read :(

I remember having a 486 my self and everything being so damn snappy. Sigh.

Are you me? Perhaps a little bit later on and a different set of signifiers (foobar2000/xp/celeron 1.7) but the same idea. Things were so much snappier back then than on my previously-SOTA MBPR 2019. Sigh.

I was at a graphic design tradeshow back in the mid 90's and there was a guy there demonstrating this Photoshop alternative called Live Picture or Live Photos or something like that. And he had a somewhat large, at the time, print image on the screen, probably 16mb or so, and was zooming in and out and resizing the window and it was redrawing almost instantly.

This was AMAZING.

Photoshop at the time would take many many seconds to zoom in/out.

One person in the group asked, "Yeah, but how much memory is in that machine?"

The guy hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said "It's got a bit, but not a lot, just 24mb."

"Yeah, well that explains it." Nobody had 24mb of RAM at that time. Our "big" machine had 16mb.

Live Picture was the first to use what I think are called image proxies, where you can have an arbitrarily large image and only work with the screen-image sized image. Once you have applied all the changes and click save, it will then grind through the full size image if needed.

A feature that Photoshop has since added, but it appeared in Live Picture first.

Yup, that must have been it. I think Adobe implemented that as a feature into Photoshop within a year of us seeing that other software.

This might be a long shot, but did the demo include zooming in on a picture of a skull to show a message written on one of the teeth? If so, I've been trying to find a video of it for years.

No, it was a photo of a building. The "demo" was the guy right there playing with the software, no video.

Perhaps, but size of photos should affect load times when starting the app (and in my opinion, so shouldn’t most feature either, but that depends on your architecture I suppose).

> Size of photos grown exponentially as well.

Photoshop can grow them itself and the below looks no and thread are amazing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448986

Yeah Jonathan Blow isn't exactly a luminary in computer science. I once read him going on a meltdown over linux ports because "programming is hard". This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?"

The entire point of computers is to make things easy.

The Apple question "why isn't this easy" is missing from 95% of UX in modern software. Stop acting as if software devs are the only users of software. And even then: computers should do work and not produce work or mental overhead.

> The Apple question "why isn't this easy" is missing from 95% of UX in modern software.

I switched to a MacBook at work a few months ago, and it's been an epic of frustration and Googling: e.g.,

1. I set the keyboard layout to UK PC, but it kept switching back to default. (I was accidentally mashing a keyboard shortcut designed to do just that. I've since disabled it.)

2. Clicking on a link or other web-page element will, occasionally and apparently randomly, take me back a page or two in my history rather than opening the link or activating the element. (At least in Chrome: I've not used another browser on macOS yet.)

3. Command-tabbing to a minimised application does not, as one would naively expect, automatically unminimise it. Instead I'm left staring at an apparently unchanged screen.

4. If I open Finder in a given folder, there is, as best can tell, no easy way to navigate to that folder's parent.

Now arguably #1 was the fault of my own ignorance (though some kind of obvious feedback as to what was happening and why would have been nice), and #2 may be down to Google rather than Apple.

But #3 and #4 are plain bad design, bordering on user-hostile.

So far I'm not seeing that Apple's reputation for superior UX is justified, at least not in laptops.

Window switching in OS X is so unintuitive it drives me MAD when you are remoting into a Mac.

Finder is just god awful and does all it can to obscure your actual filesystem location but the go to folder (cmd+g?) can get you where you need to go.

The Apple reputation was absolutely justified back in the OS9 era, and the early iPhone as well. However both OS X and iOS7 and beyond were huge steps backwards in usability.

At this point I think Apple still deserves their reputation for superior UX, however that's a result of how epically bad Google, MS, and Facebook are at UX, not Apple doing a great job like they used to.

for 4. ...as best can tell, no easy way to navigate to that folder's parent

You can add a button to the toolbar in Finder (customize it from options) that when dropped down will show the complete path to the current folder as a list. You can use that to move up the tree.

Cmd-Up brings you to the parent folder.

You can also cmd + click the current directory name in the menu bar to get the same menu.

Are you implying Apple software and devices are "easy"?

I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience.

Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing.

>Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing.

It's a 5 minute process, and there's very little to it that it's not optimized for ease. Any champ can do it, and millions do.

Not sure what you're on about.

>I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience.

Yes, all those people are delluded.

Clearly you've never tried it, because it's certainly not 5 minutes, it's optimized for selling you bullshit Apple services and it's buggy as hell, with no feedback to the user why everything is broken and why you're having to re-authenticate five times in a row.

And good luck if you're setting up a family account for several devices with different iOS versions. You're gonna really need it.

>Clearly you've never tried it, because it's certainly not 5 minutes, it's optimized for selling you bullshit Apple services and it's buggy as hell

I've tried it tons of times, have over 20 iOS/macOS devices over the years, and for some pervese reason, on macOS/OS X I like to install every major update on a clean disk too (and then re-import my data. It's an old Windows 95/XP-era reflex), so I do it at least once every year for my main driver (plus different new iOS devices).

What part of this sounds difficult?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u0x8Kf6j4

And the whole "optimized for selling you bullshit Apple services" is a couple of screens you can skip with one click -- and you might want to legitimately use too.

Honestly, literally millions of people do this every year, and for most of them, it's like 10 minutes, plus the time waiting for the iCloud restore. Even my dad was able to set up his new iPad, and he's as techophobic as it gets.

Technophobic people are exactly the target audience that has a huge tolerance for broken software built on piles of abusive bullshit.

My father has very little patience for broken things, software or otherwise, so I'm really not sure what you're talking about.

It is definitly easier than configuring any GNU/Linux distribution.

Watching the video that coldtea posted, no, it is not. Ubuntu and most of its derivatives have very easy installers, and take a fraction of the time. The video didn't even include the time it would take to read and understand all the terms and conditions!

Assuming one wants a partial working computer after installation.

I don't know what you mean by this- care to elaborate? I have several fully working computers running Ubuntu derivatives without having to do anything after the install.

I bet none of them is a laptop.

I currently have two laptops, one a Lenovo from work with Kubuntu and the other cheap Asus with KDE Neon. Both required no additional work to be fully working after install.

>This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?"

So the kind of minds we want?

"Why isn't this easy?" should be the bread and butter question of a programmer...

Except for problems that are hard. I wholeheartedly disagree, Blow showed many times he has not the right mindset.

> This is the kind of minds Apple enable, i.e. "why isn't this easy?"

I dunno, personally that's why I've used Apple products for the past decade, and I think it's also maybe part of why they have a 2T market cap, and are the most liquid publicly traded stock in the world?

So making simplistic products that treat users as dumb is profitable, yeah, I agree with that.

Believe it or not, lots of people have more important things to do with their computers than dick with them to make shit work.

Most people don't really know how their car works, and shouldn't have to. Same goes here.

Where's your evidence for that? The argument that it "treats users as dumb" and that doing so is "profitable" is oft trotted out, but I never see any substantiation for it. Plenty of companies do that. What's so special about Apple, then? I mean, it's gotta be something.

You gotta be careful about these arguments. They often have a slippery slope to a superiority complex (of "leet" NIX users over the unwashed "proles") hiding deep within.

Needlessly complex or powerful user interfaces aren't necessarily good. They were quite commonplace before Apple. Apple understood the value of minimalism, of cutting away interaction noise until there's nothing left to subtract. Aesthetically speaking, this is approach has a long, storied history with respect to mechanical design. It's successful because it works.

What Apple understood really acutely and mastered is human interface design. They perfected making human centric interfaces that look and feel like fluid prosthetic extensions of one's body, rather than computational interface where power is achieved by anchoring ones tasks around the machine for maximal efficiency. Briefly, they understood intuition. Are you arguing that intuition is somehow worse than mastering arcana, simple because you've done the latter?

Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. I love my command line vim workflow dearly, and you'll have to pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. But there's definitely the idea of "right tool for the right job" that you might be sweeping by here. Remember, simplicity is as much a function of cherished *NIX tools you probably know and love. It's where they derive their power. Be careful of surface level dismissals (visual interfaces versus textual) that come from tasting it in a different flavor. You might miss the forest for the trees!

It's easy to take a stab at someone online, behind a keyboard, but I'd suggest you show us all your work and we'll judge your future opinions based on it.

By no metric I am comparatively as successful as the guy, but I am still able to disagree on his point that Linux is held back by its tools. The fact that he did not want or had the time to learn Linux's tooling don't mean anything in particular except that he's either very busy or very lazy. Any interview I read with him he's just ranting and crying over this or that "too complex" matter. If he does not want to deal with the complexity of modern computers, he should design and build board games.

As an example, read how the one-man-band of Execution Unit manages to, in house, write and test his game on three operating systems. https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-...

It's not a matter of "this is too hard", Blow just does not want to do it, let's be honest.

preferably future work and dreams and ramblings too..

preferably over a twitch stream..

If I wanted that experience I would kept my PC with MS-DOS 3.3.