800k floppies? Sir, we had 400k floppies, thank you very much!
Actually not much like Photoshop (much later), except for the fact that it works with images. MacPaint was black and white and had a set of tools (paintbrush, bucket, etc) that you used to make bit-mapped pictures. Its complement, MacDraw, had tools that allowed you to make selectable objects that could be stretched, scaled, etc. Photoshop works with photos (eg, jpgs) that you edit, in layers, rather than creating something original from scratch.
My memory is that MacPaint & MacDraw were bundled for free with your Macintosh back in the day. My experience is that since they went away, there has been nothing as easy to use and well designed to replace them. Same with Hypercard. Bill Atkinson is one of the most influential and creative members of early Apple, and deserves much more in accoladesâŚ
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Seriously? FugeddaboutitâŚ
Ah yes - I remember saving my dissertation via an extended sequence of disk swaps, and running a Logo program for printing out the Julia set overnight on my first Mac (lugged up the hill from the UC Berkeley computer store to my dorm room at I-House)âŚ
No love for Deluxe Paint?
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Provided you had a way to get a scanned image into MacPaint, it could of course be a rudimentary monochrome photo editor.
The resemblance to Photoshop is not coincidental at all. MacPaintâs and MacDrawâs basic palettes of tools and patterns popularized a UI paradigm thatâs still with us. (I would have said âestablishedâ but then somebody would have come along to school me on Xerox Parc.) Plus, Photoshop didnât support layers until 3.0, so early versions would have had even more similarities to MacPaint. Not to mention that some people would have run PS 1.0 on monochrome monitors, which remained commonplace until the mid-90s. Of course, most pros would have shelled out for a colour display or at least a 256-shade grayscale monitor.
In a nut, MacPaint really is the granddaddy of bitmap image editors, and MacDraw is the granddaddy on the vector side.
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It never came out on the Mac, though Studio 8, the high end version of it, was a Mac exclusive. I loved them both, but Studio 8 had some really nice features that D-Paint lacked (while D-Paint supported every bitmap file format in existence). Of course, Studio 8 was also 3 times the price. Studio 1, the 1-bit version was also a neat B&W paint program that also did flip-book style animation.
EA used to make some really great things back in the day.
What was the Letraset B&W photo editing software that preceded PhotoshopâŚImageReady? Something like that. I remember seeing it for the first time and being blown away by what it could do on a 256 greyscale monitor.
Last time I checked out Metacard/Runtime Revolution/Livecode it was hideously expensive for a single seat developer license. Iâm glad to see that theyâre making it available to kids on allowances.
been so long i completely forgot about 400k floppies. i have a bunch of 800k floppies i have no way of retrieving the files on them. pity. theres a couple of magazine layouts iâd love to get at.
imageready was an adobe product created to prepare images for the web. it came with photoshop for a while.
You are correct. ImageStudio is the application I was thinking of. (Thanks Google!)
Yes, itâs gotten a lot better - itâs basically free for all uses, as long as you open your source, but there is an option to purchase a commercial license and release your application closed source (that license is still pretty expensive).
The neat thing is that the only difference between the free and the commercial version is the ability to lock a stack or read a locked stack (this causes some issues with closed source add-ons), so you can do all your development in the free version and only transition over to commercial when you have something that you feel like releasing as closed source. Thatâs also needed if you want to release anything on the Apple App Store, because of interactions between the GPL and the App Store terms of use. You can still put apps on to an iPhone or iPad with the free version (assuming you are in the Apple Dev program), but you would not make it through certification for the store.
The really interesting stuff will happen when they release 7.0, which is the version that was kickstarted. The current release is basically the existing version open sourced as a stop gap while they rewrite and modernize the engine and IDE. Itâs still a great way to get that old Hypercard âI can do anything!â fix right away.
edit - if anyone is interested hereâs a link to the site. They currently are offering some free training materials, even with the free community version.
This thread makes me curious. What tools are out there today for doing bit map editing? Not photoshop type stuff, but something more like MacPaint/Studio 8/Deluxe paint that are intended for created glorious, jaggy, bitmapped images and donât get in the way with a lot of tools that you donât need when you are pecking out pixels one at a time?
Well, my solution is pretty much âout thereâ â I keep a G5 iMac running 10.4 and Classic for my HyperCard jones, and still have much fun using the paint tools in the AddColor XCMD for my 8-bit needs (also, the icon editor in ResEdit).
Barring having old hardware on hand, maybe Pixen? Fancier-but-not-overkill would be Pixelmator or Acorn.
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