Happy Birthday, Photoshop!
@rajiv_ayyangar and I have talked a lot about what applications, devices, and codebases have most influenced our thinking and careers. Photoshop is high on that list for me.
For many years it was the most reliable application I used regularly, bar none. In a world where we just expected the Windows blue screen and the little Mac unhappy icon to happen regularly, Photoshop never crashed. Even though both its feature set complexity and working data set size were much larger than most other apps of the time.
Photoshop was also truly cross platform. It worked the same way on Windows and Mac. This is hard!
It had a plugin system. Indie developers built great extensions for Photoshop.
And it had a credits screen that you saw every time the app loaded, with the names of all the programmers who worked on it!
Looking back at Notion's and Stripe's first launches offers the same type of nostalgia too! Cool to see the gold standards' humble beginnings
@benjamin_belay I often refer people to Notion's original launch to illustrate that it's not about being polished...it's about being compelling. https://www.producthunt.com/products/notion#notion-1-0-web-mac-app
@rajiv_ayyangar Wow this is amazing, definitely will take this into account when I launch in the next few days! I’ll try to make as big of an impact ;)
This is nostalgic :) I experiences only PS 4. Remember learning it when I was 14 maybe 13.
But 35 was totally different era with a few kB on a disk available :D
35 years for a consumer software product is effectively eternity. It would be pretty amazing to see a per-year absolute user numbers as well as market penetration numbers for @Adobe Photoshop. When did photoshop peak? Was this correlated with riding some other software or hardware trend?
@mikekerzhner courtesy of o1 pro:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67b797d7-da48-8003-b8a8-dc0e791c4a2b
My read is that Photoshop hasn't peaked...it continued to grow despite certain market segments (e.g. UI design) being taken over by upstarts (Sketch, then Figma).
Thanks! Imagine how different design would be without it glad I don't have to!
I wish Product Hunt was around longer so we had more nerdy, tech archeology to explore.
@rrhoover I have this thought often. Makers put their best foot forward with a launch - so it's a nice time capsule. Nothing else is as condensed - e.g. looking at their landing page via the Wayback machine.
It’s not just extensions that have been built for it – consider all the fonts and brushes that have been released as well. What a great piece of technology!
Product Hunt
What a great tribute to an iconic piece of software! Curious if @andrey_dyadyura2 or @bernatfortet have thoughts!