Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 22nd Mar 2012 19:44 UTC
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Contrast to other software packages of the same vintage. Word (1990) has a new rendering engine, a new styling engine, and a new file format. Excel (1987) has new formulas, a new formatting engine, and a new file format.
Comparing to Word or Excel is *really* a bad example. You realize the new file formats are basically the same as the old ones, just with the old binary commands mapped to XML tags? That Word does *not* have a new formatting engine, even though it needs one more than anything else--just a lot of auto-formatting cruft built onto the same old crap from the 90s, which is why you still can't rely on it to keep your formatting intact for long documents. And Excel--the rendering engine for the worksheets has got to be at least 10 years old, if you pay attention to the quirky behaviors it exhibits. That's probably also why it's the only Office app without a multi-window mode. And have you ever looked at the bindings for creating software on top of the Office apps? Behind the scenes, underneath layer upon layer of wrappers, it's COM... the same thing MS used in Windows 3.1....
Edited 2012-03-24 17:26 UTC




Member since:
2011-05-19
Indeed.
Photoshop is getting *very* creaky, and it's not just the UI. The core codebase has not been substantially overhauled in quite some time, so it just keeps getting stuff added onto it. Heck, you can find relics from Mac OS Classic in the PSD file format!
Contrast to other software packages of the same vintage. Word (1990) has a new rendering engine, a new styling engine, and a new file format. Excel (1987) has new formulas, a new formatting engine, and a new file format.
Photoshop compares poorly even to other Adobe products. InDesign has a much more flexible architecture than Photoshop, because Adobe tossed out Pagemaker and did a ground-up rewrite in the late 1990s. Premiere Pro is a total rewrite of Premiere. But then, those other products faced stiff competition -- Quark and Avid.
In contrast, Photoshop has been top dog since 1989. Illustrator is similarly creaky, and for similar reasons.