Call it Pixel.

Is Apple developing an image editing application to rival Photoshop? There are a number of reasons it should:

Good Demand   Photoshop is used by most professionals who work with pixels—photographers, graphic artists, web designers—as well as plenty of non-professionals who edit digital images. That’s a lot of people these days.

Good Fit  Apple’s Pro applications already serve creative professionals of digital video, photography, music, and sound editing. What’s missing? Pixel- and vector-based image editing.

Technically Feasible  With Core Image maturing and already used in other products, and with the design experience gained from the other Pro apps, Apple now has the ability to challenge Photoshop.

Profitable  Adobe makes a lot of money from Photoshop, whether sold by itself or bundled in Creative Suite. The extended instructional ecosystem of books and videos about Photoshop must be pretty high-margin, too.

Makes sense strategically  Adobe develops its applications on a proprietary cross-platform set of libraries to allow the applications to run on both Mac and Windows—make that Windows and Mac, because Windows has been gaining more attention over time. This cross-platform approach slows development and prevents Adobe from exploiting platform advantages. This problem is not unique to Adobe; it affects Microsoft and Apple, too.

The result is either a lowest-common-denominator approach where the software works identically on both platforms but doesn’t look quite native to either one (Photoshop), or a blatant port approach where the software unabashedly carries the design cues of one platform over to the other (iTunes on Windows).

Leopard is all about platform advantages, but it’s unlikely Adobe will be leveraging those advantages anytime soon, because another tell-tale limitation of cross-platform libraries is that they’re relatively difficult to write and even more difficult to test. That makes development take longer and cost more. Imagine you’re Adobe thinking, hmm, should we support Time Machine?. The very next concern you’d have is how would we support that on Windows? We can’t support that on Windows…

Adobe’s Mac libraries, like Microsoft’s, are written in Carbon. Carbon’s end is near: it won’t be going 64-bit, and new APIs are Cocoa- and ObjC-only. If your application is huge and written in Carbon, you’re looking at a tremendous investment to move it forward on the OS X platform; if your code base is also cross-platform, you may even need to evaluate how cost-effective it would be to separate your code bases entirely.

Which brings us to the final point…

Timing. Apple surely hasn’t forgotten that its move to the Intel platform was hampered by Adobe’s long-delayed port of Photoshop and the rest of the Creative Suite. Apple’s move to Leopard is unlikely to fare much better. Leopard represents a new opportunity for Apple to out-innovate and out-deliver its competitors, but Adobe won’t be able to keep pace.

Meanwhile, Adobe has been pushing the Photoshop brand while slowing technical innovation, which it has been able to afford this because Photoshop hasn’t had a credible competitor.

Photoshop is a great product. It needs a great competitor.

And who better than Apple, with a new OS, powerful core libraries, and seasoned expertise at building large professional applications?

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007, 1:53 am    Both comments and pings are currently closed.