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Comment by rodyancy | Hacker News Reader

I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.

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You don't need Apple to implement this, there is already a software product for the Mac that is slowly evolving into a full-featured photo editor: http://www.pixelmator.com/

I agree. We moved our entire design base to it and they love it. It's not bloatware and is priced sensibly

A closed source product built upon exploited open source code.

Can Pixelmator to do unto others?

If you're inclined to downvote this sentiment, at least have the testicles to comment why.

1 - You are being inflammatory and immature. You are welcome to raise your own opinions without questioning the testicular fortitude of everyone on this site.

2 - Pixelmator is reliant on ImageMagick, which is governed by the ImageMagick license. This license in no way prohibits commercial use of the library, and requires only attribution. By all accounts Pixelmator has respected this license.

3 - Not only has Pixelmator respected the letter of the license agreement, but it even widely advertises its use of open source components. How this is a bad thing for open source in general, only you seem to know.

4 - To pre-empt any Stallman-esque tirades about the evils of commercial exploitation of open source software... remember that no developers are in any way forced to allow others to commercial exploit their open source work. ImageMagick has done this out of their own accord, and it would be presumptuous to assume that people following their license are exploiting them in a way they did not intend. Furthermore, from what I can tell Pixelmator has added extremely substantial functionality to ImageMagick (a top-end GUI app instead of a command-line app, really?), and is deserving of whatever commercial success they may derive from this work.

cool off man! those people are just a couple of devs trying to make it.

Oh, you think these comments are supposed to be generated using your testicles! That's your problem right there. See, most of us use our eyes, brains and fingers. Commenting with your testicles sounds awkward and painful. I'm sorry you've had to go through that.

Being able to do things using different approaches is one of the best features of Photoshop. It makes the application incredibly powerful.

Yes, but does Photoshop need 9 different ugly sliders, for example?

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...

You could turn that argument upside-down and say that it's quite incredible they'd go so far as to create 9 custom sliders depending on the sub-part of the application you're looking at. You can't really argue that all those fit the 'standard' mac slider concept.

I think some of them could be rolled together but without knowing more about the context in which each and every one of those sliders gets used it is hard to be even sure about that.

Complex user interfaces:

http://www.sternstudio.com/HollandsGlorie.jpg

Tend to have a lot of buttons & sliders...

Yes, but there is similarity between the sliders in that picture you show here. When you make 9 different sliders, it distracts from the settings being modified, and directs attention towards the UI itself. This is probably one of the oldest no-nos in traditional design.

In the original example, the Color Balance and Layer Blending tools clearly should have been drawn from the same mold. Ditto for Brightness, Pencil Width, Blur Width, Layer Style: Scale.

The is limited to the Mac version only. Windows version has essentially 2 types of sliders that are used very consistently. Also saying that there are 9 different sliders is deceiving. The layer blending and threshold sliders for example are the exact same thing.

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