Oh, and this September will be see 40-year anniversary of WordPerfect [1]. (Though WP for DOS only came out in 1982.)
I wonder what their strategy is with this acquisition, since there must be some money in there still.
A decade and a half later, though, my feelings are mostly numb.
Edit: Why did I like PSP over PS? At the time, PSP had better support for my tablet, and had hotkeys that made more intuitive sense for me. I did use PS for a while, sparingly from 2010 to 2015. In the long run, I don't do art anymore, and mostly just web design, for which my company uses Figma anyway. Occasionally we might contact something from a UX designer who uses Sketch, but we just import it into Figma anyway. Photoshop might as well not exist as far as I am concerned.
Recently I found an editor that resembles psp feel: https://pixlr.com/editor/ (flash). I’m not affiliated with it in any way, just using it to crop my weekly memes.
Never got a hold of PS to this day.
Many things about PS still irritate users in a "That's just wrong, stupid, and annoyingly poorly thought out, and why do you keep adding pointless new features instead of fixing this?" kind of a way. [1]
PSP didn't do as much, but a lot of what it did do was more transparent and effortless.
When Corel bought it, they turned it into PSP Pro X Plus Special Edition Platinum Millennium Marketing Bullshit Edition. All kinds of cruft appeared, some of it was entertaining, very little of it was useful, none of it was elegant or beautiful.
[1] PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option which created a new image from the clipboard with a single click. Boom. Done. In PS you have to select a new placeholder from a list of all other possible sizes, possibly after some scrolling and selecting, and then manually paste the image into the document. And now you have an image layer and a background layer, which is often not what you want.
Since forever (probably since PS 2.4 or so) choosing "New Document" in Photoshop defaults to the size of the document on the clipboard. My workflow is: Copy in one app > Switch to PS > CMD + N > Hit Enter > CMD + V
You might be over optimising your time.
This is more efficient then having to switch to the mouse.
We got this bundled with...something? Maybe a printer? And I used it a lot for schoolwork. It was clean, neat and powerful. You could use it to layout a page really easily.
At some point they stopped selling it to normal people and brought out Microsoft Home Publishing instead. And of course it was complete crap by comparison.
I have since discovered that Adobe Illustrator is better than both.
Sure you can use InDesign but that’s expensive overkill for a lot of desktop publishing.
Office 365 includes Publisher as do most Office SKUs. Office 365 Home in the Windows Store will install Publisher by default today, but for a long time with Office you had to do a custom install to install it, which is partly why a lot of people thought Publisher was dead because it didn't install by default.
That said, Publisher does feel like a zombie compared to the excitement it had in the 90s. I've wondered if that's because we aren't printing as much today (and there's basically no competition in the "desktop publishing" space at all), or if it's just how much of its development resources merged (back) to Word since the 90s.
But the specific example doesn't work the same way for me: I hit Ctrl-N, and the size of image in my clipboard is the default pre-populated, pre-selected size (verified now in PS 6 and whatever current PS CC is); then I click Ctrl-V. So it's not a "Single click", but it's two keyboard shortcuts, my pinkie never leaves Ctrl button, so it's preferred for me to a mouse click anyway ️
The days of computer with extremely slow HDD, PSP allow me to quickly finish some photo editing and offer more features than most users would ever need. All while PS would still be loading.
Another important point was PSP was way cheaper, and Shareware. I don't even remember any students using PS actually bought it themselves.
I have recently bought Affinity Photo and Designer simply because it doesn't have a subscription model, but I really miss Jasc PSP.
Seriously? It’s $10/month on the Photography Plan, and you get Lightroom and some online storage in the same bundle as well:
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html
I just don't use it nearly enough to justify paying a subscription. I might not even use it for months at a time.
Affinity cost me like $50, once. The mere comfort of just being able to use it whenever you need it is worth that money to me.
One way to look at it, then, is that you don't use enough of what Photoshop can do to be worth it, so you can stick with whatever simpler tool you prefer and save the money. Another option, though, is to realize that there's a lot of power there to be had, and it's worth spending the time to learn to harness it.
I put it that way because I keep coming across people who talk about their favorite image editor as "just as good as Photoshop" for their purposes while they clearly have no idea what all Photoshop can do. Here's a tutorial I did for Photoshop once that probably can be done only in Photoshop:
https://photo.stackexchange.com/a/57233/4141
By the way, Lightroom was another $120 or so for the initial license when it was last sold in boxes.
Then there's all the upgrades, which you also now get as part of the subscription.
Your $50 just isn't apples-to-apples.
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason
WordPerfect for DOS, in the opinion of many knowledgeable users, is still the greatest program ever written. Some of its features have not been matched even by the latest Windows software, and its interface remains unequaled for efficiency and elegance. Its support for multiple font formats has not been equaled by any other program or operating system, and its support for multiple alphabets, languages, and symbol sets has only been equaled by twenty-first-century versions of Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS.
It was truly incredible to watch him navigate through his research. He moved like lightning through all that stuff! It was very much like watching an Emacs or Vim master. (At the time I thought: I should introduce this guy to Emacs and org-mode, he would feel right at home. But he had essentially built his own org-mode in WordPerfect already, so I doubt that he would have switched.)
Props to you, Bill, wherever you are -- I hope that the blue WP background is still shining on your face.
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This got me to thinking. Two things that my WP friend has in common with the Emacs/Vim crowd is that (a) his UI hasn't really changed in 20 years, and (b) the full feature set is discoverable and (macro) programmable. We tend to think that the latter point is more essential (it's the selling point of Emacs, the "programmable editor"), but we tend to overlook the value of the former point.
We incur a cost due to the modern tendency to change application UIs on a whim -- either because of product switches ("this year's chat app") or actual UI changes to existing products (e.g., the Ribbon UI in the Office suite). It's the cost of lost opportunities for mastery. You can hone your Emacs or WP-DOS skills over a lifetime, and what you learned will never become obsolete, as long as you stick with that tool. But forced obsolescence has become a trend in application delivery, and so new generations of application users may never enjoy that sense of mastery.
To me, this is very reminiscent of the "choose boring technology" article that was on HN just a couple days ago. You can spend your attention-credits on solving business problems, or you can spend them adapting to new tool interfaces every year or two.
If I recall correctly: Corel had agreed to rewrite WordPerfect in VBA as a condition for Microsoft to invest in it when it was on the ropes in the late 1990s. Once they did that, the quality went down quite a bit in my opinion.
As I recall, WordPerfect once owned ~85% of the word processing market. WordPerfect was reasonably priced for students; I don't remember how much non-student licensing cost, but it did have a cost while Microsoft Word was free initially if I remember correctly.
What other software have such a great income stream, especially one that has entrenched government contracts?
The 'reveal codes' feature of WP 5.2 was just awesome. Does any GUI application have it?
This was told to me by Alan Ashton, the CEO and founder of WordPerfect, in around 1986. I instantly thought that their days were numbered.