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Comment by poniko | Hacker News Reader

The service was grown to over 60 million users back in ~2012 and got aquired by Autodesk. After some years most, if not all people working with the product was reassigned and or left. Still with millions of weekly users but no one that cared.

Autodesk sold it for near to nothing and the new owners contacted me (org founder) and asked me if I wanted to get involved somehow. So we build a new product from scratch since the original app was 100% Flash and we are just month away from a completely browser block :)

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it'd be interesting to know about the tech behind this rewrite. E.g., what language/stack, how did you do it (or any frameworks of interest used), and what, if any, did you learn from the flash version that helped in this rewrite?

Its 99% Typescript and we don't use any premade js frameworks, everything was written from scratch (except for some font loader and zip), ui, rendering, webgl filters etc etc.

All the knowledge of how Photo Editing works came out of building the original products back in the day, there is more information about the field today to be found written online but much is still secrets kept at a few companies.

The browsers is really a shitty environment to be writing this kind of apps in, performances is a struggle in every step :)

I’m curious if you can share some of the deep knowledge of photo editing you’ve uncovered - if not in explicit detail, what are some of the general areas where public knowledge lags behind state of the art?

I’ve spent years building Flash and Flex apps. Some really complex ones. Adobe had this big bets in RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). Turns out RIAs are simply SPA (Single Page Applications) now.

Typescript is really nice and close to Actionscript3. I’m glad Flash died.

The new open ecosystem with tc39 and wc3 is pretty awesome.

Given the previous app was flash, I'm surprised that haxe wasn't chosen to implement the app!

I've used pixlr a few times those last few weeks as I was looking for an image editing tool that was more powerful than paint and didn't want to install more software on my PC(I think I also tried Photopea.com, but I wasn't as successful with it). It's been working very well, I finished the handful of photomontage I wanted to do, but I'm annoyed with how the tools' config reset back to its default configuration each time I switch to another tool. Still thank you for your work.

Cool, we'll fix the reset between tool switching and keep their state, thanks for the feedback.

Thank you! I have to say that, as a novice in image editing, I didn't had a lot of discoverability issues with the various tools.

It was also nice to see a negative point (no drawing on image layers) get resolved from one week to the next.

Hey Ola, I was at Autodesk Toronto around the time you were acquired and remember meeting you and your brother. I always appreciated how Pixlr solved a common problem (photo editing) really really well. Congrats on the rewrite.

Just wanted to say thank you for Pixlr, I was able to integrate it into our SaaS product and during my demo's it was a real WOW feature. Really appreciate it. We moved to a JS based image editor a few years ago when Pixlr started to get ad injections :(

Out of curiosity, did you or other owners considered publishing the app as desktop app ?

with Adobe AIR for ex

Yea we had it as Air apps for a while, it's been in all kind of versions.

Great product. One of my original fave hosted tools. I still use it. Yeah, Flash makes my cringe, but it still works. I'm looking forward to the new post-Flash version.

All the best!

Do you regret selling it in the first place?

Not even the slightest, so much fun stuff I've gotten to do due to this product, as myself, at Autodesk and now with the new owners.

Autodesk loved to waste money acquiring products and companies and then letting them die.

Are you open sourcing this?

You know you have another year?

“The Flash” the film character dies in December 2019, flash the shitapp dies in December 2020

Yea until 100% RIP. But a couple of weeks ago ppl with flash activated get a big warning in chrome and google is penalizing flash in search etc. We are cutting it close.

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