I made almost $1 million in the last 12 months, 90% from ads. The rest is from Premium (users paying to hide ads) and licensing a self-hosted version of Photopea.
When you start your own project, you never know, if it will ever make $250k a year. But if you get hired, you can be quite sure, that you will never make more than $250k a year.
Follow Photopea to see my progress :) http://facebook.com/photopea , http://twitter.com/photopeacom
Photopea is one of my favourite tools on the web. Thank you for making such awesome software.
As for the comment about working at a FAANG I'm baffled. In what world would working at a FAANG, dealing with company politics, reporting to managers, having employment reviews, etc. be more desirable than the freedom and satisfaction of launching your own project and being able to very comfortably sustain yourself?
Working on a successful independent software project is, for a lot of people, much more desirable than working at someone else's company; in much the same way owning a startup company would be. But the key there is "successful", which is certainly not guaranteed.
If you ever wanted to jump on a podcast to talk about how you built and deploy it let me know. I'd love to have you on the https://runninginproduction.com/ podcast. You can click the "become a guest" button to get started if you were interested.
(Note: if anyone else wants to be a guest you can submit a request too, I just finished a huge stretch of 8 months worth of backlog episodes so I have openings again)
I think the importance of "offline apps" is overrated today. Personally, I spend less than 10 hours a year on a device without internet, and I think this number is decreasing each year, for everyone.
People use Google Maps and Wikipedia without having them on their hard drives. On the other hand, it is nice, that you can simply close a website and there is no track of that service in your computer.
Initial setup can be finnicky (test it on a separate subdomain!) but it shouldn't require much more than a correctly configured cache manifest and a few lines of code to handle updates.
while it is pretty easy and doable in maybe 1-2 days, depending on how fluent you are with these kinds of things... it's not entirely in the authors best interest. if people start using it `offline`, he wont be able to get advertisement revenue after all ;)
But yes, this is why I suggested testing with a separate subdomain.
SimilarWeb says the website has had 8 million visits in the past 6 months. His CPM must be very, very high.
Google (total comp):
Level 4 - $266k
Level 5 (Senior) - $353k
Level 6 (Staff) - $484k
... and similarly at other FAANG companies.
If you're good/lucky, you can make it to Senior in 3-4 years as a new engineer.
It used to be that Level 5 -> 6 was a difficult jump, but nowadays there are many Level 6s and 7s. At Level 7, even your base salary >$250k a year.
Are you even allowed to release customer/client info like that?
Edit: thank you!
For example a very common thing you might want to do is add text (or any other layer) on top of an image and then center that text / layer either vertically or horizontally relative to the image.
In Photopea you create a text layer and then drag it near the middle and it'll show you guidelines when you're close and then snap into the perfect center (either vertically, horizontally or both). It takes like 2 seconds and feels intuitive.
In GIMP you have to make sure you switch to the alignment tool which is hidden by default so you need to remember to hit Q to activate it or hover over the move tool and select it but if you hit Q you better make sure you're not in any text input because it'll insert "Q" instead of switching your tool, but since you're adding text chances are you will be so you need to remember to click away. Then you need make sure you click an active area of your text layer and click the align horizontal icon, then you need to click the align vertical icon. Then if you decide you want to change your text you have to repeat this whole process again.
Another example is adding a simple stroke (line) around some text or other layer effects that Photoshop has had for over 10+ years.
In Photopea, you open up layer styles, pick the stroke option and can tweak the colors and thickness very quickly. After applying the style you can change and move around your text and the styles are applied to it automatically, it feels intuitive to use.
In GIMP I spent an hour researching plugins to add this behavior and after picking one it technically works but the user experience is pretty hostile. It creates the stroke as a separate layer so you can't move your text and the stroke together unless you remember to link them, and if you decide to change your text content or size you have to delete the old stroke layer and make a new one.
GIMP is really good in terms of what it can do but using it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts because you need to do so many steps to accomplish what feels like basic things that other editors have had for years when it comes to user friendly features.
I understand creating a highly polished image editor isn't easy and honestly if I knew their code base I would open a PR for the snap to center guidelines but at this point I have to imagine if they wanted to add that feature it would have been added. From the outside it feels like it hasn't been added because they don't want that feature, but as an end user that makes me wonder why. It's such a useful thing.
How do you do the solid color background in Gimp? In Photoshop, I'd select the background with the magic wand (contiguous or non-contiguous, depending on preference), potentially use one of those edge-improving tools, then either press delete or create a mask. It apparently also has a special tool for it that I haven't used before but seems to do basically that.
Outlining text is easy too. true, there isn't a magic text outline button, you must use the same method you would use to outline any arbitrary object.
The sum of your complaints are because you know how to do it in PS. I am a professional graphics designer and artist and I use gimp exclusively.
I used to use The GIMP exclusively, but I jumped to Photoshop when I could afford it, due to GIMP's poor UX and adjustment layers (which have been "coming soon" with GEGL since 2008).
I'm talking about horizontally or vertically aligning a layer relative to the image, not the text within the rectangle bounding box of the text input box when you have the text tool activated.
It's such a common use case to want to take a layer (whether or not it's text isn't important) and center it horizontally or vertically relative to the entire image or another object.
I'm not sure what you mean.
If you have a 1000 x 1000 image I'd like to put the text "Hello" exactly in the middle of the image, both vertically and horizontally and let the tool determine the exact bounding box of the text input based on how much text I have.
> All of these "features" sound like training wheels for graphic designers.
In GIMP I described the workflow how to do that using the alignment tool. I also described for comparison how to do it in Photopea because it only involves dragging the layer near where it should be and it auto-snaps to perfect center with guidelines that appear when you're close.
This isn't a training wheels feature because both casual and professional graphic designers aren't eyeballing a pixel perfection alignment every time without thinking, but Photopea gives you this outcome with the least amount of effort you can ask for and its accuracy is 100%.
> It's not hard whatsoever to accomplish, and assuredly not worth paying monthly for.
There's a difference between hard and convenient. Executing a checklist of steps isn't hard but it sure is inconvenient if I need to do that every time I want to align something. It's the difference between something having a good / intuitive UI vs not.
Or PS is just more intuitive than GIMP.
> I am a professional graphics designer
Once you are using a tool professionally, I guess that intuitiveness is no longer a selling point. It is though for someone that only use it from time to time...
When Blender finally bit-the-bullet and overhauled their UI - in a way that more aligned itself with how other keys/clicks worked in similar tools - it totally relaunched itself and is now so much easier to use.
It would be great it Gimp (and inkscape) did a similar overhaul IMHO.
While I congratulate its developers for not using ads and making it free, it remains a pain to use sometimes. I mainly use it for cropping, resizing, and image blurring, but for anything else I use Photopea.
That being said, if I took the time to properly learn to utilize GIMP through tutorials, as I did with Photoshop back in the day, I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion does a 180.
I also find it more user friendly (unlike GIMP where I constantly feel like I'm fighting the bad UX instead of actually doing what I came to do), especially if you're used to Photoshop.