Josh Pigford: ‘Image Editors Are the New FTP Application’

Josh Pigford, observing the recent run of new bitmap image editors for Mac OS X (Acorn, Pixelmator, Iris):

I think what really turns me off about all of this is that all of these image editors do, more or less, the same thing. Sure, they each have a different UI and will each perform tasks a tad different than the other but for the most part they all just edit images.

Substitute “text” for “images” and he’d be arguing that Allan Odgaard never should have written TextMate, or that the Coding Monkeys shouldn’t have written SubEthaEdit.

As for why image editors are suddenly popping out of the woodwork, that’s easy: Core Image. That’s not to say Core Image makes it easy to write apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, or Iris — just that it makes it a lot less work than it would have been before Core Image existed. (And don’t miss Siracusa’s quip.)

★ Tuesday, 11 September 2007