Or rather, someone please change Adobe’s mind. Today I spent some time looking online for what’s changed in the latest version of Photoshop (CS4). Along with numerous improvements across the board, I stumbled on a number of posts in forums and a few blogs on the ‘Change layer content’ menu removal.

This is unbelievably bad judgement on Adobe’s part¹. It’s not that too many people were using the option — although I am sure tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands were — it’s that it is much more complex to do *exactly* what ‘Change layer content’ did in any other way without ‘side-effects’ and even when you do it’s not elegant, it’s not easily reversible and it’s definitely more time consuming than the original method.
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Just a few weeks after Tiger was announced in 2004, I was chatting with a friend about how I thought Core Image could revolutionise the bitmap editing capabilities of applications on Mac OS X and, of course, how this would translate into an abundance of competitive image manipulation/editing applications making use of Apple’s optimised routines, the GPU etc. For a while I even toyed with the idea of writing one myself, as I had grown tired of Photoshop Elements, annoyed with Photoshop’s price tag and frustrated with GIMP’s unusable, nonsensical UI. Upon getting Tiger, in spring 2005, I spent some time looking at the example code and putting together some primitive Cocoa application that could more or less apply Apple’s ready made effects, in addition to doing some basic transformation of an image. My efforts were purely an academic exercise, getting myself familiar with some of Apple’s new APIs and playing around with a brand new version of XCode and the system frameworks. Obviously I couldn’t have been the only one and fortunately for us the efforts of others were bound to become much more than dusty old code in some src folder in a home directory.
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