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.
Adobe’s Turf
Since 1990, when version 1.0 came out, Photoshop has been more or less synonymous with ‘pro’ image manipulation on both Macintosh and Windows computers. The reasons for this are many, and arguably equally political and technical in nature, but two things are certain: Adobe has managed to maintain its dominance, despite an ever-ageing Photoshop codebase — perhaps a token of its quality, having survived countless operating system revisions and the increase (measuring several orders of magnitude) of processing performance and spanning more than fifteen years of existence — as well as countless ‘independent’ competitors, including the once-mighty Corel Corporation whose comprehensive graphics suite, CorelDRAW!, was, for several years, a formidable competitor and in some ways superior to Adobe’s offerings. Meanwhile Adobe built a huge ecosystem of communicating applications, plugins as well as training services and standards, reinforced by the millions of people that grew up, learnt to use and depend on its products.
Apple to the Core!
Apple’s relationship with Adobe was always been a love-hate one. Here are some examples: Apple licensed Postscript from Adobe in 1983 and at the same time bought 20% of the company. Adobe’s flagship products were all released for the Macintosh before or at the same time as its Windows counterparts, with very few exceptions. On the other hand, Apple flouted Adobe by releasing True Type in the late 1980s, only to be returned the favour some years later, when the then all-mighty Microsoft along with Adobe released OpenType rendering Apple’s AAT extensions the largely unknown entity they are today.
The return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997 brought back his almost fanatical insistence for absolute control and independence, as opposed to the more relaxed approach taken by some of his predecessors; his intent on salvaging the company from bankruptcy translated to an increased drive for independence and control of the Macintosh market, as manifested by the revocation of the Mac clone licences, the discontinuation of the Newton, the return of industrial design as a main criterion for product development etc. By 2003 there were rumours that Adobe was very dissatisfied with the performance of the Macintosh computers compared to their PC equivalents and the Mac software sales could not really justify the cost of developing for the Mac, given that Apple’s market share had fallen to below 2% in the US for the first time in its history and that the PowerPC was a completely different platform to the x86 requiring extensive optimisations to achieve similar performance. When Core Image was announced, Steve Jobs made his intentions clear: “I want Adobe to use those technologies in future versions of Photoshop”. Of course, since Photoshop’s codecase includes large parts of shared code between the two platforms, Adobe wasn’t going to jump on the Core Image bandwagon anytime soon. But beyond this, it was clear to me that Steve Jobs was planning to have Core Image, more so than other ‘Core’ APIs in OS X, be Apple’s leverage in the graphics market, the overriding factor over Adobe’s vendor lock-in, while itself an Apple vendor-lock in mechanism. Alternatively, Core Image could just be yet another weapon in Apple’s arsenal used to achieve a high standpoint within Apple’s fragile alliances with Adobe, Quark and other major players in the DTP, Graphics and Video industries.
There is no doubt that Apple had immediate uses for it: several of its applications make use of Core Image and it’s a good idea to open it up for people to write their own applications and plugins. Yet the timing and release of Core Image, compared to other important frameworks that Apple still insists on keeping closed on Mac OS X, was a pretty good indicator that ‘pixels’ were becoming cheaper than ever. Core Image was a very subtle, yet backhanded, way for Apple to assert its control over this important segment by creating not an application, but a whole platform for graphics processing.
With little code, Core Image plugins could apply impressive effects to bitmaps very quickly, by making use of the GPU and optimised routines. An application developer did not have to write a single line of optimised PowerPC, x86 or optimized GPU code for Core Image to work and interfacing with the API was straightforward. A widely used Core Image platform and a respectable ecosystem could encroach on Adobe’s territory on the Mac starting from the low end and building it up until Photoshop wasn’t but an expensive and unappealing relic of the past.
Core Image radically lowered the barriers to entry for an image manipulation softwre developer. Applications utilising Core Image could provide the Mac equivalent of Paint Shop Pro in several months rather than several years and on top of this benefit from top notch, continuously evolving feature set, courtesy of Apple and the other CI plugin writers.
Transfer of Power
Of course things are rarely that simple and monolithic. Photoshop still rules the bitmap graphics manipulation field and Adobe’s development efforts are bound to accelerate, especially under threatening competition. Nevertheless, the release of Acorn and Pixelmator is important for the Mac market, not simply because they provide an impressive feature set and a polished, quality experience, but because they achieve this at a fraction of Photoshop’s price and have the potential to evolve and compete with it, much faster than anything that came before them. At a time when the low end of graphics manipulation is probably going to be dominated by free online services and applications, such as Apple’s iPhoto, Imagewell or even Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements or the upcoming Photoshop Online Edition, the battle for image editing will be waged for the mid and high-end. With applications such as Acorn and Pixelmator, offering such an impressive feature set at the €30 price point (despite their obvious 1.0 problems), Adobe may, sooner rather than later, need to reconsider its pricing strategy for Photoshop. Whatever happens, the era of cheap pixels is here!