Adobe’s Principal Product Manager of Photoshop, John Nack has posted an idea for a new Photoshop feature on his blog. Nack’s idea is to create a way of rendering HTML and CSS within Photoshop. This means visual designers could work with “live” HTML objects as they’re building websites within a team of programmers, easing the workflow between the designing and coding stages.
Before you get to excited (or disappointed) keep in mind that isn’t a feature, isn’t even part of a plan, it’s simply and idea that Nack would like feedback on.
Nack describes the idea (and workflow) like this: a designer creates a mockup, which he hands off to a programmer. The programmer then renders the mockup in HTML/CSS, at which point he could hand it back to the designer who can open it in Photoshop as a kind of live layer. Resizing and other layer actions would cause the code to respond according to how the programmer has written the code.
What Nack is envisioning is a smart layer that uses WebKit (already part of the Creative Suite) to render what he calls “programmable layers.”
Among the benefits Nack sees are “[live] pixel-accurate web rendering (text and shapes); the ability to style objects via CSS parameters (enabling effects like dotted lines); data-driven 2D and 3D graphics; and high fidelity web output (HTML as HTML).”
The real world example Nack uses is a calendar widget, but that particular example raises an interesting question — what about scripting languages? We don’t know of anyone who writes out calendar code in HTML, that would be insane to update. So if you’re generating the calendar with, say, PHP, where does the script rendering happen?
So far, the comments appear pretty evenly divided between those who think such a feature would be great and those think that either it’s just more bloat in Photoshop, or that Fireworks would be a better home for the idea.
If you’ve got strong opinions one way or the other, head over to Nack’s blog and let him know what you think, either in the comments or by completing this survey.
Just remember that this is not part of a roadmap and may well never happen. In the words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t panic.”
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As for the editing tools themselves, well… don’t expect “real” Photoshop. But the basic options like cropping, straightening, color corrections and preset image transformations can go a long way toward making your mobile images look much better.
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Webmonkey had a chance to talk to Sevandersson about Pixlr, his development process, and what he has planned for the tool.
How is Pixlr different from Photoshop Express?
The difference between PSX [Photoshop Express] and Pixlr is that while Adobe doesn’t want to create a free online replacement tool for their Photoshop Elements and other licensed software I just want to create an online tool that will satisfy the 80% of the photo enthusiasts needs. I am well aware of that it’s much more work left to do before Pixlr will accomplish what Elements do, but this is just the first beta launched.
How long did it take you to write Pixlr?
Yes, the first line of code was written in august 2007, but it was not full time and done by a single person. The code is rewritten several times to get the overall performance up and the app to work. To get the performance up and keep the size down I have written all of the controls my self and not used the built in flash controls.
Any plans to make money? A year is a long time for just a labor of love…
All you need is love and I love bitmap algorithms. The plan for Pixlr is to license the techniques and do small app spin-offs’, and there is some ides of a PRO app (Maybe on the desktop?).
What other features are coming soon?
Crop tool, text tool and more auto adjustments are the first things in the development plan. API and other development tools are on the wish list too.
The dotted line [to show selection as the user drags the mouse] will be added soon. Some features was ignored in this release, I just wanted to get the application out to the public so I could get some feedback and know if I was going in the right direction with the product.
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