40 Years of Adobe

[Winfried]

I just read an article in in the press about Adobe.
I am just curious about the "birth date" of Picture Window Pro
or dl-c.
I use PWP since 2002/2003 (version 3.x?). Thats about 20 years. The oldest version in my archive is a 3.5 dated 2004-02-28.
I am still convinced of this programm.

[jsachs]

If I recall correctly, Version 1.0 was released in 1993. I started working on it before Photoshop was released.

[Bob Walker]

Like Winfried, I started with Version 3.5. Not a fan of Adobe products.

Why did you decide to stop charging for PWP??

Bob W

[tomczak]

I too discovered PWP 3.5 I think, some 20 years ago, thanks to Norman Koren. This may not sound like much, but at one point I even reported to Kiril seeing a bootleg CD of PWP on the market in Laos, and they only had a few 'major' apps on sale...

[jsachs]

When PWP 7 was discontinued, DL&C downsized and Kiril went on to other pursuits. PWP was not generating a significant amount of money at that time and advertising to increase sales and the cost of processing payments ate up most of the profits. Since I didn't really need an income it was easier to make it free. It still costs between $1000 and $2000 annually to purchase development tools, software certificates, and web hosting so donations are welcome to help offset this cost.

[Marpel]

Jonathan,

As we seem to be going a bit down memory lane, and if I may ask....

I seem to recall (actually tried to find the initial post, to refresh my hazy memory, but could not), that at the end of version 7, you seemed undecided whether that would be the end of PWP or whether you would continue in some fashion. I got the impression you were leaning towards letting things fade. Things went quiet for a few months then version 8 was introduced, and here we are. And although there seems to be a lot of activity (continual updates, largely based on user input), has version 8 been a one man show?

Marv

[jsachs]

Yes, it has been a one-man show.

At some point I finally understood advantages of non-destructive editing and set about rewriting PWP to add an image browser and scripts. It was quite a while after tearing it apart before it was put back together enough to be usable again, and several more years to get it to its current state.

[Robert Schleif]

I am interested in some of the nuts and bolts of PWP 8. What language is the program written in, how many lines of code, what editor and compiler do you use, can anything understandable be said about the overall structure of the program, particularly how new features are kept from invalidating older scripts?

[jsachs]

PWP is written in C++ although it mostly just uses the subset of features in C. I use Visual C++ which is an integrated development system that includes its own editor and debugger. I also use UltraEdit to edit files other than program modules.

I used a Visual C++ search tool to make a rough count of the number of lines of code and it came out to almost 310,000, not counting comments or third party modules, help file, documentation, etc. At 50 lines/page that's over 6000 pages of code.

Scripts are simply text files and consist of a unique command word followed by version number and various arguments that encode transformation settings. Before reading a command line, all the settings are initialized to defaults -- this way if I simply add a new setting, old scripts that do not include the new setting will just have it set to a default value. For more extensive changes, I either add a new name for the setting or update the version number and check which version I am loading and make allowances accordingly. The next time the script is saved, it thus gets updated to the latest version.

[MarkT]

"6000 pages of code"... I'm curious how ver 8 compares to ver 7, in size and in ease of updating?

I was completely happy using ver 7, and when you announced the end of development I felt I could continue to use it for the rest of my days without complaint.

But then ver 8 came along, and now I can't live without it.

I remain in awe of the design of the app, and in gratitude for your continued updates and support.

Thank you.