Now, I used Fractal Painter since version 2 (why not version 2? At the time I couldn't afford it). I loved the program, but didn't use it enough to justify following it through the nightmarish set of boom and bust corporate shenanigans that ended (?) with its acquisition by Corel (best known for their freakishly terrible \"Draw\").
Anyway, ArtRage is by no means feature competitive with Painter. It's small, simple, uncluttered -- but it just works. And in this era of bloated and incredibly complex software, it's something of a relief to use a program that knows what it is and isn't.
Another example of this is Silo 3D, a 3D modeling program that -- at least as of version 1.x -- offered only polygon modeling and subsurface smoothing (and in fact offers only one type of subsurface smoothing, and will allow only creased or uncreased edges). Almost any 3D modeling tool offers more features, but somehow, Silo 3D is more fun to use. Oh yeah, and it's simple, small, and cheap.
The thing that lets these and other better-known simple applications (such as the iLife apps) be so useful when similarly \"crippled\" applications would have been justifiably ignored ten years ago is file-level interoperability. In essence, we are getting the fruits of the \"object-oriented operating system\" (Taligent, OpenDoc, etc.) at the level of applications thanks to emerging file format standards.
Some of these file formats are open (e.g. JPEG) or self-evident (e.g. OBJ) while others are proprietary but reasonably well-documented or understood (e.g. PSD).
Anyway, it's nice to see small developers producing focused products that are easy to use, addictive, and cheap.","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T10:51:19.815+00:00",path:"the-virtues-of-simplicity",_created:"2024-07-09T20:34:06.882Z",id:"63",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:34:06.882Z","$id":"63",_path:"post/path=the-virtues-of-simplicity"}}