A look back at Photoshop’s 20 years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iItTsYmy8lQ

It is interesting because my colleagues were discussing Photoshop and Illustrator and design in general. One of the key features of Photoshop is that it is resource hungry. But I think to myself, “Surely this can’t be true. 20 years ago, computers were running 16 MB of RAM and a 8 MHz Central Processing Unit (CPU). Back then 20 MB hard drive cost US$700 and the super rich bought 400 MB (RAM) drive for US$40,000… and they used it just to run Photoshop 1.0″

Back then, graphic designers and artists were using these tools to create wonderful imagery and graphics. Today, we use Photoshop to crop, resize and apply basic manipulation features (lens flare, anyone?) and yet we complain our dual core 2 GHz + systems aren’t capable enough!

We have 500 times more Megahertz than 20 years ago (8 MHz vs 2 x 2000 Mhz) and in term of RAM (or its derivative), a typical rig used for editing has 1000 x more memory ( 16 MB vs 16 GB)

And still we think it is too slow. Maybe it is because software is bloated!

As computers scale in speed and memory capacity, software developers churn out new versions of their software to use up these extra resources. My friend once asked me this, “I have a 8GB laptop. After booting Windows 7, I check available memory and it reports only 4 GB available! What happened to the other 4? There is nothing running in background!”

(this stuff is premium.. but today is pretty cheap to buy!)

iPad is a different class of machine on its own.

Processor: Dual core 1 GHz low power (think something along Atom / Pentium M / Macbook Air processor Low-Voltage range)

RAM: 512 MB (!) gasp.

Gfx: Ok, this one is quite powerful, 9 x more power than the iPhone 4′s chip but it’s lighting up a 1024×768 screen.

What I’m trying to point out is that, all the cool iOS apps can run within this limited specifications. The developers play within their boundaries. Just grab an iPad and play Infinity Blade or Real Racing 2 HD. The fundamental core of the Operating System is very very efficient. From a coding standpoint, and from a technical design standpoint, it is very lightweight. Windows 7 can run great on a 1GB system or a 8 GB system, but the way it uses memory against the actual performance difference is very negligible. It shows the character of the coders working for Microsoft and how slacking and not serious in their work!

yummy

Even the simple angry bird game runs better on the iPad vs the Chrome browser version or any other of the consoles supporting it. The experience is simply much better!

Here is my effort on PS:

Here’s a little bit of fun (using an online GIF creator tool)