We're about to revive the Apple vs Microsoft lawsuits of the 90's over "look and feel"

If this is actually based on decompilation, they're going to get sued into oblivion. If it's a reverse engineering project based on behavioral observation... it's probably relatively thin, and the question becomes whether the maintainer(s) are going to invest enough effort into it to merit user trust. Given how massive the feature sprawl of Adobe CC is, getting from zero to something is pretty easy. Maintenance, completeness, and meriting trust are a lot harder.

I'm quite mixed on this if it's a positive or not.. But I have to say, their website did give me a good chuckle.

> Built the hard way.

> Every Crafting App is written from scratch in Rust and held to the same rules.

In a similar vein, https://redlamp.app

Why link to some dude's bluesky instead of to the original source? https://getartcraft.com/apps

The Adobe suite is just the start - they've made "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of many other apps: https://github.com/storytold

This looks more like spam... there is no de-compilation.. an LLM based vibe-code app is no adobe alternative, and gimp is already opensourced and covers the same workflows. They are also charging for these new apps on their site. Additionally, they themselves have this disclosure:

"Important Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha, and we want to be straight about where it stands: much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. The biggest gaps are Al/generative features, about twenty missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility. Every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command (docs/parity.md), but that measures wiring, not behaviour. The honest, dimension-by- dimension picture and where we're going next are in the roadmap's parity assessment. Expect rough edges, and please file issues (include your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot). You can also tell us what broke on Discord."

I mean 1) hell yeah that's sick and 2) the front-end software isn't the moat typically, it's the cloud service with stuff like collaboration and storage, maybe even render?

They are clean-room implementations based on their GitHub:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

I think the greater concern should be the increasing viability of spinning up your own personal version of any SaaS product, especially if you constrain it to only the parts you need. These products are made to appeal to as broad a user base as possible, and a lot of personalization is missing by default. Users don't have to sacrifice personal needs due to software scarcity anymore.

why do you think decompilation is needed ?

Title is factually wrong. The author describes their project as a "clean-room reimplementation"[0]. "Decompiled" in the HN title seems to be a (severe) misunderstanding.

[0] https://github.com/storytold

That was on here yesterday or so already and the feedback was, condensed and friendly, rather something like "unusable".

Aw man... now my Animal Crossing clean room implementation won't be a huge surprise.

Dang it. Gotta get one week faster.

Are we getting to the point (in a few years maybe?) where software will have its Suno moment where there is no need to actually pre-create it on some occasions.

It’s just created when required and personalised to exactly that use case. Then either reused or just discarded.

That is a weird world if so.

Or maybe we all have our own personalised version of photoshop that Adobe allow you to modify and still keep paying them.

This has been posted a few times already, and no, it's not decompiled from real Photoshop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981449

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986072

Why is this story being censored?

A clean-room reverse engineered Photoshop is huge and important news.

Are we hiding from reality now?