According to Chris Hornby on the Photodesk and Topmodel mailing lists, Photodesk Ltd. will soon have a presence on the Internet at
photo-desk.com/ and
photodesk.ltd.uk.
He confirmed that the new company will continue selling digital cameras, and indeed expand the range from just the Olympus models; the Canon BJC7100 with photoreal drivers will still be sold while stocks can be located; and Photodesk Olympic (Photodesk 4) will be released around the time of the RISC OS 2000 show, priced £134.75 with various upgrade routes (v3 to v4 only £19.95).
One of the most surprising announcements was that the source to all programs will be opened up to programmers:
I am prepared to release the sources of all programs includingPhotodesk to *serious* programmers under NDA providing we retainrights to publish any developments either as commercial attachmentsor PD or shareware. People intending working on hardware driversshould contact me.
Hopefully this should assure the future of Photodesk the program, and perhaps even lead to new add-ons?
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Long live Photodesk Ltd. (2) |
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(20:36 7/9/2000)
Richard Goodwin (08:53 8/9/2000)
Sendu Bala (20:23 8/9/2000)
hARMsy (13:22 9/9/2000)
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Sendu Bala |
Message #88091, posted at 20:36, 7/9/2000 |
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Being a Photodesk user, this is clearly glorious news. One thing I'm eager to find out is what exactly Photodesk 4 consists of. For just 20 odd quid I'm not expecting much but does it, then, deserve a whole new version number?
There are a lot of things missing from Photodesk, and while 3rd party plugins have been rare (non existant?), lets hope along with Richard that we get some significant new feature loving in the v5 release. |
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Richard Goodwin |
Message #88092, posted at 08:53, 8/9/2000, in reply to message #88091 |
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The features mentioned were PNG support - which is good - but also layers and CMYK support which I thought we already had...?
Anyway, although I doubt I'd be able to do any plug-ins myself (I'd love to but my programming ability isn't up to it) I'm quite excited at the thought that plugins could be on the way to extend the current version of Photodesk (3 or 4) in the same way that Martin Wurthner's modules extended the life of ArtWorks. |
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Sendu Bala |
Message #88093, posted at 20:23, 8/9/2000, in reply to message #88092 |
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v3 does indeed have CMYK and layers. I hadn't even noticed it didn't have PNG support :)
It's my understanding that there had already been documentation released that allowed people to write plugins. Now that the source has been released, I was hoping for something more. Plugins don't seem to take advantage of the main Photodesk feature of use any tool with this effect. Plugins also tend to be (are) just funky effects. While they might be fun, they're hardly important. No. What I had in mind was new fully intergrated basics being written - different editing modes for example. _That_ is what's interesting about this development.
IMHO of course :) |
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hARMsy |
Message #88094, posted at 13:22, 9/9/2000, in reply to message #88093 |
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This is, indeed, good news, and not just for the Photodesk program. Nice to see an apparent re-structuring of its price - and even if this is just for RISC OS 2000, it makes it all the more worthwhile to be attending late in October.
Hopefully it will also mean the continued development of the OHP presentation software, which I really ought to buy for my lab.
Bravo! |
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