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Photoshop in Eclipse?

I was doing my daily reading of news and came across this article over at News.com. It seems Adobe is getting ready to overhaul its Photoshop product… here’s a cute quote:

In comparison, Photoshop today is unwelcoming and unhelpful. “Today, if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, ‘What do I do?’ the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, ‘I dunno–you tell me.’ That’s not real cool, and we can do better,” Nack said.

Sounds like my first experience with Eclipse 2.0 🙂

Here’s another quote:

“A new user interface will help Photoshop become “everything you need, nothing you don’t,” said Photoshop product manager John Nack…

Adobe coders have been working to make Photoshop to enable the modular, adaptable vision with features such as customizable menus and shortcuts, or workspaces that let users save particular configurations of editing palettes.

We’re already making the code modular so that people aren’t running what they don’t need,” Nack said. “Now we need to follow up at the user experience level, so that people don’t have to wade through anything not geared towards the task at hand.”

Eclipse could help in some of these areas as these were similar problems software developers faced within integrated development environments. For example, the notion of Eclipse perspectives was introduced to help codify the UI for the task you’re currently working on, whether it is Java development, planning or debugging. So…

Perspectives… check.

Modular architecture… check.

Configurable keybindings… check.

Workspaces… check.

Adobe already plugs into Eclipse for AIR-related tooling. How about plugging Photoshop onto Eclipse?

I guess I’m getting spoiled these days with everything integrated within Eclipse… I almost feel like an Emacs developer back in the 90’s with NNTP, IRC and email in my Emacs client.