Post

Ant Stanley
@iamstan.dev

So a fun thing is happening to all the ArtCraft projects (The Adobe/MSFT/etc clean room clones). They're attracting a ton of contributors, and are rapidly improving. If you tried any of the apps a few days ago when announced, they're all a lot better today, and will keep improving.

4 reposts57 likes

Ash
@hiwarkar.bsky.social

This is very true. I tried effectCraft a few days ago, didn't like a few features, built the features and changes and shipped them. Linus wasn't kidding when he said that the Linux kernel is OSS not because of some belief, but because it actually makes the software better. More people should try it

Sean Newell
@sean.thenewells.us

Yeessss yesss I like this. If we can get high quality creative tools in the hands of artists, without a binding annual subscription. That will be very very good!

AJC
@acjc.mu.social

Ooh, money is involved now. Watch Congress outlaw these apps somehow, because of "dangerous AI" (subtext "ooh China is baaaad")

Ant Stanley
@iamstan.dev

The photocraft app (aka the Photoshop clone) is probably going to hit over 2,000 changes in the next day. It was only released 10 days ago. Over 1,000 of the changes released so far are fixes. If it had bugs when you tried it last week, there is a good chance they may be gone.

David Calavera
@calavera.dev

I tried photocraft last week with some camera raw files and I was blown away by how much faster and responsive it is than photoshop already.

Ant Stanley
@iamstan.dev

I've been using Gridcraft for some spreadsheet stuff. It's so fast, and the binary is only 23MB! I think we'll see a community of contributors spring up around these apps, and hopefully push them past the incumbents.

David Calavera
@calavera.dev

Lightcraft doesn't support tethered capture yet and I'm thinking about building it myself. All the other features I use from Adobe are there, although in slightly different shapes.

Ant Stanley
@iamstan.dev

Large numbers of contributors are flocking to improve these apps... At one level this is analogous to what happened with @npmx.dev earlier this year... but instead of building a better npm, they're building a better suite of enterprise and design apps.