[sift this] As part of the research into the look and feel of Bitsifter 2.0, we've delved into the world of image editing. Until recently, Bitsifter has always used Paint Shop Pro, a light-weight shareware paint package that packs enough punch to forgo use of hard disk hog packages like Adobe's Photoshop or Corel Draw. A problem cropped up in their 4.0 version; we realized their implementation of drawing fonts wasn't up to snuff.

The slickest add-on for Windows 95 was their Plus! pack. The desktop enhancements were geared toward the owners of desktops with some fashion sense. They wanted full redraw when they moved dialogs, fonts without annoying jaggies, and serious desktop themes. The Plus! pack spoiled us. Looking at the way Paintbrush drew fonts with jaggies started the Bitsifter staff on a search for the next generation paint program. We wanted an image editor that cared we had 4 megabytes of memory on our video card and lots of processor power.

In comes, Alvy Ray Smith...

Other than personal finance, the one market that Microsoft has never significantly penetrated is graphic design � Corel Draw has the vector graphics market and Adobe owns the desktop publishing and photo editing sector. In 1994, Microsoft purchased the Altamira company, founded by Alvy Ray Smith, also the founder of Pixar. Altamira produced Composer, the first image editing product to "introduce the concept of image objects (sprites) to the personal computer imaging world." Essentially, a sprite is an image with your normal red, green, and blue channels plus one extra, the alpha channel. This extra channel allows the designer to adjust the transparency of sprites and produce other interesting effects.

The staff at Bitsifter could care less about alpha channels, but Microsoft Image Composer piqued our interest with its rendered fonts. Beautiful 72 point smooth Times New Roman characters, suitable for professional looking web pages. Similar to that of Corel Draw, the interface provides an amazing amount of control over the objects on the canvas, the degree of control the user has in utilizing their color is unprecedented.

The mad craze regarding the Internet has Microsoft's pointed at the web, so Image Composer is currently getting shoved into the Front Page 97 suite; but any serious graphics designer will have Composer as part of their image editing repertoire.

[?] In his article "New Math: One Plus One Equals Four", Rich Willis argues "that pessimists who worry about the 'information haves' exploiting the 'information have-nots' erroneously apply physical object-based concerns to the intangible world of information. Physical objects are expensive to duplicate for everyone who might want them. Information and knowledge have no such limits. They can be used by everyone, simultaneously."

A problem exists in Willis' argument -- he ignores that in order to access information, an individual needs a "physical object" in the form of a computer with Internet access. We in the Silicon Valley are thankful for the tremendous resources available to us, but it is our job to make sure the rest of the planet has equal access to this tremendous wealth of information.

Happy Thanksgiving.