Photoshop 1.0 Arrives On The iPhone

To celebrate Photoshop's 20th Anniversary, Photoshop co-creator Russell Brown asked Ansca Mobile to re-create Photoshop 1.0 for the iPhone.It would have been a natural job for Adobe Flash, were Flash available on the iPhone.

But as has been widely reported, Apple CEO Steve Jobs isn't fond of Flash and won't have it on his iPhone. (You thought it was your iPhone, didn't you?)

So Brown turned to Ansca Mobile, a start-up founded by veterans of Apple and Adobe, to build the app using the Corona SDK, which lets designers and programmers build Flash-style apps on the iPhone.

The result can be seen here in a video. It's not a complete copy of 1.0. It only lets the user load a photo from the iPhone library, and manipulate it using the original Photoshop 1.0 Levels panel. Still, it's an app I would purchase were it available to the public, just for the nostalgia value.

Sadly, it's only available to 50 lucky people who attended the Photoshop anniversary event, through what's known as Ad Hoc Distribution -- a way to distribute a limited number of iPhone apps outside the iTunes App Store. I don't expect it will be released to the public owing to the licensing issues sure to be involved. And Apple, the overly protective parent that it is, might withhold its approval.

Surprisingly, this Photoshop 1.0 recreation was coded in three days. Development speed has been one of Corona's selling points and Ansca Mobile decided to take the project on to put its claims to the test.

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