Adobe's moat is so small, so it's a matter of time until someone frustrated with their pricing would rather just rebuild the entire Creative Suite. I have also rebuilt the features from Photoshop I want using Rust recently (primarily because the company I work for started blocking Photopea, but I digress...) and it's been a great to work with. I can imagine the same would hold true for Lightroom, Illustrator, and Indesign.
Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction
Pretty crazy. I think we’re already very numb to AI. Can you imagine seeing something like this pop up 3 years ago? Youd have been dumbfounded and it would have been major news.
Not surprised, I was super suspicious when I saw this post. Like I bet the underlying image/layout manipulation isn’t that technically challenging at this point, but there is just so much that goes into every single operation from the UI to validations to operation that even with the best use of AI I doubt you could replicate any of the image/video products without several months to a years worth of dedicated effort.
I think there's some fatigue with all the brand new projects that have a skeleton of a project up that isn't really usable yet, where the original prompter doesn't bother to finish it off when it gets too hard. There's a lot of noise that doesn't translate to results so far.
I think this project is interesting, but it's more a wait and see what happens kind of thing.
Agreed. It’s hard to tell what apps will “survive” other then making a splash, especially since there is a constant reliance on llms with fluctuating costs and seemingly an over reliance on rust being the ideal language for everything.
I am holding onto my copy of Affinity 2 and never letting go... mainly because Canva never bothered porting the third version to iPad and the whole point of me buying Affinity was that I could open the same project on iPad and Windows.
Affinity for iPad is still coming — apparently in November.
It’s not a simple port, is it? The iPad apps have significantly different UI and a more iPadOS-ish UX, and their release has always lagged (though, ironically, Affinity started out as an iPad project within Serif; the hardware wasn’t ready so they pivoted to the Mac, but things like canvas rotation were still tested first on the iPad for feasibility)
It really hasn't been enshittified. They made everything that already existed in Affinity free without any catches. And then added some new AI powered editing tools which require a subscription. Tools which you don't need and can ignore easily.
The way it works now is pretty much how studio link worked in v2 if you had all three apps (and indeed the file format was already shared by the three apps, under the hood).
Nothing has been enshittified, and indeed if you knew anything about Affinity, the fact that they chose that name, had a three pointed logo and a single shared file architecture, and the way they have talked about the integration in the suite, you would have predicted this for v3 whether or not Canva bought them. This integration was always going to happen.
It's wild that anyone still uses Adobe software these days. Adobe is one of the most famous companies for enshittification, and the open-source alternatives are generally very good.
Personally, I switched to open-source alternatives way back in the late 1900s, and they've only continued to improve ever since. Adobe has been lagging behind for over a quarter of a century, in the ways which matter to me, and they keep getting farther behind as they turn to worse and worse methods of extorting money from people.
YMMV, of course.
I can get behind almost anything which reduces lock-in for Adobe's remaining customers, but from what I see in other comments, this probably ain't it. It seems very vibey and buggy. But maybe after more work is put in, it could be good. It looks like it wasn't supposed to go public yet, and they're aware that it's not ready yet.
I'm interested to keep an eye on this. Doesn't seem like it's in a usable state right now but if it ends up workable this will really shake up the entire software industry.
Same for Microsoft and others. There is still a business in selling and supporting software, but not in creating it, and barriers to entry are now purely about sales and service.
These companies are going to start tagging files not made by their software as not being "genuine" and freak out a bunch of IT people, who will then ban these apps.
> These companies are going to start tagging files not made by their software as not being "genuine" and freak out a bunch of IT people, who will then ban these apps.
Yeah, that's not going to happen.
The backlash against Adobe would be intense from users and the industry for attempting to break JPEG's interoperability as an ISO standard.
Let’s not get carried away here; Adobe has competed against hundreds of image editors ever since Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 and haven’t messed with the interoperability of their file formats.
Just to be clear, nobody at Adobe is losing sleep over a suite of free apps that are knock-offs of Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, etc. for now.
I mean pdf is made by Adobe so they can change their standard. If I were distributing software I’d want guarantees it only ingests trusted data, not only for software but for non-tech peoples trusts. No need for poisoned data further diving into the software/llms.
Are we looking at the same stock? I am confused where this data is coming from. What I see is stock slightly higher than it was week ago, fell compared to day ago, and the change is 1-2%, way less than you 50% fall claim.
As I understood the message, the GP post stated their predicted price for Adobe, and the target price for the options they purchased, not any change in price that has already occurred.
Haha, I wasn't ready to post this to HN. It's not anywhere close to ready. But thank you aghuang. (I want to post this again when we clear Beta phase.)
These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.
I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)
I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.
It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.
Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.
Just wanted to say at least for the non-creative apps I am already doing that at https://azul.rs
But its a lot harder if you want to maintain at least some level of quality. For example, your PDF export exports texts as paths and correct PDF encoding and font subsetting took months of trial and error (I maintain the printpdf crate).
So you have to actually use your apps, test extensively, etc. - don‘t underestimate the effort required for QA and testing.
I like this mindset but damn that's a lot of tokens? At what cost? And then to continue to maintain and .. idk.. I suppose it'll work? If the motivation is strong enough and momentum is sustained?
I m not really a fan of GIMP but Krita and Inkscape are both serious and competent apps with their own principles and features, made by people who care and who seriously understand their knowledge domains, and I would rather have either than AI-slop clones of Adobe apps that enshrine Adobe’s dated workflows in open source that no human wrote.
I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.
Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.
Affinity works both similarly and differently and is now pretty popular.
It’s different but really not inferior to Photoshop, for example (better live filters, cross model curves, better layer blending), and it’s not inferior to InDesign or Illustrator, mostly. It does have a file format that allows all three to coexist (in fact it effectively always did).
They all have sufficient familiarity (the basics of the tools and layers are now pretty much a standard “medium” that most photo/painting apps implement, after all) but they have their own advantages. The integration between the three apps is way ahead.
I just don’t see why anyone would make open source apps that don’t move things forward (Krita and Inkscape do, in their own ways).
It’s also a pretty hollow demonstration of AI, ultimately, to use it to just clone ripoffs, but it does have a sort of fractal self-similarity I suppose.
Is there an open source “drop-in alternative” for really any desktop app of substance? Plenty of excellent alternatives, very few that drop in and don’t have some kind of conceptual differences (even LibreOffice, which after all started as a closed source app).
I don’t think anyone is served well by pursuing blatant cloning in open source. But if this is shoddy destiny of AI coding then I am at peace with it. People can use lazy knockoffs if they want.
I'd love to see something like this for Solidworks, but think you're in for a boatload of trouble there. OpenCASCADE is less capable than Parasolid, and a true Rust-based parametric geometry kernel capable of boolean joins, fillets, etc. needed for anything resembling a modern feature set is wickedly difficult (that's one of the reasons why everyone licenses existing ones and don't try to roll their own).
Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!
Indeed. If you are going to burn tokens to clone something, then assembling a team of people who could help you burn those tokens in service of a bRep kernel (let alone a Parasolid kernel) would be an interesting undertaking.
With photoshop, illustrator, etc., there’s a fair amount of code out there. No LLM has however ever seen the source code —- or I suspect even much detailed discussion —- of a bRep kernel better than Opencascade, but with the right people to decide what maths to work on, maybe there is progress to be made. This knowledge is held by few people, many of whom will now have retired!
I've played around with most of the solutions in this space (OnShape, Fusion360, FreeCAD, Solvespace), but honestly at this point would probably just end up paying for the Solidworks hobbyist license; it's like $4/month and I have a Windows desktop available. That said, there's been some consensus built over the past few years about what the next-gen CAD software should probably look like, ranging from modern scripting capabilities to version control and intermediate shape representations.
A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.
I'm doing a run at rebuilding a few of Apple's bundled apps (iPhoto, iTunes, Mail) as they were back around 2015, the replacements are much worse in the ways I care about so at this point rebuilding as GTK + Rust seems like a worthwhile experiment. I only started last week though so I don't have a sense of how long it will take yet.
The videos of the features are very well done, and it looks like there is a unified vision, which is not what any of the other products have. Did Google copy some of the UI/UX? I was curious where their inspirations were, and I think this may have been it.
Despite whatever else happens with AI, I am excited about the near future where we have an open source version of basically every app. I hope this is the beginning of the end of the subscription model. Keep it up!
This project looks extremely ambitious. Are these applications coded by AI by any chance? I can't find any easy documentation about the development process.
> ArtCraft is a form of "fair source" software. It's like free beer in that we give you the code, but there are a few small limitations on what you can do with it.
As seen on the main Artcraft repo. There's other tools that are MIT-licensed, although given that people are noting that this is AI-created the notion of copyright on this is suspect to begin with. Remember kids: all AI slop is born public domain because machines don't have a soul for the purpose of copyright law. And probably also the 13th amendment. Don't upload your brain, kids.
Anyway, let me get up on my soapbox and talk about these "have your cake and eat it too" licenses, that try to be source-available while privileging one particular vendor as the Blessed Owner with special monetization powers. To put it shortly, this doesn't work, because it mixes all the bad parts of FOSS with all the bad parts of proprietary software.
The business model of proprietary software does not work with even source-available terms. Proprietary software is a game of becoming essential to your customers and then taking them for everything they've got. All the successful proprietary companies are, effectively, selling legacy software that was useful to a group of companies a long time ago, but is now so deeply integrated into their IT systems they don't even know they have it until the licensing police show up. "You can use it for free but can't sell it" is anathema to this: it is specifically the "use" part that you're worried about.
Likewise, being able to modify the software - even only for internal uses - means that the proprietary owner has to compete against their own customers for ongoing payments and revenue. Again, if you've dug your talons into a big org to the point where you're indispensable, you don't want your customers making their own forks of your code. You want them paying $$$$/mo for enterprise support.
What FOSS is doing is basically promising to never do these things. If your goal is to make money, then adopting FOSS is like a cat going vegan. And the half-measure source-available licenses don't help, because you wind up conceding all the things that make you money just so you can claim ownership over things most people weren't interested in.
also, from their CLAUDE.md:
> Clean-room. Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Illustrator bundle (names/listings only). Never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names. Behaviour comes from public docs and black-box observation of the running app with synthetic documents only (screenshots by window id, stored under plan/illustrator/screenshots/, never committed). Never copy GPL/AGPL code (Inkscape, lib2geom…).
There is no such thing as clean-room vibe coding. Every line of FOSS code has been trained on. If you use any AI coding model, you are generating code that is going to be similar to copylefted code. There is no "MIT/Apache only" model out there you can use.
Also, no, switching to GPL doesn't help. Actually, it is my opinion that you cannot meaningfully comply with GPL while vibe-coding, because you have changed the definition of "corresponding source code" from a bunch of .rs files to a number of prompts being handed off to a cloud model. Remember: according to GPL, the source code is not "the thing you put into the compiler", it's "the thing the developers prefer to edit to alter the program". Otherwise, you could say "the source code is this uncommented ASM listing" and sidestep the GPL entirely. What we're doing with AI is the same idea, except instead of going down one level of abstraction, we're going up one.
I'm sorry! I didn't mean to publish the repos so soon. This project is brand new. There's been a lot of excitement about this, but we have a long way to go.
If this is about the desktop apps and not the website, I'd love it if you could file an issue. We're going to work through everything.
My fault, I shouldn't be putting you down for developing something and making it public. The mix of grandiose with slop is a bit weird and dangerous tho a bit of humbleness would fit well as we know the effort you put to this isn't much yet. Unless you have years of experience in the video/image editing software.
Nobody is beating Adobe with "claude create for me a clone of the adobe suite". Someone that knows what they are doing need to be behind it. It might be you but it would take years of experience if you don't have them yet.
Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction
Just curious, because I've worked within design/film etc. for years.
I did open the PhotoCraft and loaded a few of my simpler layout projects. And literally nothing works.
Let's see:
1. Tried to select text, like the selector is off from the cursor.
2. Tried to edit text, takes like 3 seconds to drag the slider for size, nothing happens (text doesn't change size).
3. Absolutely everything is insanely laggy: selecting, switching, etc.
4. Can't seem to expand/collapse folders.
5. Everything shows shortcut keys - shortcut keys don't do anything.
6. Tried to move something, it kind of got frozen for a while. Eventually disappeared I think?
7. Clicked something and it auto selected a side panel (don't know why), hid the other panel, can't stretch, collapse the panels or get it back...
This is actual joke software, I'm confused why you are impressed?
I think this project is interesting, but it's more a wait and see what happens kind of thing.
Every Crafting App is written from scratch in Rust and held to the same rules."
Yes. We are numb to AI (slop). Maybe if this project is still being developed in a year people might take it seriously.
It’s not a simple port, is it? The iPad apps have significantly different UI and a more iPadOS-ish UX, and their release has always lagged (though, ironically, Affinity started out as an iPad project within Serif; the hardware wasn’t ready so they pivoted to the Mac, but things like canvas rotation were still tested first on the iPad for feasibility)
Serious publishers don't want a photo editing program in their UI.
That's not how it works; when you're in the Layout Studio, that's your UI and nothing else.
I think the confusion is that some tools appear in the Layout Studio and the Pixel Studio because they make sense in those contexts.
Affinity lets you customize each Studio and the overall UI to your heart's content [1].
[1]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/workspace-about-studios/#cu...
Nothing has been enshittified, and indeed if you knew anything about Affinity, the fact that they chose that name, had a three pointed logo and a single shared file architecture, and the way they have talked about the integration in the suite, you would have predicted this for v3 whether or not Canva bought them. This integration was always going to happen.
Absolutely not.
Affinity just released an update [1] that delivered features like the Blend Tool that users have wanted for years. Cost: $0.
In addition to MCP support, users can now automate the Affinity suite using JavaScript [2].
[1]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/release-notes/
[2]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/scripting-in-affinity/
The Adobe apps are 100% open source, desktop, MIT, no telemetry.
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft etc.
Personally, I switched to open-source alternatives way back in the late 1900s, and they've only continued to improve ever since. Adobe has been lagging behind for over a quarter of a century, in the ways which matter to me, and they keep getting farther behind as they turn to worse and worse methods of extorting money from people.
YMMV, of course.
I can get behind almost anything which reduces lock-in for Adobe's remaining customers, but from what I see in other comments, this probably ain't it. It seems very vibey and buggy. But maybe after more work is put in, it could be good. It looks like it wasn't supposed to go public yet, and they're aware that it's not ready yet.
https://github.com/storytold
Nope. I just downloaded and installed PhotoCraft [1] and launched it. No sign-up, dialog boxes, licensing agreement.
The installer for LightCraft [2] isn't ready yet; building it from source took about 5 minutes.
[1]: https://getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft
[2]: https://getartcraft.com/apps/lightcraft
Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.
Yeah, that's not going to happen.
The backlash against Adobe would be intense from users and the industry for attempting to break JPEG's interoperability as an ISO standard.
Let’s not get carried away here; Adobe has competed against hundreds of image editors ever since Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 and haven’t messed with the interoperability of their file formats.
Just to be clear, nobody at Adobe is losing sleep over a suite of free apps that are knock-offs of Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, etc. for now.
Now that being said, Adobe has plenty of non-standardized file formats that they absolutely could do AutoCAD-style shenanigans with.
These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.
I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)
I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.
It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.
Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.
we remember different 1999s. i remember everyone pirating software made by large companies at that moment in time
But its a lot harder if you want to maintain at least some level of quality. For example, your PDF export exports texts as paths and correct PDF encoding and font subsetting took months of trial and error (I maintain the printpdf crate).
So you have to actually use your apps, test extensively, etc. - don‘t underestimate the effort required for QA and testing.
I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.
I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.
Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.
Specially when the LLMs he is using to make this software were 100% trained and likely heavily influenced by the software he is shitting on.
Affinity works both similarly and differently and is now pretty popular.
It’s different but really not inferior to Photoshop, for example (better live filters, cross model curves, better layer blending), and it’s not inferior to InDesign or Illustrator, mostly. It does have a file format that allows all three to coexist (in fact it effectively always did).
They all have sufficient familiarity (the basics of the tools and layers are now pretty much a standard “medium” that most photo/painting apps implement, after all) but they have their own advantages. The integration between the three apps is way ahead.
I just don’t see why anyone would make open source apps that don’t move things forward (Krita and Inkscape do, in their own ways).
It’s also a pretty hollow demonstration of AI, ultimately, to use it to just clone ripoffs, but it does have a sort of fractal self-similarity I suppose.
I don’t think anyone is served well by pursuing blatant cloning in open source. But if this is shoddy destiny of AI coding then I am at peace with it. People can use lazy knockoffs if they want.
Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!
With photoshop, illustrator, etc., there’s a fair amount of code out there. No LLM has however ever seen the source code —- or I suspect even much detailed discussion —- of a bRep kernel better than Opencascade, but with the right people to decide what maths to work on, maybe there is progress to be made. This knowledge is held by few people, many of whom will now have retired!
A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.
You may want those in new high-performance infinite precision: https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal
Exact curves: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve
Meshes: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh
and more in the ~22 crate stack.
I look forward to the beta and beyond!
As seen on the main Artcraft repo. There's other tools that are MIT-licensed, although given that people are noting that this is AI-created the notion of copyright on this is suspect to begin with. Remember kids: all AI slop is born public domain because machines don't have a soul for the purpose of copyright law. And probably also the 13th amendment. Don't upload your brain, kids.
Anyway, let me get up on my soapbox and talk about these "have your cake and eat it too" licenses, that try to be source-available while privileging one particular vendor as the Blessed Owner with special monetization powers. To put it shortly, this doesn't work, because it mixes all the bad parts of FOSS with all the bad parts of proprietary software.
The business model of proprietary software does not work with even source-available terms. Proprietary software is a game of becoming essential to your customers and then taking them for everything they've got. All the successful proprietary companies are, effectively, selling legacy software that was useful to a group of companies a long time ago, but is now so deeply integrated into their IT systems they don't even know they have it until the licensing police show up. "You can use it for free but can't sell it" is anathema to this: it is specifically the "use" part that you're worried about.
Likewise, being able to modify the software - even only for internal uses - means that the proprietary owner has to compete against their own customers for ongoing payments and revenue. Again, if you've dug your talons into a big org to the point where you're indispensable, you don't want your customers making their own forks of your code. You want them paying $$$$/mo for enterprise support.
What FOSS is doing is basically promising to never do these things. If your goal is to make money, then adopting FOSS is like a cat going vegan. And the half-measure source-available licenses don't help, because you wind up conceding all the things that make you money just so you can claim ownership over things most people weren't interested in.
also, from their CLAUDE.md:
> Clean-room. Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Illustrator bundle (names/listings only). Never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names. Behaviour comes from public docs and black-box observation of the running app with synthetic documents only (screenshots by window id, stored under plan/illustrator/screenshots/, never committed). Never copy GPL/AGPL code (Inkscape, lib2geom…).
There is no such thing as clean-room vibe coding. Every line of FOSS code has been trained on. If you use any AI coding model, you are generating code that is going to be similar to copylefted code. There is no "MIT/Apache only" model out there you can use.
Also, no, switching to GPL doesn't help. Actually, it is my opinion that you cannot meaningfully comply with GPL while vibe-coding, because you have changed the definition of "corresponding source code" from a bunch of .rs files to a number of prompts being handed off to a cloud model. Remember: according to GPL, the source code is not "the thing you put into the compiler", it's "the thing the developers prefer to edit to alter the program". Otherwise, you could say "the source code is this uncommented ASM listing" and sidestep the GPL entirely. What we're doing with AI is the same idea, except instead of going down one level of abstraction, we're going up one.
If this is about the desktop apps and not the website, I'd love it if you could file an issue. We're going to work through everything.
Nobody is beating Adobe with "claude create for me a clone of the adobe suite". Someone that knows what they are doing need to be behind it. It might be you but it would take years of experience if you don't have them yet.