Macromedia xRes

~ the goodbye ~

In 1997 I was thirteen and did not own a scanner. xRes existed for people whose problem was that a single image would not fit in the machine, and that is a problem you only get once somebody is paying you to have it.

It started as Fauve. Fred and Richard Krueger set the company up in Raleigh in 1992, and their first product, Matisse, shipped in 1993 with layers in it: separate stacked images you could slide over each other without flattening anything. That was a year before Adobe put layers into Photoshop 3, and it made Matisse the earliest consumer paint program in North America to have them. A Japanese tool called LALF had done it in 1989, which almost nobody outside Japan knew.

Fauve xRes followed in 1994 and it went after the other problem. Prepress work in the mid-nineties meant files of a hundred megabytes and up on machines with a fraction of that in memory, and Photoshop's answer was to make you wait. xRes did the work on a screen-resolution copy of whatever region you happened to be looking at, which made every brush stroke instant. The accumulated edits got applied to the full-resolution original at the end.

Macromedia bought the company on 30 August 1995.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it did ~

xRes 2 was the merge: Matisse's paint engine and layer model dropped onto the xRes high-resolution core, sold for Mac OS and Windows. The trade was explicit and everyone who bought it understood what they were agreeing to. You got a responsive editor on hardware that had no business running one, and you paid for it at the end of the session while the machine baked your work into the real file, which could take a very long time.

That trade is why the product existed and also why it had a shelf life. It was engineering around a memory constraint, and memory got cheaper every year. By the time xRes 3 shipped in 1997 the machines it had been designed to rescue were not the machines anybody was buying, and Photoshop on a well-specified workstation was quick enough that the proxy trick was solving a problem the customer no longer had.

~ the funny part ~

Macromedia decided it could not fund the release cycle needed to keep pace with Photoshop. Three of the main programmers left after that call was made, and by the time they had been replaced the company had turned its attention to the web. xRes was dropped at the end of 1998 and its users were pointed at Fireworks, which had shipped that year and did a smaller job for a different audience: graphics sized for a browser window rather than for a printing press.

The rest is tidier than these stories usually are. Fireworks lived fifteen years and was discontinued in 2013. Adobe bought Macromedia in December 2005, which ended the fight by putting Photoshop and the remains of the program that had layers before it under one roof, about a decade after that had stopped mattering to anybody. Photoshop is still there.

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