Splashup

» see splashup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2007 the interesting question was how much of a desktop application you could move into a browser tab, and the answer kept being: more than you expected, as long as you were willing to use Flash. Splashup was one of the better answers. It opened a window, gave you a toolbar down the left side and a layers panel on the right, and let you stack images and apply effects to one layer without touching the others.

It started life as Fauxto, which is a pun that works better written than spoken, and took the Splashup name around November 2007. Behind it was Faux Labs, a company of two out of Y Combinator's summer 2007 batch. There was a paid tier that never mattered much and a lighter build called Splashup Light for people whose machines could not carry the full editor.

The one feature everyone cited was selective editing. Most browser editors of that period gave you a single flat image and a row of filters. Splashup let you select part of a picture and apply something to that part alone, which is a small thing to describe and the exact thing that separates a toy from a tool.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what came after ~

Everything in this category was Flash, because in 2007 nothing else could paint pixels in a browser window at a usable speed. Picnik was the popular one, Aviary was the ambitious one, Pixlr was the one that copied Photoshop's layout most faithfully and lasted longest. Splashup was the one that got layers right early.

Canvas and WebGL took over the job afterward and did it better, which is the ordinary way these things go. What did not survive the transition is the specific feeling of the era, when a whole image editor arriving over a broadband line in a few seconds still registered as slightly improbable.

~ the funny part ~

Flash is the obvious suspect and Flash did not do it. Adobe did not announce the end of Flash until July 2017 and did not stop shipping the player until the last day of 2020. Splashup was gone six and a half years before that, killed by the far more boring fact that Faux Labs closed on 1 February 2014.

The archive brackets it neatly. splashup.com serves a working page with a sign-up link and a launch button for the editor on 13 November 2013. The next capture, from 5 October 2014, is four hundred and sixty five bytes of GoDaddy parking iframe. Somewhere in that gap, a two-person company simply stopped, and the tool went with it while the platform it depended on had years left to run.

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