Technology

Thursday Buzz: An Image-Editing Legend’s Milestone Day

Twenty-five years ago, Adobe Photoshop entered our lives—and it's been making our photos look better ever since. Also: A big acquisition in the association tech world.

If you’ve edited an image or two in the past couple of decades, the odds are strong that the photo first saw the light of day through a little tool called Adobe Photoshop.

Photoshop’s massive legacy—which helped turn photo manipulation into something mostly done on computers rather than in darkrooms—has been felt ever since, helping add an extra punch to millions of magazine pages and making memes and animated GIFs the lingua franca of the web. Today, it turns 25 years old.

As Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll notes, the software (at first) didn’t have a massive purpose. “Photoshop was a product ahead of its time,” he said in an interview on Adobe’s blog.

But, that said, the purpose eventually appeared.

“Website creators needed to process relatively small images and compress them and make them look good, and that’s where Photoshop came in,” Knoll said. “Then came inkjet printers, as I said, followed by the arrival of digital cameras. I don’t think digital photography would have become as popular unless there was already a way to print and process the images.”

Be sure to take a gander at the timeline of Photoshop’s history [PDF].

A Growing Company

The nonprofit technology firm Abila has been on a bit of a tear on the acquisition front in recent years, and it just added a new peach to the mix.

On Wednesday, the company announced its acquisition of Peach New Media, a firm that has focused on online education solutions, such as its Freestone Learning Platform, for more than a decade.

“The acquisition of Peach New Media is part of our overall strategy to be the best provider of software and services to associations, nonprofits and government entities,” Abila CEO Krista Endsley said in a news release. “By adding the Freestone learning platform and the exceptional Peach talent, Abila strengthens its strong portfolio of products and services that help enhance engagement, add value, increase revenue, and improve decision-making.”

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. (ht @abila_inc)

Other Links of Note

Awesome new tool of the day: Social-scheduling tool Buffer just made it super easy to create text-on-photo shareables for Twitter and Facebook. Check out Buffer’s new tool, Pablo.

Speaking of awesome tools, the task-automation platform IFTTT just launched a trio of new apps called Do, which might come in handy when you have things to do.

Welcome kits matter. What’s in yours? Kivi Leroux Miller offers some ideas for onboarding.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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