from Hacker News

Avocode – preview and inspect PSD without Photoshop

by PetrBrzyBrzek on 5/1/14, 12:35 AM with 20 comments

  • by lechevalierd3on on 5/1/14, 1:41 AM

    How is it different from the Adobe tool mentioned here earlier today ? (https://projectparfait.adobe.com/)

  • by cvburgess on 5/1/14, 1:40 AM

    Although I think this tool is fantastic, and an asset to the design community, i think it is an attempt at making the wrong tool for the job slightly less wrong. Photoshop was never designed, optimized, or planned around UI designers - it's audience is photographers.

    I applaud projects like this, but sometimes its just better to use a tool that was build from the ground up around UI design, not an app that can be hacked to the point where it can somewhat deliver the results that UI designers need.

    I personally use Sketch and Sketch Mirror and have found that the native support for device mirroring, retina resolutions, and CSS layer styles have become an essential part of my workflow. Photoshop gets REALLY messy as soon as you get a few iterations into a big project, and although there are hacks to get around some of the frustrations, at the end of the day they are just that: hacks.

  • by iansinnott on 5/1/14, 1:41 AM

    This is amazing. No one who uses or likes photoshop for design has to switch, and developers never need to find a copy of photoshop again. This is a genius solution.

    Also the fact that it's multiplatform is great. I'm looking forward to using this on linux.

  • by ryanackley on 5/1/14, 1:34 AM

    Has anyone tried Layervault? I've never used them but they look like they do something similar. They also have an open source ruby library for inspecting PSD files called PSD.rb which is how I know of them.

  • by jffry on 5/1/14, 1:30 AM

    As an aside, I was surprised (in a good way) at how well the video blended in with the page. Pixel-perfect alignment of the first thumbnail of the video with the slightly-animated image shown before, and near-instantaneous starting when I played. No flicker, no buffering, just play immediately.

  • by gio on 5/1/14, 1:58 AM

    Looks cool. Me and my friends are working on an API service that would enable anyone to build such an app. http://filepreviews.io

  • by dolphenstein on 5/1/14, 1:17 AM

    Just the sort of tool I'm after! Been using Gimp to open PSDs but it's quite finicky and error prone. I can't justify myself a Photoshop license just for inspection purposes.

  • by stuaxo on 5/1/14, 10:30 AM

    Interesting .. how good is the PSD support ?

    If it's based on existing 3rd party libraries then I imagine there are some things that don't work, on the other hand it might do something a bit more exotic like sandbox adobe apps.

  • by carrotleads on 5/1/14, 1:41 AM

    How can I test it. Put my email down and on a list now.

    Also your email subject says subscribing and at the same time there is no unsubscribe link.

    Maybe change subject to "Thank you for showing interest in Avocode"

  • by muaddirac on 5/1/14, 1:05 AM

    This looks great! I wanted something sim(ilar|pler) for inspecting psd iOS mockups (to extract size/font info, etc). This is clearly geared towards web, but looks like it would work well for any sort of design.

  • by jpdlla on 5/1/14, 1:40 AM

    This looks way better than what Adobe is doing with https://projectparfait.adobe.com/