Alchemy Mindworks

Graphic Workshop is a singular application. First released in 1986 – yes, they did really have computers back then – it has evolved to provide an expanding palette of graphic functionality to its users for almost a quarter of a century.

At times, it makes us feel really, really old.

One of the unseen components of Graphic Workshop has always been its internal architecture. The way Graphic Workshop manages its memory and resources to manipulate the oftentimes substantial data objects represented by digital images has allowed it to make the best use of the hardware it found itself running on. Its architecture has always been a bit of a juggling act in this regard – typically requiring that we keep a lighted torch, a chainsaw and a polecat in the air at all times.

The architecture of Graphic Workshop Professional 3 has about half a decade on its clock as you read this, and it was structured for much smaller images on much less powerful computers than are now the case. In transitioning to Graphic Workshop Professional 4, we sought to better align it with the reality of contemporary digital imaging.

This being said, we also sought to hang onto a nicely-evolved, intuitive user interface that no one really wanted to re-learn from scratch.

One of the fundamental considerations in the architecture of a complex application like Graphic Workshop is that it embodies inherent limitations. Making it possible to have the software do what was required of it efficiently and easily, circa 2005, has made it increasingly difficult to implement new functionality that wasn’t envisioned five years ago.

Graphic Workshop Professional 4, due for release mid to late summer of 2010, offers what we hope will be a familiar working environment, along with a number of important new features that we’ve wanted to roll out for some time… and which the architecture of its predecessor just refused to play nice with.

While the list of enhancements and new toys is extensive, the following are some of our favorite features this far:

• Browser sorting: One of the most frequently asked-for features in Graphic Workshop Professional 3 over the past few years has been the option to sort the items in a browser window by criteria other than their file names. It was also something that the old version three architecture just wouldn’t permit us to do… at least, not in any form users of the software would have enjoyed looking at. Graphic Workshop Professional 4 allows its browsers to be sorted by file name, file size, file type and file date, and it manages even really huge folders quickly and with a reasonable allocation of system resources.
• Up-to-date file readers: We’ve reviewed the graphic format readers and writers in Graphic Workshop Professional 4, adding support for innumerable new variations. Perhaps not innumerable, but there certainly seemed like a lot of them. Graphic Workshop Professional 4 will open even the most repugnant, scaly green mutants without so much as a beep or a warning message.
• Simplified thumbnails: Graphic Workshop Professional 3’s thumbnail management was something of a work in progress, with several new thumbnail modes – such as virtual thumbnails – added as the software expanded. While powerful and flexible, its thumbnail features took some effort to fully understand and utilize. The version four thumbnail modes are easy to understand, with few options to keep track of. We’ve also added localized thumbnail databases to blend the space efficiency of a centralized database with the speed of individual thumbnail objects.
• Interactive account management: The registration process for Graphic Workshop Professional 4 has been completely rewritten. Graphic Workshop interacts directly with a user database that resides on our web server. If you lose your registration code, you’ll be able to recover it within seconds.
• Extensive open-with database: Right-click on an item in a Graphic Workshop Professional 4 browser window and you’ll be able to open it with any application you choose. The software can be configured to keep track of your choice of third-party software to work with each format Graphic Workshop supports. It will even suggest suitable candidates.
• Personalization: A contemporary tool bar and nicer dialog buttons won’t make Graphic Workshop resize your JPEGs any faster, but they’re part of a portfolio of functionality that will let you fine-tune its working environment to your taste. The Millennium theme that ships with the version four package is particularly elegant – its toolbar appeared earlier in this post.
• Robust security: The growing emergence of deliberately malformed graphic objects on the Internet has made it more important than ever to manage them with software that can’t be crashed. We’ve reviewed every line of code in Graphic Workshop Professional 4 and stomped every theoretical exploit we could find. It’s as bulletproof as software gets.

There’s a lot more to Graphic Workshop Professional 4, but we’d like to keep some of it as a surprise for a while longer.

As with earlier major version upgrades, if you have registered or upgraded a registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 3 within one year prior to the release of Graphic Workshop Professional 4, we’ll send you a free upgrade registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 4. That’s “free” as in “no money down, no interest or carrying charges and no payments from now until the end of time.”

The pricing for Graphic Workshop Professional 4 has not been finalized at this time – note that if you upgrade your Graphic Workshop Professional 3 registration now and the upgrade cost for Graphic Workshop Professional 4 increases, you’ll have pocketed the difference… assuming you still keep anything like money in your pockets.

To upgrade, please visit our upgrade ordering page or call our toll-free order desk at 1-800-263-1138.

We’re particularly proud of Graphic Workshop Professional 4, and we hope that the many long-time users of this application will enjoy it as much as we have. You’ll get to enjoy the stable release, of course – the early in-house builds were often a lot more exciting than software is meant to be.

As always, we encourage you to get in touch with us if you have any suggestions for Graphic Workshop Professional 4.