Ex-Photoshop Developer Moves to Microsoft SmartFlow

There’s a new Microsoft employee in town and he comes to campus by way of the Adobe parking lot.

Former Adobe Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg has been hired at Microsoft and will be spending his time working on a new Microsoft product “SmartFlow“.

Mary Jo Foley reports that SmartFlow is a new graphics program that, with this recent hire, seems to be going after the higher-end photo editing crowd that focuses on what Adobe is doing in graphics.

Graphics and image manipulation is actually one of the largest areas that I’ve consistently not used Microsoft products. You might as well uninstall Paint and Draw from my machine because I will always download and install a collection of graphics programs now that I use exclusively.

My personal choices depending on my needs include IrfanView, Fireworks MX 2004 (back when it was still developed by Macromedia), and now SnagIt. For photo organization and manipulation I’ll use Picasa2 as my preferred source.

Is Microsoft Developing Any Useful Graphics / Image Software?

Because of this I haven’t really paid much attention at all to what Microsoft has done in that area of development. Are they doing anything interesting really?

On a side note, one thing that really irritates me is that you can’t easily change the image editing program specified in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. That’s gotten really annoying to me in the past.