???? – 1991retired
Macintosh IIcx
“No screws, no fuss, no fanfare — it just snapped together and quietly left”
“It layered memory on memory, previewing every goodbye in real time.”
xRes began life at Fauve Software before Macromedia acquired it, bringing along a genuinely clever image editor. People loved it for its real-time preview of work — a small miracle in an era when image editing usually meant waiting. And its early versions gave the world the concept of layers, a new way of moving and overlapping objects within an image.
Available for older versions of Mac OS and Windows, xRes quietly said its goodbyes in 1992. Its ideas did not leave with it: layers went on to become foundational to how image editing works to this day. That is a fine legacy for an app most people never learned to pronounce confidently.
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“No screws, no fuss, no fanfare — it just snapped together and quietly left”
“Low Cost, Low Color, full heart — the Mac that let everyone in.”
“Six months of tower duty, then a quiet handoff to the 950. A pioneer's exit.”