The Product

Altamira Composer, the first image composition application, entered the market in November 1993. It featured the first-time use of shaped, floating image objects, called sprites. It borrowed its user interface paradigm from the geometry-based illustration market and 3D market. Most other imaging applications have since adjusted for the new concepts introduced in the product - for example, "layers" in Photoshop. Microsoft ceased production of the product when Altamira merged with it in 1994. Microsoft released, however, the immediate successor to Altamira Composer, called Microsoft Image Composer, bundled with the Microsoft FrontPage 97 product, and a later successor, Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000, part of Microsoft Office 2000 Premium. The latest incarnation is Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10.