Fauve Matisse

Fauve Matisse was a natural painting application that was released by Fauve Software in 1993. Some of its features formed the foundation of Macromedia xRes and later, Fireworks.

History
Matisse is noted as being the first commercial application to use the concept of layers in computer graphics editing, preceding Adobe's own implementation in Adobe Photoshop 3. Layers presented a new way of moving portions of objects within a bitmapped image, while allowing the overlapping elements to remain separate. A "Light" version of Matisse 1.2.5 was bundled as a demo with computer magazine CD-ROMs.

After its acquisition of Fauve in 1995, Macromedia briefly continued to market Matisse and xRes from Fauve's existing product line. The features of Matisse's painting and layer features were then combined with the xRes high-resolution image editing engine into what would become Macromedia xRes 2.