I am a big fan of application simplification, so when a major software company redesigns the interface of a relatively complex application, I sit up and take notice. In this case, Corel announced that its latest version of Painter (version 8) would have a more Photoshop-like interface 'for ease of use'.
A few years back, Painter was an industry-standard art program that shared the professional paint tool market with Expression from Creature House.
Paint programs simulate the effects of an artist's brush on your computer. Aside from being a lot less messy, these applications are indispensable for production artists who create art for print and/or electronic formats.
Then Painter 7 came along. It had difficulty integrating with the Wacom Tablet, the most popular graphics pen/brush input device. The whole program was so unstable that many artists found it unusable. Needless to say, a lot of people were anxiously waiting for version 8.
I am always in favour of simpler interfaces, but Painter 8 is not simpler. It is, however, more like Adobe Photoshop. But Photoshop has one of the most unintuitive interfaces of any application, even though long-time Photoshop users have become accustomed to it.
If you use Photoshop every day you might prefer the new look of Painter, but if you are a novice user, you definitely will not prefer it. Professional commercial artists will figure it out in a few days because they have to, but it would have been nice if Corel had at least offered the option of retaining the old, familiar interface.