Well, yes and no; I deliberately tried NOT to look too heavily at other products, mainly because it's easy to be influenced. I did, however, make a huge list of all the best features from all my favourite programs, and use that list to put together a feature list for the editor.
My biggest influence by far is PhotoShop; it inspired the use of layers, the MiniMap navigation system, and many of the drawing tools.
Mainly, FishEd is designed so that an artist can prototype their graphics extremely quickly, then throw in parallax layers and static layers and test out their map with smooth scrolling and tile animation effects to see how it would look in the game environment.
My biggest influence by far is PhotoShop; it inspired the use of layers, the MiniMap navigation system, and many of the drawing tools.
Mainly, FishEd is designed so that an artist can prototype their graphics extremely quickly, then throw in parallax layers and static layers and test out their map with smooth scrolling and tile animation effects to see how it would look in the game environment.