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I've always wished youtube would enable video smoothing during playback to help cancel out some of the pixelation. Its as simple as setting smoothing = true on the flash video display object, yet it makes a world of diferenece in terms of quality. The videos are also small enough that it wouldn't be a big hit on cpus. AS1/2: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/00002842.html AS3: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Video.html

I've always wished youtube would enable video smoothing during playback to help cancel out some of the pixelation. Its as simple as setting smoothing = true on the flash video display object, yet it makes a world of diferenece in terms of quality. The videos are also small enough that it wouldn't be a big hit on cpus. AS1/2: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/00002842.html AS3: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Video.html

Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle.

Apple has its headquarters in Cupertino, CA and Adobe has its headquarters in San Jose, CA. Anyone familiar with Silicon Valley geography will be able to tell you that the two are not exactly a million miles apart.

I have to admit I stopped reading your post at that point, as if you can't be bothered to check the most basic of facts, then it doesn't bode well for the rest of your arguments.

It looks like the sort of restrictions I was alluding to apply only to some of Adobe's products (at least in the US and Canada), not including Photoshop: "Education versions of Former Macromedia products only (Studio 8, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) are intended for instructional and administrative purposes only and may not be used for any commercial purpose." (Source: http://adobe.com/blah blah blah long URL) This seems to contradict the UK information you pointed out, so perhaps Adobe's license terms vary by jurisdiction.

Sorry, but wrong

Please check again. I used a careful-placed weasel word ("might"), I did but advise care, and some common Adobe products do indeed have such a restriction (making it worthwhile to check specific cases, assuming you want to be in compliance with your licenses).

Careful! You might be admitting to violating the terms of the student version license by using it now that you are no longer a student.

He has posted a clarification on his blog, dispelling anyone who thinks his original post was him claiming on behalf of Adobe that the Photoshop UI was bad. Instead, it is just not good enough.
 
Read up here http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/11/clarification_o.html

Did anyone else see the Adobe Notes thing? John Nack basically admits that Adobe's help system is useless and wants you to write notes to remind you how to do things in Photoshop.

Here's a practical example. Let's say you go into Photoshop's Unsharp Mask dialog box. "Amount" is straightforward, but what the hell do "Radius" and "Threshold" mean, exactly?

I don't know, but you know what should be able to tell me? The help system.

Then dock them. Photoshop's floating windows are dockable.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/10.0/help.html?content=WS8599BC5C-3E44-406c-9288-C3B3BBEB5E88.html

1. everything you need, nothing you don't.
2. make dramatically more configurable.
3. I don't expect most users to customize the app--nor should they have to do so
4. with the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces
5. start deprecating (and later removing) outmoded functionality
6. polish what's already present

Oops, forgot to add in the URL to the standalone debug version of the flash player.

http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Windows users, like me, should opt for "the Windows Flash Player 9 Projector content debugger (EXE, 2.68 MB)" [Also known as sa_flashplayer_9_debug.exe for those who might opt to find it elsewhere, but beware taht Adobe has the newest version (older versions have flaws/hacks out already).

Look at Flex Builder. Built on the same technologies as Flash, but with the focus on application-style GUIs rather than animations.

Used the Windows-based freely available Flex 2 SDK (Not the Builder) to write an in-house media viewer here and was rather pleased by it, all told.

Not that I'd expect this to run on Gnash though as Gnash is based on a version of Flash (SWF 7) which wouldn't support all these cool toys.

I still believe it's a correct assumption to say Adobe was not building any of their applications using Apple's xcode as their development tool.

Wrong again :( > http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html

Adobe has opened the source code of the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the high-performance ECMAScript implementation used in Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player. Adobe has made the source code available under three prominent open source licenses, and contributed it to Mozilla for eventual inclusion in Firefox.

Cons: Postscript and PDF are both open standards. I am not sure I'd like to see Apple control their future.

Only underdogs* claim to like open standards. PDF is open but Adobe controls all the dominant tools and extends the spec every year or so whether it needs it or not. (Remember back when the "P" in "PDF" stood for "portable"? Have you tried to open the typical modern PDF in anything but Acrobat? Even my computers with Acrobat 5 and 6 pop up warnings on about half of the PDFs I get.) And Adobe quit giving a shit about SVG right after they bought Macromedia (Flash.)

* and open-source types

The only CS3 apps that are intel mac only are the Video apps that had no Mac version of the previous generation. My assumption is they are reusing their SSE tuned code from the windows version since the error message is actually that the program requires SSE2.

BTW they do actually use xcode for the mac apps as of CS3.

http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html

Your eyes surely deceive you. You too can achieve similar effects, with a little practice:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html

It's called keeping up, what with google gears, ms silver, AIR(formerly known as apollo) and all the groovyness in KDE4. If you are a windows type go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/ for a tasty treat.

Enjoy running that on your warez version of adobe's cold fusion server.

For only $649

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html

I know if I was just starting which one I would try first. (And I mean try very very hard)

I hate to bring in price as a selling point but that's almost two weeks (after tax) wage for me.

Adobe's site and Corel's site are even more obviously shopped. Corel even managed to use the same initials as PlayStation Portable ;-)

There's also Aviary. Adobe itself announced they're working on Photoshop Express, after announcing Premiere Express, both on the web. A few weeks ago they bought Buzzword after hinting on an online office suite. Those all run in the Flashplayer, and Hydra will let developers write pixel shaders for Flashplayer 10.

With all those new dev tools (Flex Builder, Thermo) and that C/C++ to Actionscript 3 converter, one might get the impression they're moving away from banners. But maybe that's just me.

• I don't want to wait while 3GB of Photoshop crosses the wires
  you would only have to do it once.
• I don't want Google/Adobe/MS to "own" my work because of some crappy TOS
  you could store your files locally
• I don't want my work to be unavailable if my 'net connection goes down
  it wouldn't. the app would only download the first time.
• I don't want my work to be unavailable if Google/Adobe/MS goes out of business
  I think it is more likely they would merge before go out of business...LOOK OUT!
• I don't want Google/Adobe/MS searching my work to decide what ads I need to see
  see above
• I don't want the NSA/FBI/DLC searching my work to determine if I'm a terrorist/on the wanted list/threat to Hillary
  ?
• I don't want to be locked into paying "rent" to Google/Adobe/MS so I can see stuff later
  that may happen, but not likely.
• I don't want to be forced to "upgrade" to some new version that I hate because that's what's on offer over the 'net
  You think they'll give upgrades away for free, HA!

Just because it's a web application doesn't mean you need a web connection. I imagine they'll distribute their apps not in a browser but in a client like Adobe AIR:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Think of it as the flash player but without the security issues of a browser...that means better interaction with the OS, but the app can still interact/update itself with the web.

The intention is probably to leverage Adobe AIR http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/ (Adobe Labs), but it's basically a webapps on the desktop + sync to online DB. It's in development now. I imagine you will use the AIR app most of the time (so you aren't limited by bandwidth and such and also makes your machine handle the processing requirements) then sync to your online source so it's available elsewhere.

Adobe has real problems, then. Here's the bio of their CEO, Bruce Chizen. Mattel Electronics merchandising. Microsoft eastern region sales manager. VP sales of Claris (remember Claris?). Zero background in any industry that uses Adobe graphics products.

He's identified the marketing problem: "These products are designed to appeal to a younger generation of Internet users for whom paying $400 for a packaged software product is a thing of the past." That's reasonable enough. The going rate for a photo editing program is somewhere below $99. Adobe Photoshop Elements is at $99, it does most of what most people want to do, and people buy it at retail. Adobe's problem there was that they thought they could raise the price of Photoshop from year to year, and that didn't work. The price trend for software is down, not up.

Since they acquired Macromedia, the Macromedia products have gone downhill. Dreamweaver 8 and later are horrid; Adobe can't get FTP to work reliably, create HTML that will pass validation, or make the view in Dreamweaver match the view in the browser. The newer versions are notably worse than the old ones. I just hope they don't break the Flash player engine, which is an elegant and delicate little piece of software. That thing does more in 2MB of code than most programs today do in 200MB.

On the video side, Adobe's problem is that the low end has been taken over by tools that come free with Macs and cameras, while the high end has been taken over by tools from high-end players like Avid. Premiere was once considered a high-end tool; now it's a low end tool with a high end price. Not good.

Open source isn't helping that much here. There's still no good open source replacement for Dreamweaver. Nvu, which had real promise, was abandoned by Linspire back in 2005. There's a fork, called Kompozer, but even its authors just call it "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release". The Gimp has its enthusiasts, but it's not really targeted at graphic artists. Look at its web site. Would you get a graphics tool from those people?

All the comments I see are from a bunch of uninformed Adobe bashers.

The software will be delivered to your desktop via the internet, and will most likely be a flash application running in the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). That means, even if you are offline, you will still be able to edit your photos or do whatever. The online connectivity will be needed to download the software once, periodically check to see you are still subscibed, and to update your local copy of the software when there's a update.

If you care to pull your head out of the sand for a while to go and find more:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

You'd see how uninformed your petty comments are. Install the AIR runtime, download a couple of the application, try them out, then come back and complain when you know something.

Actually, I've frequently been harassed about applications I downloaded or copied off my network whether I really want to run them (and told at that point whether it's digitally signed). It's bloody annoying, and I bet it will be in OS X too.

Interesting then that I, with XP Pro SP2 and hotfixes have never seen such a beast. Perhaps you're running some third party app that does this or some screwed version?

The core thing here is that there is no way to tag an executable in Windows. You're blowing smoke. See below for more on MS's digital signing strategy.

# Application-Based Firewall

Your argument is a load of crap. The fact is, XP SP2 apparently did have it before OS X (even if it sucks, I imagine OS X's one will suck too). You cannot shrug off a valid argument against your point with strawman arguments like that. And it's not an add-on application. It's an OS feature. In the same way as OS X's new firewall is an OS feature.

Actually, OSX already has a firewall, you're just going to be able to use it in easier ways. BTW, IIRC, MS NT based OSes have had port blocking for a long long time. It's certainly not solely an XP SP2 item. (The reason I equate the 2 is that the SP2 Firewall isn't much better than pure port blocking. Don't bother arguing about it, MS's firewall has been well and roundly publicly criticized.)

# Library Randomization

As the GP said, this has been in lots of OSes for a long time, including Windows Vista.

And how easy has it been to implement? It's not in XP SP2.

How is that relevant?

Many of your arguments seem to be - but look, it's in XP SP2...

Other than that, Vista is a swell OS. Just look at its adoption rate. (yes, tangential slam, I just couldn't avoid it)

# Signed Applications

Again, Microsoft, SP2.

I believe MS had signed drivers and DLLs (not applications, just drivers and DLLs) long ago. Guess what, no one does it. When's the last time you had a signed driver or DLL? My sound card, video card, motherboard chipsets, network chipsets, printers, and scanners all came with unsigned drivers, despite being "Made for Windows". Having something and using it effectively are two entirely different things. Those would all be from mom and pop companies, like Creative, nVidia/ATI, MSI/Asus, broadcom, Konica-Minolta/HP, and HP/Epson, respectively.

Wow, way to twist the original point to fit your rabid, foaming at the mouth agenda. Microsoft signs all core OS components (ironically, not Internet Explorer) with their digital signature so the OS can verify that they are the legitimate originals. Third parties can choose to sign their code. Interestingly, that's the exact thing that Apple just described. This has been in Windows since Windows 2000.

From Adobe on the new features of SP2 (because even a google search shows little on digital signing of files other than for embedded systems):

Many of the new security dialog boxes appear if a particular piece of software does not have a digital signature. Digital signatures verify the authenticity of the software download. As software publishers get busy creating and filing their digital signatures, there will be a transitional period in which many reliable software applications will not yet have them. Even without a digital signature, users are able to click to confirm that they want to install their software and proceed with the installation. To find out more about the digital signatures, see the Enhanced Browser Security section of the Microsoft TechNet article, Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Now, that sounds like it happens every time yo

The idea is that it's very easy to switch from "Layout View" (WYSIWYG) to a nice color-coded HTML view, and from there to previewing it in your browser(s) of choice. I don't think the author in this case got the idea.

http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/

But we are nerds. Matter of fact, when it comes to programming language matters even more than it does in a court. Here, we're talking about stuff that could land you in court, so precise language is of benefit.

In a court of law, stealing requires depriving somebody of something more than a theoretical sale. It's only theoretical because there's no real proof that any given copyright infringer would have bought a legitimate copy if they hadn't been able to get the illegal copy.

Take one of the more stolen pieces of software: Adobe photoshop, $649 for the basic version. Would you be able to seriously say that a high school student would have purchased a legitimate copy using a whole month's pay(if not two!) from his part time job? When he's already paying a car loan, insurance, and gas from said pay?

Of course, you're probably one of those people who have no trouble calling a magazine a clip when it comes to guns. Or point at the monitor when you say computer.

Note to all saying that there's no difference between Vista and XP:

The official Adobe advisory states: "Vista users are not affected".

Now let the downplay begin.

However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits. Maybe if Linux had Mac OS X-like Fat Binaries people would be encouraged to create cross-platform binaries, rather than just create a simple IA32 version.

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

You're right that doing middleware through Xfire is perfectly viable.. It didn't seem very supported when we last looked into it, though, which is one of the reasons I was nervous. I do see Adobe's posted http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flexjava.html
though, which is a good first step.

Are you working with Flex->Xfire? How well does it work? Can you point me to any good resources?
I've been frustrated with the small team size behind OL, and it's seemingly lagging technology when compared to Flex- While OL has some really nice features, it's always one or two steps behind, since it needs to then implement a wrapper for the API..

Not to mention the speed difference- Since OL can compile to JS or SWF6, it's slower than a native AS3 app for SWF9 would be.

On the other hand, it allows a *LOT* more compatibility. With OL, you can compile to versions of flash that work without anything new installed except windows. It also supports DHTML fallback, which means you can do your magic everywhere, even an iPhone. They're also working on the new features, such as SWF9/AS3 compilation targets, which will give you a speedboost, without having to recode your work.

Like most things, it's a series of tradeoffs.
-Colin

The entire Flex SDK is open-sourced under the MPL: http://www.adobe.com/go/opensourceflex

The push to support Linux is real. Flash and Flex are intended to be a first-class software development platform, and Adobe realizes that many developers prefer to use Linux.

Hmm, Adobe might be big(ish), but they sure do seem to "get" the web. You couldn't make Dreamweaver or Flash or ColdFusion if you didn't get it. The whole "YouTube revolution" stems partially from Flash video coming to maturity.

Caveat lector: I do work for these people. But I also mean it.

Have a look here. The prices listed are 887 for the extended version and 580 for the basic version. (Note: I think the basic one would more than suffice. It's been a while since I looked it up, but I don't think any serious photo critical tools are missing...) It shows the pounds symbol instead of euros... I don't understand that, I thought pounds were replaced by euros. I apologize for my ignorance, but I thought you'd at least like to know if it turns out the price is significantly cheaper.

good- another company that realizes that linux adoption is inevitable.

Bah. Don't hold your breath for AIR

I've been using photoshop for about 10 years now and have become very proficient. I recently made the switch to linux. The only real application i havn't found a replacement for is photoshop. I have tried using GIMP but their are just too many problems with it.

Have you tried CinePaint aka FilmGIMP? I'll be getting into photography, well professionally I'm hoping, and because it would be a real stretch for me to afford Photoshop right now I'm been looking for a FOOS photo editor. Also as some have offered there are other editors available such as Bibble, Xara Xtreme, and Light Crafts. I'll start with CinePaint and work my way down 'til I find one that works for me, if I don't find one I guess I'll be stuck getting Photoshop. If I do what I'll do is buy an older version of PS from eBay and upgrade it. You can get PS pretty cheaply on eBay but you have to make sure what you get is eligible for upgrades and there's a Transfer of Ownership form filled out.

It will probably be the same as for the Windows version:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexbuilder/

For Flex Builder 2 that's more or less 500 USD (depending on the country you live in).

Flex 3 will be open source. Flex 2 was not, but this is version 3, and it will include the SDK and IDE and whatever else falls under the term "Flex". I actually just downloaded it for Eclipse on Windows the other day, and I plan to do so on my Linux box as soon as I get home. Check out this page and the FAQ further down for more answers.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=657&threadid=1303887&enterthread=y

Posted by "jaydeex"

Flex may be, but the Flex builder is not. At least, version 2 wasn't.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

So yeah, expect to pay for the IDE if you get the official one.

Adobe is giving Drupal some serious loving too, and that's also of interest for the FLOSS CMS folks, no doubt.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/drupal.html

It's an IDE for building apps with Adobe Flex. It was quite apparently to me, even though I've never even considered using Flex. If you don't know what Adobe Flex is, and don't care enough to look it up, why did you bother with the article?

I'll help anyhow:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/

"Adobe® Flex 3 is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems."

You are confused. Autodesk is actually protecting the potential eBay consumer. If I bought a copy of AutoCAD on eBAY, I'd be very disappointed to learn that it wouldn't install without authentication and I'd be very, very disappointed to learn that I cannot authenticate without a license.

It's the eBay buyer's responsibility to make sure they can legally run any software they buy from eBay. And if they use a credit card to pay for it they can dispute the charge, make a chargeback, on the CC. Though I haven't bought anything from eBay, because of the price I've though of buying Photoshop there. Searching eBay you can find where the seller has a Transfer of Ownership form from Adobe.

Exiting news: Through a CGI-script, you can browse on the server of adobe:
here (this has just been disabled a few minutes ago)
According to heise (German), you were able to get adobe's private RSA key (which is not much used though) and there are also rumors that they got the private SSL-key.