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I just ordered and update for my personal, home copy of FrameMaker. It is not cheap, but it is the best text/word/document development tool I've ever used. For technical documents, especially large ones - including books, it has everything you need. It supports multiple output formats, WYSIWYG editing, and has a slick math formula tool.

Check out the free evaluation.

What I don't like about FrameMaker? Adobe dropped the Linux port, after a successfull beta test, due to lack of interest... sigh...

YARIFTRW (Yet Another Reason I'm Force To Run Windows)

There's a huge difference between perceived loses & real loses.
They appear to be taking a page out BSA's book to reach such conclusions.

Using the entertainment industry's analogy, every P2P download represents a lost sale,
& it sounds & looks good to the average Politician!

Now if we use an example the flaw will become apparent.

Example: If Photoshop's latest version get's downloaded via P2P 100,000 times does
that mean they lost those sale's?

Answer: At $649 US a pop I very mush doubt it!

Being generous I'd guess only 1% to 2% of those 100,000 people would truly pay
$649 US for Photoshop if that was the only way they could get it.

I think it would be safe to say the true cost of Piracy isn't $250 billion, but closer to the
$2.5 to 5 billion mark anually.
In all likelyhood the U.S. government will spend more than that amount each year hence
forth in fighting Piracy, thanks to the lobby groups mystical figures.

And for those of you trying to get Flash working in Firefox on an AMD64 linux machine, try this and be pleasantly surprised!

flock-bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.2.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Macromedia/Adobe have two in-depth solutions for this. At least one of the works for any ActiveX.

There's also plenty of information on MSDN.

Here's the page to which you probably were referring.

Microsoft has a tutorial on their MSDN site which discusses this as well.

You are right about Flex already doing this. Want proof? Go to http://maps.yahoo.com/beta
Enter an address and hit enter, repeat n times, now use your browser back & forward buttons at will. :)
Flex has been doing this for a few years and many components support integration with the history manager out-of-the-box. More info here:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/labs/1/flex20beta3/ 00000996.html

BTW: Flex 2 SDK is now free as in beer: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:SDK_Anno uncement

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe.

Adobe claims to hold copyrights on some of the "data structures"

and also may have applicable patents

Microsoft seems to be playing the wounded duck at the moment, trying to convince the public that Adobe won't allow them to implement PDF creation as a standard feature in their Office 2007 and Vista environments.

However, Adobe has published the Portable Document Format specifications since 1993, encouraging developers to create applications that both read and *write* PDF files. From page seven of the PDF Reference, Fifth Edition (v1.6, PDF format) we see the following:

Adobe will enforce its copyright. Adobe's intention is to maintain the integrity of the Portable Document Format standard. This enables the public to distinguish between the Portable Document Format and other interchange formats for electronic documents. However, Adobe desires to promote the use of the Portable Document Format for information interchange among diverse products and applications. Accordingly, Adobe gives anyone copyright permission, subject to the conditions stated below, to:

• Prepare files whose content conforms to the Portable Document Format
• Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format
• Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays, prints, or otherwise interprets the contents
• Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of data structures and operators, as well as the example code and PostScript language function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the purposes above

My guess would be that in typical Microsoft style, they are probably wanting to create their own incompatable extensions to PDF and Adobe has stepped-in and said no to them.

1. That they had a prior contract with MS, which MS are now violating. This might have been signed way-back when Microsoft wanted Adobe's Acrobat Distiller to support MS Office.
2. That Microsoft, by implementing the features of their software in Office, is abusing their de facto monopoly in the office suite market.

Adobe used to say that SGV was here to stay, so why did they let it wither on the vine and die? (My theory is because they bought Flash, so now they don't care about SVG any more.) Why should we trust what they say about Flash, if they lied about supporting SVG?

The Adobe SVG Page they say that "Adobe has taken a leadership role in the development of the SVG specification and continues to ensure that its authoring tools are SVG compatible." Is that still true? Will FLEX ever support more than importing a trivial static subset of SVG at compile time, and will it ever run on the SVG player? Why doesn't Adobe continue developing the SVG player, if it's not yet capable of supporting the requirements of FLEX? If Adobe is dumping SVG, then why don't they put the source code for their excellent SVG implementation out there as Free Open Source Software? Are they afraid it will compete with Flash?

On the same page, Adobe also says "Open standards promote choice, provide lower-cost solutions, and facilitate interoperability." That I agree with! So now that Adobe's given up on SVG and moved on to Flash, will Adobe ever submit the Flash specification to an open standards organization so it can be openly standardized like SVG? Will Adobe ever publish the complete source code of the entire FLEX system and Flash as Free Open Source Software? Will Adobe at least make a statement that they won't sick their legal team on people who implement free open source Flash-compatible runtimes?

The archive from 2001 says: "Adobe's intention is that future releases of the Adobe SVG Viewer will strive to achieve support for the full W3C SVG specification." What ever happened to that plan? Does Adobe's current SVG player fully support the W3C SVG specification, 5 years later? We've heard the lip service, now where's the beef?

The archive from 2004 says: "Discover the open-source future of graphics with Scalable Vector Graphics." So what's the open-source future of graphics, now? I think that describes OpenLaszlo pretty well, because it's future-proof by not locking you into any one platform like Flash! Will Adobe be open-sourcing FLEX and Flash? How about at least making the SVG player open source, instead of quietly killing it and dumping its body like a forgotten bastard stepchild?

-Don

I'm guessing the mods lack a (-1, Misinformed).
The PDF format is open, like many previous comments have pointed out. The situation with the Russian programmer, while detestable, was only tangentially related to PDF (it was their DRM'd ebook format).

Apple's not breaking any rules - and likely what Microsoft is trying to do is drop PDF in favour of a Microsoft portable document format. Only guessing here, but the article is pretty speculative as well.

The PDF Reference provides a description of the Portable Document Format and is intended for application developers wishing to develop applications that create PDF files directly, as well as read or modify PDF document content.

It's a future possibility to add features for blind users. It's not done right now, but at least it's possible.

You've just alienated the 10% of the web that doesn't have flash.

According to Macromedia/Adobe, it's only 2,3% of all web users who don't have Flash installed. Statistics

Not to mention infuriated the quite potion of the rest that cannot stand site content embedded in unnessesary flash.

1. When Flash becomes part of the site, it's not unneccessary.
2. If they can't stand it, it's their problem. I bet that 97% of all web users don't even notice that it's Flash.

So what? Do you rather want to see totally unreadable, eye-burningly-colored images that you have to identify, or just use Flash? ...You just can't please everybody.

Most of my 2D animation has been done either with Flash or Adobe After Effects.

After Effects is an industry standard package, and it costs about the same as Flash, last I checked. One of it's most powerful features is the scripting language. It helps to create procedural animations which can be difficult to do by hand.

You also might want to consider doing 2D animation with a 3D package. Most of my time 3D time was spent learning Maya. The strength that 3D animation packages have, is that they get used more often for character animation than the 2D packages, therefore they have a lot more tools forcharacter animators such as bone structures and deformations. A lot of them have physics packages that can help automate certain types of animation. Most 3D packages also come with built in scripting languages for procedural animation.

The down side to 3D packages is the intense learning curve. At last count, I heard that Maya had over 80,000 commands. These are huge and complex software packages. The proprietary ones also tend to cost quite a bit, although Blender is free as well as open source.

A lot of what software to use depends on what kind of animation you want to do. Are you doing short character animations? Are you doing experimental stuff? Are you Rotoscoping? If you tell us a bit more about the type of animation you want to do, we could be a bit more specific in recommending specific packages.

Other thoughts:
--I know that Photoshop and ImageReady can be used to animate between layers ( but involves a bit of hackery to get it to work well).
--The integration between Photoshop and After Effects is really nice. It's one of the reasons AFX is used so much in television.
--FilmGimp/Cinepaint has been used for wire removal and image clean up for a while in the FX industry, I have no experience with it.
--I know that there are also some animation plugins for the Gimp that have been written. Again, I have no experience with these.

Regardless of the tools, there is always a steep learning curve, and there's always seems to be a lot of work coaxing the software program to do what you want it to do. If it's not coming easily, it's because we still have a lot of work to do in developing great animation software.

Good luck, and have fun.

No, I don't have any hard stats to back up my claims, just the common sense knowledge that:
a) The percentage of 64 bit systems is still very small in comparison to 32bit
&
b) The percentage of Linux being used as a desktop is still very small in comparison to Windows

Multiply one small percentage by another small percentage and you get a tiny percentage. Also... once it becomes a large enough user base to worry about, Adobe will port it to it, no issue there.

Also, as I stated, our target audience is business users within Marketing areas, so they are almost entirely using Windows boxes (some are Mac based, but that's fine for us too).

And And furthermore, Flash is still not supported "in a browser, on a phone or wherever".

Huh?

So, flash running in 94.8 percent of all US (if you want more stats of other areas, check out this list (I'm using flash version 7 stats, although our code will run on 6 or above if need be) browsers is 'not supported in a browser'
and in the Original Article that this is attached to it shows a Laszlo app running in the flash player ON A PHONE.

So, yeah, it kinda does run in a lot of places... and the flash player is being pushed to run in other items as well.

Completely dismissing Flash as a distribution platform for applications just because it doesn't run on some tiny amount of the world's possible computers, and ones that don't even concern us from a target point of view is just pure Flash hatred for no good reason. I suppose you dismiss anything with images or mouse interaction as some people use text based browsers?

And that the laszlo system will be offering DHTML rendering soon as well only further broadens our available market.

Speaking of camera support, CS2/Adobe Camera Raw and the DNG converter support the S5200/S5600 since version 3.3 (now at 3.4).

Like Adobe does when someone displays a photoshop that they photoshopped with Paint Shop Pro.

Still, might be useful if your PDF file is on the internet, but not in Google.

I can't speak to Adobe's overall SVG strategy because I really don't know. But I do know that a subset of SVG is supported in Flex. As for Flex 2 pricing, the SDK is free, and single CPU deployments of Flex Data Services are free. Exact pricing on Flex Builder and clustered FDS haven't been announced.

For more info on the Free Flex 2 SDK, see: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flexframework2/

Also for more info on Flex's SVG support see:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/labs/1/flex20beta2/ wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=Live Docs_Parts&file=00001271.html
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/labs/1/flex20beta3/ wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=Live Docs_Parts&file=00000992.html

But of course Flex locks you into Flash!
This is silly. This is like complaining about how Ajax frameworks lock you into XmlHTTPRequest (which BTW is not a standard and only exists because Microsoft added it to the browser).

And how did you make the conceptual leap from "more affordable pricing" to "*FREE*"?
Ummm, maybe because the Flex SDK that does everything Laszlo can do and more IS FREE.

Having worked on the video playback component in Flash and Flex (I'm an engineer at Adobe), I feel obligated to enlighten you on the bandwidth implications for users visiting web sites containing Flash-based video ads.

There are three ways to play video in Flash:

1. Embedding the video directly into the SWF file
2. Downloading the FLV file over HTTP
3. Streaming the video over RTMP (FMS or FVSS)

Of these, the first one is recommended only for extremely small video clips (5 seconds or less), because embedding the video into the SWF, aside from providing poor quality playback, also bloats the size of the SWF file.

The other two have their pros and cons each, but they have one thing in common: video is downloaded only when requested. Streaming (option 3) has the additional advantage of requesting video frame-by-frame, whereas in the case of HTTP download, the entire file is requested at once (though the download can be aborted at any point during playback).

So, take a chill pill. The world is not coming to an end. If you don't want to see the ads, don't click on the play button.

The OpenLaszlo compiler is being rewritten to support the more efficient Flash 9 runtime, as well as other runtimes like DHTML/AJAX:
http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Legals_Project
http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Legals_Project_Plan

SWF9 Runtime Goals

The immediate goal of the swf9 porting project is to take advantage of the performance improvements in swf9 (AVM2). The swf9 vm is 10x faster for low-level stuff, with types another 2x or so. A secondary goal is to enable access to new features of AVM2, especially where these features are or will also be supported by other runtimes (e.g., regular expressions, E4X support deferred from intial release). It is not a goal of this project to add these new features. For example, it is outside the scope of this project to add regular expressions or E4X to the OpenLaszlo platform. However, this project should leave the platform in a state where it is easier to add these features in a way that has support on at least one swf and one non-swf target.

The OpenLaszlo server is a Java servlet that compiles LZX applications into executable binaries for targeted run-time environments. OpenLaszlo currently targets the Flash Player, versions SWF6, SWF7 and SWF8. The version now in development, code-named "Legals", will also target SWF9 and traditional DHTML as deployment targets by end of 2006.

But of course Flex locks you into Flash! If not, then please tell me what other runtimes does Flex support, besides Flash? Can you compile Flex programs into DHTML that runs in the browser without Flash, the way you can do with the new version of OpenLaszlo? Will Flash ever support Microsoft Avalon, the way Laszlo plans to? Or will it ALWAYS require the Flash player, and directly expose many Flash specific features instead of abstracting them the way OpenLaszlo does?

And how did you make the conceptual leap from "more affordable pricing" to "*FREE*"? There's a world of difference between Adobe offering a free non-commercial evaluation for a product they charge a steep per-developer and per-server license for, and true Free Open Source Software like OpenLaszlo. Can you please tell me what the "big per-CPU price tag" will be, or did Adobe make you sign an NDA before telling you that?

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flexbuilder2/
How much will Flex Builder 2.0 cost?
Flex Builder 2.0, which includes a license for the Flex framework, will be licensed on a per seat basis, similar to other integrated development environments. Final pricing is not yet available, but Flex Builder 2.0 will be sold for less than $1000 per developer.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/10/06/flex-20- announced-with-more-affordable-pricing/
While the current version of Flex costs some US$12,000, Flex 2 will cost less than US$1,000 for the basic components described above. Although you're constrained to communicating with the server via XML data transfer and SOAP Web Services, you can certainly implement anything you can do with AJAX and DHTML, only with a richer GUI. What's missing from the package is the server-side component of the Flex framework, which has been split into a separate product for Flex 2: Flex Enterprise Services 2.

Flex Enterprise Services 2 will come with the big per-CPU price tag, but will be significantly upgraded from the server-side facilities provided by Flex 1. The main focus of the enhanced package is the transparent availability of server-side resources (such as database records and enterprise services) within Flex applications.

-Don

Adobe Flex 2.0 delivers an integrated set of tools and technology enabling developers to build and deploy scalable rich Internet applications. Flex provides a modern, standards-based language supporting common design patterns and includes a client runtime, programming model, development environment, and advanced data services.

At the core of Flex 2.0 is the Flex framework, which is included with Flex Builder and will also be distributed in the free Flex Software Development Kit (SDK). Using only the free Flex SDK, you can commercially deploy Flex applications that connect to XML and SOAP web services with no additional costs or server licensing required.

Check out Flex 2. It's similar to OpenLaszlo; free as in beer and the source code is provided. However, applications built with Flex 2 run much faster than OpenLaszlo applications, there are a ton more features, and the programming model is better.

JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

Do you trust that the Flash plugin is safe to use?

Who installs software before knowing what it does?

Can you know for sure what's inside the plugin?

Maybe now we can finally use Melinda Gates' new publlc search box.

The real enemy:

Adobe type libraries! The requested URL (yro/06/05/12/2249236.shtml) was not found. If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to [send email to pater@slashdot.org via gmail] pater@slashdot.org.

Adobe type libraries!

http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_1721.htmlN iggers for Jesus!

Photoshop
Flash

Actually, we (yeah - I work at MacroAdobedia) offer a free SDK for making Flash Search engine friendly in response to customer requests. You can download this from our developer site http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/ The SDK includes an application named 'swf2html'. Swf2html extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application, and as a static library for linked library implementation. For complete functionality, see the file Readme.htm included in the SDK.

It works on linux just fine, I just watched a bit of this week's episode of Alias. Install wine, install the windows version firefox under wine, and then install the flash 8.5 beta also under wine. It runs perfectly after that.

There are two major components that make ABC's video offering possible:

1) Adobe Flash Media Server, aka FMS. Streams Flash movies over HTTP, but does so in a "smart" manner so that video degrades based on the performance of the client and of the pipe.

2) Akamai, which hosts thousands of geographically dispersed servers across the world. Akamai licenses Flash Media Server and hosts it on thousands of "edge" servers, which basically cache the most popular videos and stream them out from the most efficient location.

However, Google Video and YouTube do not use FMS. Since it's not their content, they don't care about its reliability quite so much. They simply package up a video inside a Flash file and serve it directly to users. If the user doesn't have the bandwidth, the video hangs or other bad things happen. I am pretty sure Google Video and YouTube also do geographic clustering (co-location) in order to reduce lag abd bandwidth costs, but I'm not sure on the details of that.

Getting back to ABC, there are two differences between their business and Google's: 1) ABC takes the user experience much more seriously (since it's their content), and 2) ABC isn't a technology company. Therefore they'll pay a little extra for the reliability and quality of FMS, and they sign up for Akamai's services because they don't have their own server farms.

See this Macromedia forum post from this Digg story. :(

See this Macromedia forum post from Digg story. Unfortunately, it is after Windows and Mac OS X releases. :(

Adobe After Effects for one. You'll want to get the Pro version, I think, and use an image stabilization filter.

Purchasers will also get a free copy of Adobe (ADBE) Premier Elements 2.0 video editing software.

If you buy this multimedia computer (AKA not a phone) will it be able to run this software (as you would assume since its bundled)? Alas, apparently this does not replace your other computer that requires at least 4 GB of disk space. I suppose if someone figured out how to run DirectX 9 on this multimedia computer...

The last thing I want is some fancy pants CPU hog with Rosie O'Donnel sized memory footprints running around in the background!

The real pirates are going to try everything to be able to crack and sell these advanced copies. They'll do it regardless of what features Windows has. There's already speculation on how to do it [com.com].

If you're making one version more secure than another, you're simply admitting that you're not too concerned about the minimal package being pirated but you cannot afford to have Aero pirated.

Adobe Reader: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
Sun Microsystems Java: http://www.java.com/en/
Azureus: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes
Winamp: http://www.winamp.com/
AudioScrobbler: http://www.last.fm/
Mozilla Suite: http://www.mozilla.org/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/
GIMP: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
GAIM: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

I also suggest to get:
B's Recorder gold: http://www.bhacorp.com/products/gold8/index.html
Corel Painter IX: http://www.corel.com/
Powerquest.. sorry Norton Partition Magic: http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/s ystem_performance/pm80/index.html

I'd like to write a small descriptions for each software but I have busy now so this is just fast reply. :)

It's strange to see Mac users asking about "amazing Windows software" because aren't mac users mostly Windows converts? Windows PCs have been about half the price of Mac machines for about a decade. I figured the reason people paid that premium for a Mac is for the quality that they have over Windows PCs. Also, the notion of Mac people now wanting Windows software shows that Apple's plan could backfire. Isn't the whole Boot Camp thing so that Windows people can now have an opportunity to switch over to Apple without losing all of the software they've grown accustomed to?

Anyway, to keep this on-topic, some amazing Windows software is
Spybot Search and Destroy - great spyware killer
AVG Anti-virus - self explanatory
iTunes - great software for organizing and playing your music. Also has a built-in store where you could purchase new stuff.
Konfabulator - great widget program with tons of free downloadable widgets online
Photoshop - The industry standard photo editing software, but it's pretty expensive.

It is difficult, to be sure, but it is mostly a psychological matter or ideological (Bill Worship).

Just because people are used to the situation, doesn't mean the problem's solved. If you've followed any of the security bulletins for any amount of time you'll notice that trying to keep up with MS' patches, using firewalls, and anti-virus software will only improve your situation a bit. You'll still get hit many ways. e.g. MSIE and Outlook both go through firewalls or they won't work. Instead, moving to software and systems designed for a networked environment is really your only way to reduce maintenance costs, aside from unplugging permanently from the Internet.

Secondly, it's not 1992 any more. Any modern business has thousands,/strong> of documents stored in proprietary formats. Saying "Use OpenOffice and convert it, and pray you never come across a document which is complicated and breaks in the conversion" simply isn't going to fly.

However, be sure not to fall for the myth of 'rip and replace' Unless you rented your productivity software, you should be able to run both at the same time. That way both are present, first as the new package is phased in, second as the old package is phased out. Again, unless you rent your software you can keep one or two 'recovery' stations around until they wear out just in case they are needed. And, of course, you would have the foresight to retain backup copies of the files in the original format in a read-only archive, just in case.

However, if you're using MS Works for your data, you're still S.O.L., regardless of which other package you choose.

Particularly when you've got accountants who, wanting to do something clever with the financial forecasts, built some honking great thing up out of linking together half a dozen spreadsheets.

Show me the equivalents to:

• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe PageMaker

It is difficult, to be sure, but it is mostly a psychological matter or ideological (Bill Worship).

Just because people are used to the situation, doesn't mean the problem's solved. If you've followed any of the security bulletins for any amount of time you'll notice that trying to keep up with MS' patches, using firewalls, and anti-virus software will only improve your situation a bit. You'll still get hit many ways. e.g. MSIE and Outlook both go through firewalls or they won't work. Instead, moving to software and systems designed for a networked environment is really your only way to reduce maintenance costs, aside from unplugging permanently from the Internet.

Secondly, it's not 1992 any more. Any modern business has thousands,/strong> of documents stored in proprietary formats. Saying "Use OpenOffice and convert it, and pray you never come across a document which is complicated and breaks in the conversion" simply isn't going to fly.

However, be sure not to fall for the myth of 'rip and replace' Unless you rented your productivity software, you should be able to run both at the same time. That way both are present, first as the new package is phased in, second as the old package is phased out. Again, unless you rent your software you can keep one or two 'recovery' stations around until they wear out just in case they are needed. And, of course, you would have the foresight to retain backup copies of the files in the original format in a read-only archive, just in case.

However, if you're using MS Works for your data, you're still S.O.L., regardless of which other package you choose.

Particularly when you've got accountants who, wanting to do something clever with the financial forecasts, built some honking great thing up out of linking together half a dozen spreadsheets.

Show me the equivalents to:

• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe PageMaker

SVG: IE still uses (and will continue to use) an SVG plug-in such as Adobe SVG Viewer (not as standards compliant as it should be, but it has existed longer than the W3C standard).

CSS2, DOM, XHTML: obviously much better in Gecko, KHTML, Opera, etc.

No ActiveX: great security enhancement for non-Trident browsers, eh?

JVM: Sun's J2SE JVM doesn't work with IE? I didn't know that; I thought your OS used the same JVM throughout. Then again, Windows doesn't have the update-alternatives scripts and whatnot either, so that doesn't surprise me.

Well...since you already use photoshop, I'd have to suggest Version Cue. It's made precisely for your purpose. I've used subvserion, myself. But I've also fought and lost the same battle when it come to non-techie conversion. Best of luck...

As a long-time Photoshop user, I completely agree - exporting Actions as an .exe is useful in only a limited way.

And I don't think Adobe would disagree with you. For large-scale image processing (including the ability to alter a Photoshop text layer dynamically), there is the Adobe Graphics Server (see http://www.adobe.com/products/server/graphics/main .html).

It isn't cheap ($7500 per CPU, with a 2-CPU minimum I think). And it is only supported on Windows Server versions and Solaris. But it's the only product that I'm aware of that will do things with Photoshop-specific elements (layers, text layers, support for PDF or EPS, clipping paths & vector masks, etc.)

Many of the big Content Management and Digital Asset Management make use of it (including the company that I work for) (see http://www.adobe.com/products/server/graphics/part ners.html.

As a long-time Photoshop user, I completely agree - exporting Actions as an .exe is useful in only a limited way.

And I don't think Adobe would disagree with you. For large-scale image processing (including the ability to alter a Photoshop text layer dynamically), there is the Adobe Graphics Server (see http://www.adobe.com/products/server/graphics/main .html).

It isn't cheap ($7500 per CPU, with a 2-CPU minimum I think). And it is only supported on Windows Server versions and Solaris. But it's the only product that I'm aware of that will do things with Photoshop-specific elements (layers, text layers, support for PDF or EPS, clipping paths & vector masks, etc.)

Many of the big Content Management and Digital Asset Management make use of it (including the company that I work for) (see http://www.adobe.com/products/server/graphics/part ners.html.

You can use this piece of Adobe software:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp? ftpID=2709

To create custom MSTs for Acrobat, which you can use to disable all of the annoying crap. Well, apart from the Yahoo search! I suggest also http://www.appdeploy.com/ can be useful for finding ways to disable stuff in installers.

ImageMagick's function library is also accessible through a variety of APIs for your favorite language -- scripting or otherwise. If you haven't used it, try it . . . it's GPL and it Rawks (with a capital "r"). ;-)

While I use (and love) ImageMagick, it's worth noting that Photoshop has similar (but not totally analogous) capabilites:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/phot oshop/sdk/PhotoshopScriptingGuide.pdf

Unfortunately, Photoshop's scripting host only supports JavaScript, VBScript, and AppleScript. This is not the same thing as a Photoshop Action; scripting isn't as limited as Actions are: one can employ conditional logic, perform some basic file system operations, and transfer scripts easily.

As mentioned in this previous story http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/27/ 0128236, photoshop is one of the most desired linux ports.

It's an awesome application. I'm no expert, but i've seen my sister who's into graphics play with the latest photoshop version, and I tell you MS isn't gonna beat that product just because they want to. Take a look at this tutorial video http://media.studio.adobe.com/linked_content/en/ac s2ttL08/phscs2ttvpgrid.mov or many others on http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/newfeature s.html.

People may be inclined to use whichever browser or media player comes preinstalled (because in the end any browser does the job, alghough us techies may be picky) but this is different. People who buy Photoshop (which costs several hundred bucks) are mostly doing professional-level work with graphics or photography, and they use photoshop because it is the best product around. Even if MS can come out with a half-decent basic graphics app you can use to remove red-eye fron your pics they're not going to take much of a chunk of photoshop's profits. I think it's a big waste of MS money.