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If you think that's bad, you should see how much Adobe is charging for their Font Folio package -- they want $9,000 for it! It really demonstrates the relativity of value in today's society.

If you think that's bad, you should see how much Adobe is charging for their Font Folio package -- they want $9,000 for it! It really demonstrates the relativity of value in today's society.

If you think that's bad, you should see how much Adobe is charging for their Font Folio package -- they want $9,000 for it! It really demonstrates the relativity of value in today's society.

For example... The Lucida Grande font has become associated with the Aqua interface and is further tied into the new Apple "style" since it's used all over www.apple.com.

For example... The Lucida Grande font has become associated with the Aqua interface and is further tied into the new Apple "style" since it's used all over www.apple.com.

not open-source, but free, Adobe offers an OpenType Font Development Kit which is Python-based and runs on (at least) Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and some Windows versions.. i'm not sure how "graphical" it is

Yeah, Gill Sans seems to be enjoying the same limelight that Officina Sans did a few years back (this is the font that Iomega used for a long time). I have also noticed a slightly increased use of sans fonts with curly lower-case "L" letters -- I really like these though, so I have no complaints. My favorite in this category is the DIN Schriften set, which is used for roadsigns and license plates in Germany.

Yeah, Gill Sans seems to be enjoying the same limelight that Officina Sans did a few years back (this is the font that Iomega used for a long time). I have also noticed a slightly increased use of sans fonts with curly lower-case "L" letters -- I really like these though, so I have no complaints. My favorite in this category is the DIN Schriften set, which is used for roadsigns and license plates in Germany.

I just installed these on my Windows machine. The monospace font is excellent. Until now I haven't seen a decent TTF monospace font that was properly hinted to keep it from looking horrible at 9pt, but still nice and smooth at large sizes.

The Lucida Sans monospace font that came with Windows pales in comparison to Vera Sans Mono, even though the Lucida family was supposedly designed with bitmap screens in mind.

I wonder how Adobe Encore DVD stacks up against DVD Studio Pro 2.

Why shouldn't windows cost $300. Photoshop costs $609.00[adobe.com]

Windows does a lot more than photoshop.

There are LOTS of expensive software packages. Microsoft isn't the only company that doesn't follow the open source model. They just happen to be the biggest consumer software company.

How come nobody rips on IBM the way they do on Microsoft. They've got business by the balls the same way MS has the consumers. I couldn't tell you how many hundereds of thousands of dollars my company has spent on their operating systems / Databases / software packages.

Though honestly the far, far more annoying bug is that an smb mount failure can result in the shift key not functioning properly in Illustrator. I'm not kidding.

How open is Opentype?

Flash should be replaced by a proper W3C standard, that way everybody can play without running closed code from Macromedia.

Lo and behold, just such a thing exists!!!
It's called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/

Don't worry, you can still do all your stupid, annoying animated 'punch the monkey' type of nonsense, but at least your monkey is standard XML. And your audience can 'view-source' your monkey if they like, thus enabling a whole community of open-sourced monkey punching animations.

You can generate it server-side (or even rasterize it for those with crappy browsers) with a spiffy batch of tools by those same people who brought you the Apache HTTP server.

There's even a very nice gtk SVG editor app available for X11, and Win32 available here.

Of course, there is a small downside, as of yet, mozilla (and IE) only support it with the use of a plugin, but if you're used to flash, you shoudln't mind that. As soon the the mozilla folks get around a liscencing issue, moz should support it natively (some builds already do).

In summary:
Proprietary 'punch the monkey' things suck ass.
Open standards-based 'punch the monkey' things suck considerably less.

Now that you realized that you should by a new PC, at the bottom of the page is a link. Go ahead and click on it. Note the dell for sale, dude.

They are getting cozy...

..k

I'm making an exception this time because I can save a lot of people time before they delve into the over 500 posts of reaction to this story (at least for those who read /. in threaded mode).

Adobe is not expressing a preference for Windows PC's

The linked page is called "pcprefered.html" because it is the page which is brought up on the Adobe Digital Video Products page when you click on a link that says: "Prefer a PC for DV? See what an industry expert has to say about PC vs. Mac for video editing."

In other words, those who followed the link from The Adobe DV Products Page are indicating a preference for PC's. Since it's a page for those who prefer PC's, it's called "pcprefered.html".

There is nothing in the body of the page to indicate that Adobe has any preference for PC's, reccomends PC's over Macs, or even likes PC's. The page is a mirror of some Dell vs. Mac speed tests that some guy did. That is all.

By deep-linking to this page out of context, the person who submitted this was obviously trolling... perhaps hoping that the article would not go up until a little closer to April 1.

You may now safely ignore all of the responses below and move on with your life. No need to mod up this post, I'm already posting it at 2. Save your mod points for a real article.

Check out the Adobe Motion Gear Page to see if they may have other motivation...

First off, the slashdot article is misleading. The link is for a page on adobe's site about a study done by somebody else on which is faster PC or mac and what somebody else recommends, it's not about which adobe recommends. I mean if Adobe had a note next to Photoshop's minimum requirements saying that PCs are recommended this might be interesting but simply putting up a summary about an article which talks about which is faster is really a much more ambiguous move. We cannot draw from it, for instance, the conclusion that Adobe is gearing up to drop the mac. Nor can we gather that Adobe is no longer investing as many resources in the Mac version. If anything, the only thing we can draw from it is that Adobe is aware that the latest G4 macs are not as fast as their PC counterparts, which I would assume they would know about anyway.

Here's the parent link on adobe's site.

Quote::
Is it only me, or isn't ironic that they move now when UNIX (include MacOS X) is gaining ground at all fronts including the desktop users.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

While the Mac is attracting a record number of new users to the platform it is also loosing its established niches and customers. Apple's share in education, for instance, has gone from 50-60% to about 20% under jobs. Apple is also loosing quite a few customers in pre-press although I don't have any numbers on that. I think it is also telling that while Steve has shown in previous macworld keynotes that that the number of new users to the platform has gone from ~10% to 25-30%, Apple's market share is stagnant or decreasing and PC sales are flat which implies that for every new user to the platform Apple is loosing an established user.

What I believe is happening is that Apple is loosing market niches in which it has gained a sizable number of Early Majority users (as defined in Geoffrey A Moore's "Crossing the Chasm") and trading them for early adopter type users in other market segments. This does not bode well as it implies Steve has absolutely no idea how to market to an established user base. Since going from the initial inroads to niche market domination is the hard part, Apple's decline implies that it's quite possible that Apple will never, under Steve, gain enough market presence under in any niche to control it properly. If you have 10% of every market you're not important in any of them and you will be marginalized in all of them.

This definitely matches my experience. I was once a rabid Mac fan, however both the iMac and MacOS X did not present any obvious upgrade path to me since the iMac and ilk broke compatibility will all my peripherals and MacOS X did not leverage any of the knowledge I had acquired in using and debugging the MacOS. Oddly enough, it was easier for me to switch to the PC since my peripherals we're all PC Mac compatible and Windows was at least as Mac like as MacOS X.. and of course everything was cheaper. So I went with a new PC and have been quite pleased with it. This situation is typical when an established market is not presented with an obvious upgrade strategy.

Oddly enough Steve is quite good at setting up situations where he *could* dominate a niche. Like at the moment he looks to be going after the consumer market and the Unix market (quite a spread!). The thing is, as soon as he gets anywhere, I think he'll get bored and abandon the niches and move on to some other interesting niche technology. I seem to remember it was this type of mentality that got him fired from Apple in the first place :-)...

You mean "commodity hardware" like the Dell you can buy in Adobe's online store?
Customers embracing that machine will certainly enhance Adobe's bottom line.

It seems stupid to me for them to make such a proclamation which will only serve to inflame loyal Mac based customers of many years.

It's the same sort of backward move as when they decided to indefinitely discontinue the Linux FrameMaker beta program. [They still support it for the Mac - for now.]

At MyCorp the UNIX desktop has moved from Sun to Linux, largely because of the cheaper x86 hardware. Needless to say, FrameMaker users emigrating from Sun are quickly getting an extra reason to be weaned off of Adobe's product because the way they can run it on their Linux box is over the network (mmm, latency) via X from a Sun.

The net outcome will be that more people will use the ubiquitous MS Word, and maybe StarOffice/OpenOffice on Linux, but we'll clearly be buying less Adobe products in the future.

It's got to be strange being an Adobe executive, watching MS eating chunks of your bread and butter business, but having to be nice to them so that you don't get on their shit list when it comes time to get a reasonable head start developing your product for the next version of Windows.

While I know a PC is faster for any Adobe app, the actual page that links to that page has the context reveresed. It's not "ADOBE Prefers PCs." It's "If you Prefer PCs, read this!"

The inferrence I made was that MAC was still the de facto standard.

Complain. I did. Misrepresentation of data is widespread, but we can probably get them to change it in this case.

http://www.adobe.com/misc/webform.html

There's the link to they're feedback page.

and this graph shows that somebody is a fucking retard.

Of course, it is not like Acrobat 5 actually works in OS X. Adobe is willing to sell something labelled as an OS X product, but the Adobe website says that Acrobat only converts graphics files in OS X (see the Adobe site for details), not the things that people actually want or need to use Acrobat for...

Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Adobe, which began as a Macintosh-dominant company (the versions of PhotoShop always came out for the Mac first), is now becoming Windows-dominant?

http://www.adobe.com/motion/pcpreferred.html

Adobe supports Mac OSX

"Adobe software got its start on the Macintosh computer. Today, the Macintosh platform remains important for Adobe and our customers. Since the introduction of Mac OS X, Adobe has delivered more than 13 Mac OS X native applications. This strong support of the Mac OS X platform is a demonstration of Adobe's commitment to customers on the Macintosh platform."

I love "metric time" as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't trust any review that equates 47 seconds with 0.47 minutes [from the review].

Mark

Check this.

"Using Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5 and Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 and Mac OS X v.10.2
Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5 and Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 offer native mode support for Mac OS X v.10.04, 10.1, and 10.2 (Acrobat Distiller® still runs in Classic mode)."

If that doesn't work, Adobe has an online converter you can use to view the pdf as html.

There is this one little company that makes a modestly succesful vector graphics program ;)

There is this one little company that makes a modestly succesful vector graphics program ;)

Or, we could just benchmark the best application for the hardware, like Apple does ;-)

Trust me boys, your stuff looks a lot better when you design chips for only one program!

I think that the practicality of Xterminals is lost with many Linux users and almost all of Windows users. When people understand the efficiency of X over tcp/ip, it is like a big light turns on in their head.

Windows Terminal Server-Citrix/Metaframe environment is relatively slow and the licenses are so expensive that it really hasn't taken off as well as it could. TCO for that environment exceeds that of standalone Windows PCs.

There once was a time when Xterminals were more expensive than standalone PCs too. And old-line commercial UNIX software was/is always more expensive than Windows apps on a per-seat basis.

It seems like the current generation of IT greybeards were the early risk-takers of the generation that replaced the mainframe with standalone PCs. Now they are the ones stuck in their old ways.

If you have talented sysadmins that actually know their job you can save massive amounts of cash using unix... even more if you didnt get fancy-smanchy NCD X terminals but used your old pc's as diskless terminals.... but we wanted the invisible PC+ sleek lcd on everyone's desk.

We white-boxed ours from a local clone maker. Micro-ATX Nforce boards, Durons, 128mb of memory. No CDROM, no hard disk, no floppy. Even in a real Micro ATX case, they are big, but they sure are fast! Many a time I've shocked an onlooker by telling them I was working on a terminal!

You, sir, are a troll.

Of course, anybody who breaks ranks and punctures the myth of Macintosh perfection must be a troll

As is well known, the Mac IE code base is completely different from the Windows IE code base. There is NO major feature that I am aware of that is present in the current version of Windows IE that is missing from the Mac version of IE. If I'm mistaken about this, please point me in the direction of something that references such a feature.

An XML DOM. I know this, because I spend all day in VirtualPC testing my JavaScript/XML-based app. Plus, I've tested several sophisticated DHTML toolkits and found them to not work on IE for the Mac (admittedly they probably push the boundaries of the standards). And then there is the problem with getting access to the native scripting engine from a plugin. These are real problems that force me to run VirtualPC on a daily basis.

Maybe Chimera and Safari are immature, but IE5 for Mac is certainly not obsolete,

IE for Mac bites. It isn't very efficient and it doesn't support most of the pages that use IE6-specific features. If I'm going to make a pact with the devil, I'd at least like to get something out of it.

and the statement that Mozilla for Mac is a clunky port (but the Windows version isn't) is just silly.

Somehow I think there QA department puts a little more effort into the Windows version. I use the thing every freaking day so I know what I'm talking about. There are all kinds of dialogs that are mis-sized. For instance I just entered the Preferences dialog and I'm looking at the Navigator page. The "Choose" and "Restore Dialog" buttons are half cut-off. Sometimes the problem is so severe I have to hit "Enter" without seeing the button I'm selecting. I think the most severe case is when you're saving from a download. And if there is a way to make PDFs show inline (in the browser window, not an Acrobat window) in either Mozilla or Chimera, I haven't figured it out yet.

If you don't like those, there's also Opera or OmniWeb, both mature browsers that are also highly standards-compliant.

And free? And compatible with the Adobe SVG plugin that I use every day? And ad-free? I feel bad enough that my productivity has stagnated (a little, not a lot) since I switched to the Mac without having to get my boss to shell out for a _browser_. (or shelling out myself!) You can blame the browser situation on Microsoft, or Adobe or Netscape or whoever, but as a user I just want my computer to do what I need. I expected the Mac to be at least as good at the PC for every day jobs and better for more Unix-y things. In fact, it has been a very mixed bag. Yes, it is better for Unix-y things (I didn't have to install cygwin) but the basics are about as much of a headache as they were before, if not more.

MS Office for Mac is "behind" the Windows version how, exactly? Mac Office doesn't have Access, so if you need Access, then the Mac isn't for you. Other than that... No speech recognition? I don't consider that a problem. VBA support slightly behind in some areas? Ditto. What else is there?

I need the VBA support because sometimes I have to develop plugins. And I kind of wonder how long I'll have to wait for the XML support in Office 11. Is there an OSX Outlook, or just Entourage? I had a co-worker who tried Entourage and went back because of calendaring hassles. If someone tells me that Entourage's calendaring is just as good as Outlook's (i.e. my co-worker was wrong) then I'll try it myself.

And there most certainly IS a Mac version of OpenOffice [openoffice.org].

It runs under X11. Ick. Another layer of emulation. (perhaps I should run Wine under X11 while I'm at it!)

For some developers, Apple is an afterthought, yes. But there are plenty of other developers for which Apple is not an afterthought, and believe it or not, Microsoft has been one of them. You make it out to sound like the state of software on the Mac is in the dark ages or something, but the truth is that in the two areas you mention, web browsers and office software, there are plenty of good choices out there. The only major area I can think of that is lacking on the Mac is gaming.

Both lack features I need. I also need an XML Word Processor. I run XMetaL in VirtualPC. What would you propose is comparable for the Macintosh? And then there is the MSN client for the Mac which also bites the big one. Perhaps there are workarounds for all of these issues but we're far away from the point where using the Mac was simpler than using Windows. Today, it takes more specialized knowledge and a greater ability to shift around between different user interface modes (like Classic versus Aqua file dialogs). Hopefully it will be better in the future, once Classic dies off, but what's the point in lieing to ourselves in the meantime, pretending there is no problem?

And besides, if you consider this such a problem, why not just get a Windows PC and be done with it? The rest of us will happily continue using our "obsolete" web browsers and office software.

America: love it or leave it. If you criticize George Bush you obviously don't belong. Look: the Macintosh is the best operating system I've ever used. If I could use the operating system without any apps I'd be in nirvana. But in my experience the apps tend to suck (if they exist at all) and I spend all day trying to remember whether I'm supposed to use the Mac, Windows, Classic, Unix or X11 conventions for solving different tasks. Sorry, but those are the facts as I see them.

And as said in before, There are plenty of PDF readers for Unix/Linux like this one

Unfortunetly, NJTransit only makes schedules available in PDF, but... it's a cute idea.

Adobe has a script for converting PDF to HTML, which would also prove useful maybe for train schedules around where I live:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_simpl e_form.html

Google also has a similar function with its cached PDFs.

You're so right. No one writes software for the Mac.

-T

Apple started using TrueType fonts on their OS because Postcript fonts where never thought to look good on screen. That's where the hinting (and probably other features of TTF) come from. As I understand, and been told from friends in the graphic design market, TrueType fonts are, on the other hand, worse for printed works.
I agree thought that on Linux TTF fonts don't look as good (althought that might change with the release of freetype 2.1.4), but that has nothing to do with the font format.
I would prefer the use of OpenType that promises the best of both worlds and more, but well, meybe in the future...

I played with it a little bit. I wanted to make a slideshow out of some (big) photoshop files, with some pan & zoom, nice transitions, music, etc.

The main problem was that 80% of the PSD files came in wrong.. they were "folded over" as if you shifted the pixels over and they wrapped around. Bizarre.

Also at random times (maybe when an effect was still rendering) it gave me an error message about "unable to convert to JPEG, but was imported anyway" which means it couldn't apply the pan & zoom, but it still showed up in the movie. Bizarre again...

I also couldn't figure out an easy way to turn OFF the pan & zoom and just have a static still image.

Finally, I just exported a plain slideshow from iPhoto and left it at that.

On a related note, I hope Apple takes a look at Photoshop Album for ideas for a future version of iPhoto. Album looks like iPhoto on steroids.

Although, being a windows user i could only view it using the Adobe SVG Viewer which only works in IE, any of you have an idea of how to make it work under opera7 drop me a line:)

Adobe has offered SVG plugin for Mozilla-compatible browsers (and IE) since 11/2001. Get it here: http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html. It's not libre, but gratis and does the job. There's version for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and obsolete Mac OS.

If the APU fails destructively, the potential for damage to the Orbiter is obviously much greater. Nobody would be happier than I (whatever happiness means in such a tragic context) if the incident analysis for this mission concludes that they caught the rare unstoppable failure for which no reasonable contingency mode can be designed. But I wouldn't put any money on it.

We need to start doing more of the things that advances in technology allow us to do (in the 30 years since STS was designed) to insure on-orbit crew and craft survivability. There are projects that basically can't compete for funding during times when everybody's coming home healthy and the budget crunch is worry #1. Now we're in different times. I hope we press for more safety while we can.

PS Trust me on the Bowery assessment, I was there.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an open-standard alternative to Flash.
it is a W3C recommendation.
there is a partially-implemented SVG native plugin for mozilla.
Adobe has a fully functional SVG plugin.

there is a Call for Participation at the SVG Open 2003 (in canada this july).

sites like homestarrunner.com could really boost SVG acceptance. if anybody out there is looking at homestarrunner.com as a model by which to base their plans for a similar site, please consider SVG!

"One of the strengths and simultaneously one of the weaknesses of free software has been that developers develop what they want to develop, not necessarily things that users want. It is possible, and it is often the case, that developers get great pleasure from producing a popular application or feature, and so are motivated largely by that as a goal. But the market gets distorted a little by that slight disconnect between user desires and developer production, even as it has been distorted (to a greater extent) on the non-free software side by Microsoft's monopoly."

I wouldn't say this is consistantly true. Infact I would say it's primarily true with free software for the simple reason that no one wanted it in the first place. Most of the time the developer made it because they wanted to.

With purchased software there was a need before the developer started. And when the developer is being payed, they tend to listen to the customer a bit more. See Adobe for an example.

If you've read this far you might be interested to note this plug-in from Adobe that "enhances the reliability of Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.x software running on a Mac OS X system that uses the G4 processor" from a couple of days ago.

No word on whether this gives the PS on G4s any kind of speed boost, though.

I think Java can't die that easily. Nearly all posts forget about a very big supporter of Java, IBM. IBM will never support Microsoft-propietary on its servers. (I mean, since IBM started eclipse, it's entire development platform is built and made for Java.

So with server suppliers Sun and IBM it's natural to use Java on the server. An when the backbone is Java, why not use the same environment (Java, JDBC-Drivers, XML-Access) on the client. (it's by far easier to maintain...)

But of course: It'd be great to spread JVM among the clients around the world, although JVM is a fairly "heavy" thing over the slow lines out there... (at least Sun's, which is the only "comfortable" under Windoze)

So the developing community should concentrate on making standard routines for installing the JVM by providing direct links on webpages and so on. (like this happened with Acrobat Reader which you can expect being installed on nearly every system connected to the internet)

As someone who is a regular on SVG lists for the past 7 months or so (not very long), I have already come across SVG book authors, W3C members, and Macromedia employees, and good ol' developers all having the very same debate that know the technology much better. And, surprise(!), no side has given up and said "Oh, you're right, lets start developing only with X." If you checked a 2 page SVG vs Flash demo and reposted some generic "SVG doesn't have as many authoring tools", although valid, it's a lot deeper than that. SVG is XML. A real W3C standard. Anyone can make their own client, and hopefully get around cross platform issues like HTML browsers. Which shouldn't be too bad, an SVG plugin is less of a commitment than your whole browser, and bad XML is just that, hopefully no "close enough" rendering. You can create SVG with XSLT or through any server side scripts that can output plaintext.

Here are some great places for SVG demos:
Pinkjuice/svg
KevLinDev
Adobe SVG zone

And here are some SVG examples more "in the wild", which are usually mapping or graphing:
http://www.netency.com/netenmap/index.php?p=demos
http://www.oaklandtracks.com/noise/noise_managemen t_replay.html

Anyway, educate yourself and see where SVG can be applied. Good luck.

Version 4 of Adobe SVG Viewer (renamed Adobe Image Viewer) also supports synchronization of video elements. Unfortunately Adobe Image Viewer only supports viewing SVG files that are embedded in Acrobat PDF files.