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For example, you can see everybody wandering around, but can't tell who is who. Unless somebody explicitly does the moon walk and says "Look, I'm the guy in the T-shirt doing the moon walk", then you can't relate the text-based user names to the GUI. But then there are probably 2 other guys in T-shirts doing the moonwalk at the same time.

The most exciting point the Adobe help files state is: "Users that are exploring the same world can see representations of each other called avatars, and converse with one another by typing messages in a chat window."

Get it? ... "typing messages in a chat window" -- which can be done without the GUI.

The fun GUI stuff to do (even though it doesn't relate to chatting is): learn to jump, jump off the edge of the map, learn to do the moonwalk, tell other people how to jump and do the moonwalk. And of course the non-fun stuff also doesn't relate to the chat.

By the time you're finished playing with the 3D GUI you have not said anything meaningful at all ... thus, anti-chatroom technology at its best.
But get people into a meaningful conversation, and they will ignore the GUI altogether.

It seems to be useless technology right now -- hopefully Adobe will create some linkage between the chat and GUI. Or maybe in the same vein, they should throw together a chat box and a screen-magnifier utility. That would go over just as well in its current incarnation.

So it's a 3d universe (oops, sorry, metaverse) for Counter Strike players, but it's not even using the Counter Strike/Half Life engine. That's kind of lame.

It's just using Adobe's Atmosphere Player which has been around for a while now. I tried it a while back and it was not a great improvement over the VRML days.

Now if they'd somehow found a way for everybody to serve their own persistent locations, do their own matchmaking, and run presentations *inside* the Counter Strike engine, well, that would have been something.

Let's keep in mind that this is the event of some realizm gamers finding Adobe Atmosphere and remaking their favorite maps. Don't start expecting innovation from a scene that has set gaming back years, and is singularly responsible for my not playing Team Fortress 2 right now.

I have a simple question... since when did open standards become synonymous with open source? It seems to be an attitude really common around Slashdot these days.

I suppose PDF isn't an open standard, since Adobe Acrobat isn't open source. Right? RIGHT? And how about RTF? There's no way that's an open standard!

*cough* *cough*

Yes, it's an example of DRM in action, but you can also go out and buy the book or you can legally transcribe the book from the screen, since the content is in the public domain. The thing they are trying to protect and reap a profit off of is the time and money spent transcribing it so they have something to sell - feel free to transcribe Aristotle's works into an online version and give it away for free in your spare time. The copyright laws don't prevent that. As far as the rights to his own $24 e-book are concerned, well... kinda sounds like he should have negotiated better with his publisher if he wanted people to be able to copy it for free, eh? Or maybe just made a website with a free, printable .PDF and given it away.

In other words - graphic example, but not of the problems with copyright in as much as the problems of software written against the users' interests. It's perfectly legal to write software that you can print Aristotle's complete works from, or even that allows you to copy the whole thing to the clipboard. You just have to do a lot of typing and have happy people be your reward....

adobe was working on a web-based 3d application called atmosphere -- it sould even import objects from 3d applications, and could use javascript to let users interact with the objects. it was a neat idea -- you could create whole 3d worlds with gif and jpeg surfaces and have fully rendered 3d objects in the middle, with small file sizes.

what ever happened to this? another one for the toilet?

(note -- this app is, naturally, windows only. but if you have windows, check out the contest winners. neat!)

adobe was working on a web-based 3d application called atmosphere -- it sould even import objects from 3d applications, and could use javascript to let users interact with the objects. it was a neat idea -- you could create whole 3d worlds with gif and jpeg surfaces and have fully rendered 3d objects in the middle, with small file sizes.

what ever happened to this? another one for the toilet?

(note -- this app is, naturally, windows only. but if you have windows, check out the contest winners. neat!)

Horrible trolling attempt (one of the worst I've seen), but I'll bite..

Yeah, cause they must have reverse engineered the whole PostScript spec.. it's not open or anything.. really...

Jeez, give me a break- they aren't going to get in any more trouble than someone would for implementing HTTP and HTML parsing in a product. Adobe WANTS people to use PostScript. Hence the whole open spec thing.

No need to spend $500 each on Photoshop and After Effects

Photoshop Elements for Windows is $100 if you leave out the advanced pre-press functionality, which is useless if you do no pre-press work.

GIMP can't do prepress because of patents in several jurisdictions on CMYK and Pantone.

The original work was done by a couple of guys (Michael Kaplan and Brandyn Webb) who were in ATG to do pure neural-network research. Handwriting was just something they, ur, tried their hand at, and when they got good initial results they became ATG's handwriting recognition group, and Larry joined around that time. Interestingly, none of the three of them had any notable background in this sort of thing, having all come from 3d graphics backgrounds, and most of their solutions for handwriting were pretty off-the-cuff. To put some perspective on how original the work was, consider that the technology behind it took the cover of the quarterly research rag AI magazine eight years later.

So, really, they practically did single-handedly invent handwriting recognition.

Most of the people who used to do this kind of research have moved on to other jobs.

In this case, Michael and Brandyn went on to create Adobe Atmosphere. It does seem that people like this have been scattered to the wind, though, with places like Apple ATG, Xerox Parc, and such fading from existence. Are there any companies right now with a strongly creative culture, or is that a bygone era?

Note to self: Be careful with fingers.

A little off-topic but having everything to do with the coupon, I noticed Adobe Photoshop Essentials 2.0 on the coupon, yet after a long search on Amazon I could not find it. I know it's almost out. Is Amazon trying to get rid of their 1.0 copies, ya think? Or are they just slower to pre-announce with software?

(Yadda, yadda, closed source, I know, I know. Trouble is, there is no alternative to Flash at this time.)

(Yadda, yadda, closed source, I know, I know. Trouble is, there is no alternative to Flash at this time.)

Actually, Scott McCloud has good ideas on how you could make a "better book" with an easy to use computer screen that you could treat like a book. You could have infinitely large pages, and hyperlink between them. This IS different than the web, because the web only goes DOWN, not left/right up/down very easily. Also can't write on it- keep notes on the side.

> Oh dear god, I'm going to have one hell of a > time converting over 500 JPEGs to PNG, a format > my pr0n collection viewer doesn't support on a > frickin' celeron 633!

Two things:
Adobe Photoshop batch conversion
IrfanView (it views EVERYTHING)

If you are a more casual user than Adobe still offers a product for you at a more reasonable price...

Isn't TIFF just a wrapper?

That's not the least bit true. The specification for PDF is public. What's more there is a huge pile of free software that allows you to create and view PDF files. In fact, using Ghostscript it is possible to turn nearly any print job into a PDF file (even on Windows), so there is no need for Adobe's expensive tools (unless, of course, you happen to like them).

In short PDF is good.

You can get the documentation for the PDF version 1.3 and 1.4 for free there.

If companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia provided free licenses, or even cheap sub 100$ licenses to individuals not seeking to profit from the use of the software I guarantee they would see an extreme decrease in piracy.

Two words: academic licences. Yes, they are often over $100, but they're still typically 50% or less of the full-version cost. (The one caveat: you can only use the software non-commercially).

Case in point: Wolfram Research's Mathematica. Invaluable for doing complex computations and making pretty pictures out of equations. I paid $150 for my academic copy last year, but the commercial version costs $1500. Yes, that's one-thousand-five-hundred.

I do sympathize with you, however-- I would gladly pay a little to dink around with Photoshop 7 Academic, but it's $300.

About 7 or 8 years ago, my parents owned a children's toy and software store, so they could order almost any software wholesale. They got me Photoshop 3.0 Academic for-- get this-- $50. *sigh*... those were the days...

That is not true. Photoshop is designed for graphics professionals, not the average user. That's why Adobe has Photoshop Elements, which is bundled with many scanners and can be purchased for $84.

The truth is, almost all sofware is not priced too expensively for the markets they target. The problem is that users are greedy. They want to have lots of programs, more than they would normally use, and they also want to have programs that are high-end just to have them. No, the real reason why people pirate software is because they can.

Students also get significant discounts on software. I don't know of any major piece of software that costs $500 for a student. For instance, the academic price for Photoshop 7 (full) is $300, which is less than half of the MSRP.

The latest versions of both Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office are available for Macintosh.

We, that is two of us, have been doing this since 1997. Our site Internet Technical Documentation Archive (ITDA) houses a lot of freely available Field Service Manuals.

We started with borrowing local scanning resources and manually page flipping. That's one page per every 5-6mins! Then we bought our first LPT scanner and it was a little faster but ate pages....

...ack depends on what you want to do. Like most people say do you want to totally destroy your books? How much do you want to spend? Are you ever going to use those physical books again?

If its just low cost and personal copy with reasonable quality and you have LOTS of time then.... just grab a copy of OmniPage OCR v11, a HP ADF scanner [ hp scanjet 5490cxi (C9863A)], a copy of Adobe Acrobat and get a professional company to despine your books.

We spent a total of $800 on software/hardware to do this. We spend, on average, about 50 - 200 hours per book to process it - thats scanning, OCR, OCR proofing and format rework and then final PDF output.. Some of the books we're doing I have given to students to work on. They'll do it for next to nothing ;-)

Its possible to outsource this to companies to do this work for you. For example Crowley do this and they also handle large documents. You have to be aware of how they are going to process your book and the copyright problems. However, as someone said, some don't care about copyright and some do (eg Kinkos). Again this comes down to do you care about the books and how much you wanna pay for a digital copy...

In our case we don't make money off this site so we can't afford to out-source. So our biggest problem now is how we are going to get the over-size PDP-11 documents into PDF. The Minolta PS7000 looks like the beast we need but its way too expensive for a non-profit. We'll probably be out-sourcing and eating the costs.

My suggestion is to either go the HP scanner+Omni+Adobe PDF route OR out-source it if you can afford. At least with the out-source option you get to keep your books intact.

ITDA Team

Resemble them? C'mon, the majority of kanji as used in Japanese look identical to the characters used in Chinese. There are a few characters with minor differences, but they're still recognizable--on the same order as using a different font. You wouldn't say that Fraktur font characters aren't Roman characters, but only resemble them, right? Well, the difference between Japanese kanji and Chinese characters are much smaller than the difference between Fraktur and Helvetica. In fact, "kanji" () means "Han characters", i.e. "Chinese characters".

BTW, minor note to Oroborus: technically, kana aren't ideographic; they make up a phonetic alphabet.

But anyways, back to the keyboard... yeah, Japanese keyboards have mostly kana on them... they do have kanji on some of the special Japanese function keys though (halfwidth/fullwidth shift and the kana->kanji conversion key, for example...) That's what I was referring to...

Making links in random words in your post does not help readers find information any quicker when there's no discernable pattern in what they're for

I'm sure that everyone notices the subtle irony of releasing this report using a proprietary format from a company that has abused the DMCA

FFS, just go to Adobe's freely available conversion site and convert it to HTML if you don't like it.

And the parent was modded up to (+5, Insightful)? Perhaps (-1, Flamebait) would have been more appropriate.

So use xpdf or some similar PDF reading software. The PDF specification is freely available and there are Free readers for it. You can generate it without having to use Adobe products, and you can read it without having to use Adobe products.

I liked you "Well Adobe..." rant so much I've included it in a mail I've just sent to Autumn Blatchford the only email address I could find on Adobe's site, buried in the pressroom section.
I'm sure she'd love to hear from us all...;)

This is not a good idea for Adobe since you have to consider who their market is

Flash does something that most other products are NOT able to do. Make interactive sites easy enough for even GRAPHIC developers to create. Most of the people I find that LOVE Flash love it for it's ease of use. All of those people are graphic designers the same people who buy Adobe Photoshop. Adobe has a bad PR hurricane just ready to brew over this if they decide to push for Macromedia to pull Flash

Also, what I find absolutely hilarious is Adobe's Front Page which, of all things, uses Flash

There IS an Adobe counterpart to Flash called LiveMotion. Interestingly enough, the product has support for Macromedia Flash ActionScripting. Seems like Adobe didn't have the capability or resources to create (uh, modify or steal) their own scripting language. They musta used that part of the budget for their litigation team...

I can see that Adobe had to run Flash to create the screengrabs and animations.

If you are talking about the animations here , you're wrong. They're GIF animations.

Moral of the story : Right click before you post.

umm.. what is Adobe LiveMotion 2.0 then?

That set of animations demonstrating the design overlap would have been a lot smaller if they'd done it in Flash.

Has anyone actually read the patent? The decision is related specifically to the ability for a tab to be dragged out and become a self-standing palette, then dragged back in. Adobe provides examples of the specific infringment. Note also that this is not just "a Flash thing." Now that the new MX product line has a relatively consistent interface, there could be some serious problems, given that Adobe is seeking an injunction.

There is a tendency, especially in the OSS/FSF world, to under-estimate the significance of innovations in software. While I am largely against the current patent system, my dislikes for it revolve around the duration of patents, and the inability of clerks to apply or monitor the requirements for innovation.

You consider "tabbed palettes" ludicrous. With the benefit of hindsight, I can hardly disagree ... but were they innovative at the time, before world + dog started using them?

Maybe a better example (unpatented, fortunately): toolbars. Would those be patentable? Are they (were they) innovative? We managed to get through over 20 years of GUI use without the widespread use of toolbars. Anyone know when they first appeared?

Assuming a windowed environment, the use of a title bar with some system buttons can be considered obvious: that has been around since the beginning. But the idioms by which we further break down interfaces and make them accessible are developed over time. Which necessarily implies that there is room for innovation: doing something which is NEW, and not just a variation of what has been done before. And that is patentable.

So we're left with two questions: should such innovation be patentable; and are tabbed palettes new or a variation?

I assert that GUI innovations SHOULD be patentable (although I'd like to see a much shorter duration on all software-related patents). There are individuals and companies which spend a lot of time, effort and money researching GUI concepts, improving ease of use, and generally developing idioms which gives their software an edge ... but then have that idea reused by others in less than a couple of months, because the development cycle is shorter than the research cycle.

From Adobe's site:

Q11: Tabbed palettes are fairly common throughout software applications and operating systems -- what makes Adobe's palettes special and patentable? A: Like Velcro® and Post-It® notes, the very best inventions become so familiar that they are taken for granted. The fact that tabbed palettes seem so natural and common now is a testimony to the Adobe development effort that went into the invention. Adobe's patent describes a unique method that allows tabs within palettes to be customized, separated and reorganized by users. This invention was a significant leap forward for customers' productivity and personalization of the interface.

As for tabbed palettes ... this is a more difficult one. But first you need to understand the patent. This is not just about a tool dialog with a tab panel in it! The patent is available from Adobe's site, and a set of animations illustrate the infringment.

As you can see ... this patent is about multiple tool dialogs (palettes) which dock together to form tabbed panels within a single dialog. Suddenly the idea is not so obvious anymore. Dockable components which overlap to save space ...? That's not a universal GUI concept; showing and hiding tool windows or popping up dialogs in a stack is a traditional means to handle this problem. Arguably Adobe DID innovate in this instance.

There is a tendency, especially in the OSS/FSF world, to under-estimate the significance of innovations in software. While I am largely against the current patent system, my dislikes for it revolve around the duration of patents, and the inability of clerks to apply or monitor the requirements for innovation.

You consider "tabbed palettes" ludicrous. With the benefit of hindsight, I can hardly disagree ... but were they innovative at the time, before world + dog started using them?

Maybe a better example (unpatented, fortunately): toolbars. Would those be patentable? Are they (were they) innovative? We managed to get through over 20 years of GUI use without the widespread use of toolbars. Anyone know when they first appeared?

Assuming a windowed environment, the use of a title bar with some system buttons can be considered obvious: that has been around since the beginning. But the idioms by which we further break down interfaces and make them accessible are developed over time. Which necessarily implies that there is room for innovation: doing something which is NEW, and not just a variation of what has been done before. And that is patentable.

So we're left with two questions: should such innovation be patentable; and are tabbed palettes new or a variation?

I assert that GUI innovations SHOULD be patentable (although I'd like to see a much shorter duration on all software-related patents). There are individuals and companies which spend a lot of time, effort and money researching GUI concepts, improving ease of use, and generally developing idioms which gives their software an edge ... but then have that idea reused by others in less than a couple of months, because the development cycle is shorter than the research cycle.

From Adobe's site:

Q11: Tabbed palettes are fairly common throughout software applications and operating systems -- what makes Adobe's palettes special and patentable? A: Like Velcro® and Post-It® notes, the very best inventions become so familiar that they are taken for granted. The fact that tabbed palettes seem so natural and common now is a testimony to the Adobe development effort that went into the invention. Adobe's patent describes a unique method that allows tabs within palettes to be customized, separated and reorganized by users. This invention was a significant leap forward for customers' productivity and personalization of the interface.

As for tabbed palettes ... this is a more difficult one. But first you need to understand the patent. This is not just about a tool dialog with a tab panel in it! The patent is available from Adobe's site, and a set of animations illustrate the infringment.

As you can see ... this patent is about multiple tool dialogs (palettes) which dock together to form tabbed panels within a single dialog. Suddenly the idea is not so obvious anymore. Dockable components which overlap to save space ...? That's not a universal GUI concept; showing and hiding tool windows or popping up dialogs in a stack is a traditional means to handle this problem. Arguably Adobe DID innovate in this instance.

From Adobe's FAQ at http://www.adobe.com/adobefacts/faq.html#Q11 they are not claiming to have a patent on all tabbed palettes but only on those that can be customized, separated, and reorganized by users. Also for all those who say Adobe is claiming a patent in tabs in general check out Question 17 on the FAQ. Lastly check out the pictures that Adobe has on the site showing the problems...I bet the court took on look at those and had a lot of questions. Daniel BTW Now whether this patent should have been issued is a whole different matter and I am sure that others will cover it.

As seen on this slate article:

According to information released by the Dallas Fort Worth Airport, an even more detailed list (requires Adobe Acrobat) was issued by the FAA in February that helpfully advises passengers not to bother trying to bring automatic weapons, hand grenades, blasting caps, or meat cleavers. Also banned are corkscrews and toy transformer robots.

I don't have either font, but here's the links to the Adobe font pages.

Frutiger
and
Myriad MM

-Russ

I don't have either font, but here's the links to the Adobe font pages.

Frutiger
and
Myriad MM

-Russ

Sounds to me like they're making excuses while everybody else seems to be having no trouble making their products work under MacOS X.

As an interactive production manager out here in NYC, I'd have to say "yes" -- at least on the professional side of things. Photoshop (w/ an assist from Illustrator) are *the* tools of the trade for creating static web graphics. (Don't mind the whimpering you hear from the back of the pack. Those are just the people who insist on using Fireworks...) =)

Why use these "behemoths"? Because they let us put the design in "web design", which is ultimately what we get paid for. But there are still plenty of good solutions for the hobbyist crowd, including Photoshop Elements, which retails at $99 (not counting the $30 rebate for PSP users) and has all the features of Photoshop that a smaller web publisher would need.

2) what percentage of those people actually use the software LEGALLY?

Professional use? Most everyone. Personal use? I'd give 20% as a rough guess. I've got registered copies both at home and at work, but I'm probably an exception to the more general rule.

The Mozilla SVG implementation is a native SVG implementation. This is as opposed to plug-in SVG viewers such as the Adobe viewer (which is currently the most popular SVG viewer).

Some of the implications of this are:

• Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML, XUL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document. This is being made possible by using XML namesspaces.
• Mozilla is 'aware' of the SVG content. It can be accessed through the SVG DOM (which is compatible with the XML DOM) and manipulated by Mozilla's script engine.
• Other Mozilla technologies can be used with SVG. XBL coupled with SVG is a particular interesting combination. It can be used to create graphical widgets (I wonder when we'll see the first SVG-based chrome!) or extend Mozilla to recognize other specialized languages such as e.g. CML (chemical markup language). There are samples of these kinds of more advanced usage patterns on croczilla.com/svg/.

That said, Flash in general sucks ass with a straw and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Now that I drove that home, on with my story:

Macromedia did try to open up the Flash 4 format so that other people could create software compatible with it. And in fact, LiveMotion was Adobe's entry into that market.

This was Flash 4, though. They're now essentially up to Flash MX (read: 6), and the spec has grown significantly since then. The first big change was scripting from 4 => 5, and while I have no idea what they added from 5 => MX, but I'm sure it's sizeable. (Memo to myself: look into it, consider upgrading just because it might be fun to try some animation.)

Remember, once again, that Macromedia makes the player plug-in, and if you base a site on Flash, you're still going to be at their mercy no matter whose development tools you use. And if you use someone else's tools, they may not keep up with Macromedia's changes.

Now, it's doubtful that they'll do anything to break an animation when viewed through an older plug-in or browser, but there may be side-effects, and they will affect both usability and user perceptions of your site.

Yes, I'll admit, this argument smacks of FUD, but sometimes the unthinkable happens.

Barring my qualms against it, I'll side with everyone else who answered so far and recommend not using Flash to build a website because it can prevent normal navigation, SWFs can take a long time to play over slow connections (I'm still stuck on a 56K dialup--I know from whence I speak), and as of Flash 5, Macromedia's authoring environment had some seriously "avant-garde" (read: bad) user interface design philosophies. There are those who believe [really C|net news] the Flash-based web is not necessarily a good idea.

The load speeds and display times could be the biggest issue, since web surfers have notoriously short attention spans.

But that's just my opinion, as always. The salt shaker is to the left; take as many grains as you need.

Now that I drove that home, on with my story:

Macromedia did try to open up the Flash 4 format so that other people could create software compatible with it. And in fact, LiveMotion was Adobe's entry into that market.

This was Flash 4, though. They're now essentially up to Flash MX (read: 6), and the spec has grown significantly since then. The first big change was scripting from 4 => 5, and while I have no idea what they added from 5 => MX, but I'm sure it's sizeable. (Memo to myself: look into it, consider upgrading just because it might be fun to try some animation.)

Remember, once again, that Macromedia makes the player plug-in, and if you base a site on Flash, you're still going to be at their mercy no matter whose development tools you use. And if you use someone else's tools, they may not keep up with Macromedia's changes.

Now, it's doubtful that they'll do anything to break an animation when viewed through an older plug-in or browser, but there may be side-effects, and they will affect both usability and user perceptions of your site.

Yes, I'll admit, this argument smacks of FUD, but sometimes the unthinkable happens.

Barring my qualms against it, I'll side with everyone else who answered so far and recommend not using Flash to build a website because it can prevent normal navigation, SWFs can take a long time to play over slow connections (I'm still stuck on a 56K dialup--I know from whence I speak), and as of Flash 5, Macromedia's authoring environment had some seriously "avant-garde" (read: bad) user interface design philosophies. There are those who believe [really C|net news] the Flash-based web is not necessarily a good idea.

The load speeds and display times could be the biggest issue, since web surfers have notoriously short attention spans.

But that's just my opinion, as always. The salt shaker is to the left; take as many grains as you need.

How about a nice alternative to Flash.

• The plugin
• A cool example of SVG.

The W3C SVG page may be found here. Probably the most popular browser plug-in is made by Adobe and you can get it here (RedHat 7.1 and Solaris 8 versions of the plug-in are somewhat hard to find but are still available).

You might also wish to check out some of Adobe's demos. Jasc has a Win32 app called WebDraw that can come in handy, too.

The W3C SVG page may be found here. Probably the most popular browser plug-in is made by Adobe and you can get it here (RedHat 7.1 and Solaris 8 versions of the plug-in are somewhat hard to find but are still available).

You might also wish to check out some of Adobe's demos. Jasc has a Win32 app called WebDraw that can come in handy, too.