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Adobe Kills FrameMaker for Mac
Feneric writes "As noted on FrameUsers.com, FrameMaker for the Mac was officially killed by Adobe. Of course, since one of the primary selling points of FrameMaker is its wonderfully solid cross-platform MS-Windows / Macintosh / Unix support, many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
"[...] many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
I think the real question is "how long it'll last for any platform other than Windows?"
Sad.
Trolling is a art,
Truly cross-platform, professional page layout, incredibly smart fonts and free! Stop chaining yourself to proprietary shit that can get killed any day.
As cool as it is too see major software being released for multiple platforms, especially linux. Something like this is going to happen. Just a few weeks ago, Macromedia announced that it was going to support linux. Now adboe is dropping a mac product.
Adobe never actually updated FrameMaker for OS x on the Mac, which made this a legacy app that needed to run in Classic anyway. Print shops can be somewhat slow in updating to newer software and technology, so many might still run some OS 9 Macs...but lack of support for the current system hinted that this software was considered dead long ago.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
...that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
In any case, it would seem difficult for a company to justify splitting its development resources between two competing products. FrameMaker users surely must have (or should have) seen this coming.
Adobe is a company that needs to make money to survive (like all companies). If a product isn't selling well enought, it will get killed.
So the fault isn't squarely on Adobes shoulders in this - the particular segment of the market that Framemaker for Mac catered to just isn't big enought for the software to keep selling...
On the lighter side, this must be a wonderfull opertunity for the Open Source Software to show that it can deliver somethign just as good for the Mac, right?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I don't actually think I know a production professional who uses Framemaker - although it is not bad for BIG documents. Clearly Adobe is putting its weight behind Indesign it is battle to dislodge the (in my opinion) excorable Quark Xpress.
A bigger question for Framemaker user currently on Mac is do they qualify for the next upgrade version, transitioning from Mac to Windows?
Macromedia has done a great thing in packaging MX2004 with both Mac and Windows versions in the same box -- I can upgrade any of my systems -- mac, or windows -- and use the software on the fastest box in my studio.
Software makers have been telling us for decades that hardware is a commodity and software is what's important. It's about time that the liscensing model changes to reflect that.
This is a great chance for Adobe to do just that. I hope they do.
And while feature parity might indeed be equivalent between the apps on either platform, I've run in to a few pretty frustrating cache overflow, GID and system hang problems on Windows versions of Illustrator and PS that reminded me why 'real' designers use Macs >:D
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Ah fair enough. Not much surprise realy, who uses MacOS anymore? Its not like they ever got a MacOS X version worked out.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Apparently Adobe's strategic plans are being
made by technically incompetent people who
do not understand that OSX is a variant of
Unix (in the API compatibility sense, rather
than the trademark sense).
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Right. Apple keeps encroaching further and further into Adobe's territory when they are one of only a handful of companies that didn't bail on Apple in the mid/late 90s. Quite a thank you, don't you think?
I think it's Adobe finally getting sick of giving Apple all their ideas for iRippoff iApps, particularly after being such a stauch supporter through the roughest years. Nah, they're sucking up to Microsoft, that's the ticket. Couldn't be anything anyone else did, all the evil in the world is always traceable back to MS.
First you don't update FrameMaker for the Mac in two years, then you complain Mac sales are going down and now you kill it. Uh, if you updated it more often maybe people would buy it.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
FrameMaker still beats any other word processor-like application for large document production. I'm part of an engineering organization and we've looked at moving from FrameMaker but nothing else replaces it without the loss of a lot of functionality. A bunch of people could colaborate on a document, pull it together and publish it. We're engineers, not typesetters so while InDesign could do it (I'm sure anyway) we're not about to learn a new package just for this purpose.
We've played with OpenOffice templates but there doesn't seem to be a real way to handle pulling together a document. TeX can do it but it would have a steep learning curve for something that isn't our primary purpose. I know TeX myself but I'm not about to be the one who gets tapped to teach it to everybody else (all the while still working hard at doing solid engineering work)
FrameMaker was painful in some ways, mostly because it wasn't "Just a word processor". Once that aspect was realized it was fairly painless however.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Windows or Solaris only.
If it runs on Solaris, why not a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!
ok, I know, it was bad, but it had to be said.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
From the Adobe Framemaker FAQ on the article "A. It is our policy to not comment on the size of our user base. However, sales of FrameMaker licenses have been greater on the Windows and Solaris platforms for a number of years." They spelled it out and no tinfoil hat conspiracy.
You may never see Framemaker on an open source platform. The primary use for Framemaker is technical documentation for publication. Some of the deadtreeware available for open source project certainly was composed in Framemaker. However, the majority of open source projects are not at the stage (and may never be) where someone makes the effort to publish documentation.
And then remember a large number of Framemaker users work as software technical writers for closed source software companies. So do not hold your breath for the free software version.
Framemaker is one of the few pieces of software, open or closed source, that paid more than lip service to XML. A structured Framemaker document is a pure XML document with a real DTD. So not only is it well formed, but also (*gasp of disbelief*) Valid!
Have you Meta Moderated t
all the posts say that Apple is expanding market share like gangbusters. Someone's wife takes the Mac to work, a virus hits, a week later, the janitor, the guy selling chewing gum in the lobby, and the washroom attendent are all showing up with Macs.
If Adobe had a version of the app for older Macs, and market share is growing, why aren't they supporting newer Macs? Don't they understand, as one poster pointed out, that even though Google share was 4% in 1991 and 4% now, that market share could have grown from 3.51% to 4.49% and still show as 4%? What are they, stupid?
Maybe they see something else growing at a 90% rate year over year, and whose growth rate is accelerating, and are getting ready.
How many PhD student want to spend the money on Word when they can use LaTeX for free? And don't say they can write their dissertation in a lab, you can't even bring coffee in there. Plus, Word's equation editor is an atrocity against man.
Adobe doesn't care about FM on OS X. They are aggressively pushing InDesign on OS X, so FrameMaker would simply fragment their market and distract them from the pursuit and slaughter of Quark XPress.
Of course, whenever a Mac app is discontinued it's an invitation for the haters to start trolling, but FM was never in the game on OS X.
I haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
That's because FM is not a general-purpose Joe-and-Jane office worker word processor: FM's strengths lie in really large documents, like books and other things that are over ~200 pages. Not many people have a need for that. FM on Solaris (SPARC) is a very nifty combination.
You and your acquaintances are not a statistically significant sample set.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Abandonware has nothing to do with whether the source is available.
"I think it's Adobe finally getting sick of giving Apple all their ideas for iRippoff iApps, particularly after being such a stauch supporter through the roughest years."
Hey, if Adobe wanted to be treated decently by Apple, perhaps they should stop labeling Windows PCs as their "preferred platform of choice." And Adobe sucking up to Microsoft will only cause them to become the next SpyGlass; after all, it is Microsoft, NOT Apple, that is trying to kill off the PDF file format for more proprietary versions of XML in the Office line.
As noted by practically everyone else on Slashdot in earlier threads back to near Creation, if Adobe was smart, they'd start supporting Linux instead of Windows or Mac...
Furthermore, if Premiere was actually a better product than Final Cut Pro, Adobe could actually compete upon merits instead of resorting to dropping all support because they have their panties all bunched up. Just like if Microsoft was actually concerned about developing Internet Explorer (but we all know that was just an exercise in killing off Netscape), they wouldn't have dropped Mac support - citing Apple's own internal knowledge of their operating system as reason...how ironic...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
What about other critical features being able to place figures and text-frames exactly where you want them (and not where LaTeX wants to misplace them)
There are rules for typesetting documents. TeX (and by extension, LaTeX) uses those rules. Word is like a plastic hammer and toolbelt for children compared to TeX's professional Estwing.
tracking changes/version control?
This is not the job of a word processor.
Think back to two years ago: do you think perhaps Adobe was swamped with DMCA-related questions?
Where exactly did you send your query? To a person or to a {help|info|webmaster|etc}@adobe address?
Was your question a FAQ? Did you bother to check?
To recap:
you sent email to a huge company
you didn't get a reply
feeling slighted, you sent a "less polite" email threatening to "boycott their products"
for some amazing reason, you didn't get a response to the second email
you took all this personally, and now are waging jihad against a company that doesn't know/care about your [alleged] lost business
Wow.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Interleaf was the first good WYSIWYG word processor/page editor/publication builder program. It came out in the early 1980s, and originally ran on SUN workstations. Interleaf wanted to sell you a $60,000 bundle with Interleaf, a workstation and a laser printer, so they didn't sell very many units. But, eventually, there were Mac and Windows versions.
Interleaf remained a niche product for almost two decades. It was better than anything sold for word processing until the late 1990s, but the company was stuck with the high price point. They could have owned word processing, but they blew it. Interleaf was acquired by Broadvision around 1998, which killed it.
Frame is the tech writing industry standard for anything bigger than what Word can handle. If you're going for any tech writing work of consequence, you'd better be handy with Frame.
Unfortunately, tech writers seem to march to the Microsoft drummer in general. I doubt many will care about Frame for OSX.
Ahh how refreshing to hear a state/government employee voting with someone elses (taxpayers) wallet.
That deal for the products did cost money, just not money out of *your* pocket.
Check your knees - they seem to be jerking a lot. Adobe didn't stop you from using this. You can use the product for as long as you want, there will just not be any updates. You could put this on an OS9 machine and use it for years. Just saying that there will be no upgrades, does not mean they stop you from using it. Save your closed source arguments till they are justified.
Stay tuned for new sig...
FrameMaker has been the number one tool for technical writers for years. It could be replaced by something like LaTex, an infinitely better system, but the amount of time to convert all templates and libraries and create new ones is massive. Also, the amount of training most TWs would require to learn something like LaTex is also a hurdle. I did a contract recently for one of the biggest computer manufacturers, and their whole library (thousands of books) is in Frame. Tech writers on average don't tend to be really technical, and the loss of FM would have some big reprecussions.
What about other critical features being able to place figures and text-frames exactly where you want them (and not where LaTeX wants to misplace them) or tracking changes/version control?
Minipages, parboxes, and styles like floatflt all make complex figure placement quite painless (certainly no harder than complex figure placement in MS Word). As for version control and change tracking - given that latex is pure text it is pretty damn easy to keep latex files in CVS which provides far better version control than MS Word. If you really want, you can keep latex documents in Visual SourceSafe, as I once did at a Windows based company.
Do I sound annoyed? Well, I am annoyed. You would be too if your every PhD student would initially insist on using LaTeX for his manuscripts ("i'm not gonna touch M$ word with 10ft pole!") and then expects me to make notes on a print-out.
Really? They must be quite slow then - I just use pdflatex and get people to use PDF annotation facilities to make notes - works brilliantly.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I've always used PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Photoshop, oddly enough, was not originally designed with the print industry in mind until John and Thomas Knoll from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic had sold it to Adobe.
Adobe's definitely feeling a kick in the pants from Apple...
Apple's developers, being far more ingenious at developing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, has vastly improved acquired applications such as Shake and DVD Studio Pro.
As a result of an explosion in digital cinematography and editing, people with advanced programming skills are harder to find, and therefore there's a greater need for user-friendly, robust apps on the superlative media platform.
Adobe has been riding high on Photoshop for years, and I find that particularly interesting since neither was Photoshop their product (it was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic), nor was it ever marketed by Adobe for the purpose for which it was invented... digital matte artistry and frame-by-frame image correction in motion pictures.
Unfortunately, they haven't really delivered on other products...Newer versions of Premiere had odd compatibility problems with various DV cameras, various interface bugs, a very poor titling tool that crashes frequently... Premiere Pro seems a desperate attempt to recover market share lost to Apple's vastly superior Final Cut Pro, imitating almost every major feature set of Final Cut Pro that was conspicuously absent in the standard version of Premiere.
As for After Effects... That application's edge was trumped when Apple acquired Shake, which has been used in Oscar-winning productions for seven straight years, including [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]... Shake is such an immensely powerful compositing system, it commands a sticker price four times that of After Effects Production Bundle. It's clear that Adobe's reign in the film and television industry is at its end... which means "Game Over" for one of their two primary target markets. So my response, as a content creator using Macs exclusively, to this and future missteps by Adobe in an effort to differentiate themselves from Apple who has all but entirely annihilated Adobe's market share... is, to quote Bender from The Breakfast Club, "B-O-O H-O-O."
Cry me a river...
If Apple ever plans to massively overhaul MacPaint and turns AppleWorks into a full-blown publishing suite, Adobe might as well file Chapter 11.
Mac users are very parochial about the UI. I don't mind using X to run useful apps like Unison, but most would.
FYI: Any magazine or catalog you open will be produced either in Quark (most of them) or InDesign (a few). Framemaker has a very small, very select market, for which it is a superior product. For anything else it's a pain in the ass.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Which brings us back to my first gripe which was the necessity of having to learn a programming language to prepare documents.
The owls are not what they seem
Not at all; the difficulty is not in the POSIX bits - read/write/open/close - but in the GUI. A well behaved Mac app needs to use unique Apple API's correctly, such as Cocoa. Besides, support can be a bigger issue than initial porting. I know of products that could be ported to Linux in a heartbeat, except that the support issues scare the owners.
Anyhow, Frame is essentially a corporate product and corporations have not accepted the Mac to any great extent. It's used in graphic arts, prepress, etc. but most IT departments would rather avoid them. The Mac mostly sells to consumers and independent professionals.
There's a great TeX/LaTeX front end for OS X that I use called TeXShop. Aqua-friendly, set up to generate PDFs instead of DVIs by default, etc., etc.
Having said that, the people who've observed that FrameMaker is the industry standard for technical writing aren't kidding. TeX has its strongholds in academia and research, but go to any major commercial job board and search for technical writing positions. FrameMaker is almost guaranteed to not only be the most common document production system you run across, but to be far and away in front of its competitors. (From my observations, Microsoft Word is a distant second, various SGML tools showing up next and Quark, InDesign and TeX showing up once in a blue moon.)
I think when people recommend "obvious alternatives" they tend to forget just how difficult it is to make a switch from a legacy application. If you're maintainining a few hundred technical documents in FrameMaker format with a group of a half-dozen technical writers all using Macs, figure out how much money you'll spend on converting all of those to LaTeX and on retraining your technical writers, even if you're using the nicest and friendliest front-end imaginable. Even an optimistic estimate in such a scenario would approach a thousand man-hours of work. Compare that with the cost of buying your half-dozen technical writers new PCs with new FrameMaker licenses and giving them a week to get up to speed on platform differences.
Personally, I don't know FM and I don't really want to have to learn it. But I want to move more deeply into technical writing than I'm at now, and even if I could conclusively demonstrate that LaTeX would do everything a prospective client needs, that won't win me the work.
Basically while InDesign is focused on the needs of someone writing a newsletter or a magazine that have numerous individual articles that jump all around, FrameMaker is more optimized for long documents (like books), longish documents that come in several flavors (like users' manuals), technical / mathematical documents of any length (it's one of the most popular apps for writing a thesus in), long documents with strict regulated paragraph numbering (like by-laws), and XML / SGML mark-up.
It's possible to perform a lot of FrameMaker's operations in InDesign, but it's nowhere near as slick, friendly, or fast. Try creating a valid XML (or worse, general SGML) document with InDesign for automated export to web and e-book. Try creating a technical manual in InDesign that'll automatically spit out different versions of itself for different (but related) products. Try writing a full 500+ page book in InDesign without going insane. Try writing a short paper on physics with InDesign that uses some actual complicated mathematical equations.
FrameMaker is a niche product, but in that niche it dominates. Nothing else even comes remotely close.
FrameMaker is the ONLY Mac option for long-document work. Period. Adobe is forcing the hand of those of us who are Mac-based tech writers -- either we go on using FM in Classic mode until that doesn't work any more, or we get a PC for our FM projects. Can't say I didn't see it coming when they ignored OS X, but it hurts anyway.
Copyrights do not enter the public domain just because they are no longer commercially exploited or widely available.
Just because a party owns a copyright doesn't give that party grounds to sue using that copyright unless that party can show that somebody did in fact infringe that copyright. The fair use of a copyrighted work, as defined by Title 17, United States Code, section 117, is not an infringement of copyright. I can see how a non-commercial distributor of abandonware could make a case for clause 1, clause 2, and clause 4. And even if the copyright owner does win a close fair use case when the general public widely supports the alleged infringer, I can see how that would trigger widespread boycotts of the copyright owner's other products.
Mac users are very parochial about the UI. I don't mind using X to run useful apps like Unison, but most would.
Exactly. I had that experience today firing up The GIMP 2 under OS X today for the first time. It's the first time that I've fired up any X app other than an x-term (never had any need to) and the dichotomy between the two UI's made me want to puke.
So, I quit GIMP, fired up Photoshop and give it a big electronic hug.
I own an old version of FrameMaker for Mac, which I love and have used extensively. I started using FM when it was still sold by Frame Corporation, (of Rincon Circle iirc). It is the only app I still use in classic mode. I have written two theses in it for myself, and typeset one for my wife. I've written technical books, and non-technical books in it, as well as my day to day letters, wedding invitations, etc etc.
I was holding off buying a new version until there was one for OS X -- hence why I didn't go for 6 or 7. (Plus they didn't add any features I needed -- stagnation). At the same time, I was going to purchase a new copy for my wife (windows) and upgrade my dad's copy (mac), so we all moved into sync on the same version.
No mac version = adobe has lost my two upgrades and a windows sale. And all upgrades after that. I'm not going to fork between platforms, nor support a company that does not support my choice of OS.
I'm sick of using classic, but may have to continue doing so. Or migrate to a different tool.
Frame Corporation, please (i) if necessary, resurrect yourself or spin back out of Adobe and (ii) buy back the product and return it to the amazingly brilliant product it was before Adobe got its paws on it.
Some other points re previous posters -- ctrl-L fixes the redraw glitches. And a great FrameMaker feature is conditional text, which produces different versions of a document by changing variables, sort of like #if directives. I did Mac & PC versions of manuals using this. Change one condition, and the manual references, key refs and screenshots all switched over. Awesome.
Only gripe: being unable to break long footnotes across pages.
Even though the foundation was there long before OSX 10.0 came out, the details, especially on the client side, were a moving target until about 10.1 or so. I'm sure a complex app like FrameMaker would have been a nightmare to support on early versions of OSX, even if porting it to Carbon would have been fairly straightforward. Why do you think Photoshop took so long? Or Quark even longer? You could sneer and call them incompetent, but I'll bet there's more to it than that!
It's kind of like Linux back in the early days - it had hardly any commercial software because it was such a moving target and different distributions were nearly incompatible. Just like OSX, it's improved greatly in the last couple of years in that regard. As an aside, I always thought FreeBSD would have been a commercial developer's dream - well laid out, one stable "distribution", straightforward roadmap. Too bad Linux caught fire first. But anyway.
So yeah, the rude AC has a point.