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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."
I haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
I'm not disappointed, I hate using Frame.
Komi
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
Adobe had promised before that that ``all major upgrades'' will be Mac OS X native.
Unfortunately, Lighthouse Design, the company which ported FrameMaker 2 and 3 to NeXTstep got bought by Sun, so Adobe didn't even have that option of outsourcing the port.
For those searching for an alternative, LyX, http://www.lyx.org is _very_ nice, esp. the nifty new QT version for Aqua.
There's also a script to convert from FrameMaker's Maker Interchange Format (MIF) to LyX.
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~pablo/mif2lyx/
InDesign lacks the industrial-strength SGML stuff w/ FrameMaker has, so isn't an option. Pagemaker has also been buried (but at least InDesign is a viable alternative for it w/ the nifty script pack / additions Adobe announced recently).
xmltex is another good thing to use, or of course one can roll one's own XML publishing solutions w/ TeX.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I've been a Framemaker user for over 12 years and it has not really progressed much in the last 6 or so. They glommed on some html export and XML support, but never saw much use for these features.
Framemaker was ideal for producing technical documents which require:
* paragraph style numbering, so that sections may be shuffled and all the numbered chapters, headers, subheads would automatically update
* incremental table and figure numbering
* cross-references, table of contents and figures which automatically update
* variables embedded in text
InDesign would be an excellent substitute if several of these features were implemented. I guess I'll have to keep the old version of MacOS9 Framemaker around until someone comes out with a substitute for this product.
"You have liberated me from thought."
So write Adobe and ask them to make it public domain. Not necessarily open source, just public domain. If they're not going to sell the binaries any more, then why would they care if people share them?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Unless and until Adobe kills the Unix versions of FrameMaker, there's a Mac-usable version out there.
This saddens me, though. I'm a technical writer and can't imagine having to do books with Microsoft Word. Word is not suitable for long technical documents, period. It *breaks* when you try to do complex things with it. I'm planning to switch to a Mac with my personal computer, and just hope that I won't be reduced to running FrameMaker under a Windoze emulator.
Catherine
Long-term, OOo is going to offer fierce competition for any product like Frame, and even MS Office. OOo already has a FrameMaker type of document model. By using an open XML fileformat, it means that it will be possible to write tools that interact with OOo documents easily. It will probably end up with a more powerful templating system than MS Office, and it will definitely end up with more powerful macro options (Python, etc). OOo will also win in cross platform abilities, with native ports to OSX and KDE in various stages. OOo is the one to beat these days. MS Office will always have a niche in processing of legacy documents, but it and FrameMaker, PageMaker and the others are in trouble.
It's obvious from the majority of the comments that most of the people commenting on this have never actually to use FrameMaker for anything.
If you are a Tech Writer or working in desktop publishing firm (the type that issues books rather than newsletters) in any serious capacity, chances are good that you've at least run across Frame, and if you are like me, use it pretty much on a daily basis.
I started using the Unix version first, prior to it being bought out by Adobe, sometime in the mid-90s. I've written books for a book publisher that ultimately *had* to be in Frame format, and many tech writers I know use it. So the fact that it has less than 1% market penetration isn't surprising -- it's always been a niche product.
What I don't find surprising is the fact that Adobe is dropping support for the Mac platform. I came back to Frame 7 recently and was surprised to see how little had been changed since the last time I used it extensively back in the late-90s. While Adobe *has* made some improvements to the product (primarily to just barely keep it usable in the Internet age), but it still has one of the worst UIs going for a commercial product. Embarrasing-looking 8-bit graphical buttons that make the product look cheap, multiple dialogs needed for handling a single task (such as table formatting), and the fact that pretty much anything of use besides basic text formatting is lumped into a single "Special" drop-down menu. And you have to love the dialogs whose windows you can resize without actually resizing the window's contents, which smacks of poor QA. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't curse Adobe for making the barest UI improvements to their product. So to me the announcement about dropping the Mac platform says that Adobe is continuing to neglect this product.
What it does it does well, but increasingly the headaches of the poor UI and the fact that you have to get plug-ins to do what ought to be built-in functions (decent indexing comes to mind; I can buy a good product from IxGen but why has it never been built into Frame?) leads to more frustrations that is necessary for a product that commands a premium price (currenly $799).
I am in a position to make recommendations on software purchases, and unless Adobe becomes serious about its upgrade to Frame (the 7.1 "upgrade" for $199 was laughable) I wouldn't recommend we continue with this product. Give me something that works cleanly in XML, indexes well, with tie-ins to a database structure, that produces decent HTML output and handles markers, variables and all of the "special" functions that Frame builds in and I'll sign up for it in a jiffy.
It never ran on OS X. So that answers that question.
Sort of. Problem is, they had a Linux version three years ago. FrameMaker on Linux.
So the mystery deepens. What the fuck happened to Frame on Linux, and if Adobe could port from Solaris to Linux three years ago, surely they can port from Solaris to OS X (and Solaris to Linux) today.
I can see the market for Frame on Linux being pretty small in 2000 -- anyone with $800 to spend on software probably wasn't using Linux as a desktop. I can't see that argument holding water today. And that goes double for OS X.
Bad business, when you are at the mercy of your customer coming to you.
So instead we make sure to keep VERY up to date. On the other hand we also have an OS9 and a Windows box chugging along with a whole slew of old out dated software on it as well. Just in case.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
OSX was around in server form before the desktop variant came out, and also in beta form available to developers. I'd think it safe to say Adobe would have had access to it enough for at least 4 years to do an adequate translation. Apple was prodding devs towards at least writing Carbon apps for longer than that, if I remember right. The dual-compatability mode was the subject of ads featuring the very first G3s (blue-box and yellow box modes anyone?), which were released in '97.