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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."
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.
I wonder if they got tired of all those 'If runs on OS X, why don't you have a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!' questions.
- Tash
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
[blockquote]Or, "how long will Apple last, after losing all these applications.[/quote] You forgot to use the word "beleaguered" anywhere in your post.
Can anyone say: Final Cut Pro payback?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
...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.
I spent the last 6 months of my life buried in that app, and while I think it's wonderful for what it does, I was getting pretty sick of the Classic environment crashing twice a day. (thank God for auto-saves) It got to the point that I'd prefer running it through VirtualPC and Win2k than under OS9--the only problem being the need for dual displays to manage both the workspace and the palletes. Oh well, here's to hoping that either LaTeX + good GUI or InDesign + PageMaker extinguishes the app in the near future...
I hate Grammar Nazi's
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.
Abobe's official FAQ can be found here in pdf format.
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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.
Frame was a good app, but it was also a niche app, as it was really only good for long document publishing [books]. That said Indesign and XPress own the much larger magazine and newspaper publishing arena. Adobe just realized that they weren't selling that many copies of the application on the Mac side, and decided to drop it.
The Solaris version may continue to survive, as some RIPs are still running on Solaris, and it is helpful to have the app on that platform [and they can charge *much* more for each seat... take a look at what Adobe charged for Photoshop on SGI/IRIX and compare it to the Mac/Win version].
It is always sad when a large company drops a product for an OS, but if the audience isn't there, why bother? Smart move on Adobe's part.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
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.
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.
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
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
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.
As for SGML/XML->TeX, you should look into the Jade project.
As for stylesheets, TeX has had them for decades, but yes they involve writing macros, unless LyX has a GUI for it; I don't see this as a disadvantage.
As for "half-decent" documents, TeX/LaTeX have helped produce thousands of books, papers, reports, articles and so on for nigh on 20 years.
I don't use LaTeX at all, so i'm not sure about all that. What I can tell you is that the distinction between "press-ready" PDF's and generic PDF's has to do with 4 color separation, spot color output, Line-screen calibration for presses, and correct 4-plate separation output. Not to mention overprint/knockout options & clipping paths for photos. Sorry, but if you are in the professional graphic design arena, your'e pretty much stuck with quark or inDesign, if you want consistent output when going to press...
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.
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.
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.
Point by point refutation of parent post here...
Point 1: "Utterly useless for 75% of the world that doesn't use the American alphabet."
Point 1 refutation: Bullshit. I have personally typeset texts in Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew in LaTeX. Support for Sanskrit and Elvish are easy to find if you look at CTAN. You can imagine that anything in between those extremes is drop-dead simple.
Point 2: "No support for press-ready PDF, that is to say no support for PDF/X at all."
Point 2 refutation: Bullshit. I use pdflatex on a daily basis, and the guys and gals at the print shop consistently compliment me on the resulting PDFs. teTeX, the dominant TeX/LaTeX distribution, includes many tools for converting to and tweaking output for a number of different formats.
Point 3: "No support for managed color separations."
Point 3 refutation: Who gives a damn? The strong point of TeX/LaTeX is typesetting mathematical papers, and when Knuth wrote it, it was in simple frustration that his books looked like crap after being put through the preceding technology. The fact that it can be used for other things is a bonus.
Point 4: "No XML->TeX pathway."
Point 4 refutation: Try Google. Not to mention that even a beginning programmer can figure out how to parse XML into LaTeX or TeX after an afternoon of looking at the two. At this point I have to wonder if you aren't talking completely out your ass.
Point 5: "No stylesheet support, unless you count writing macros. Which I don't. Writing macros has more in common with symbolic math than it does with graphic design."
Point 5 refutation: Gee, what are all these foo.sty files all around my texmf directory? They may be macros, but using LaTeX, pretty much all of the macros have been written for you. Not to mention that if you're trying to use LaTeX or TeX for graphic design, you are a moron. Use the tool for its strengths, not for its weaknesses -- design your graphics in another program, save them in one of the half-dozen or more acceptable formats for LaTeX, and use any of the four graphic inclusion/positioning packages that come standard with any TeX distribution. At this point, I'm almost positive that you're a troll, so I won't bother posting this under my user account.
Point 6: "Only rudimentary support for contone and vector graphics. No intelligent text wrap, for example."
Point 6 refutation: I don't contest the first sentence -- I have already refuted it above. Save your freaking diagram out from another program (I personally recommend xfig and tgif for diagramming) and include it in your LaTeX document using one of the standard packages. As for your assertion that there is no intelligent text wrap, you are clearly on glue. Try actually USING it before you decide that -- not only is the text wrap great, but the justification is top-notch, and the hyphenation understands about two dozen different languages. Beats the living hell out of Frame, Quark, InDesign, and the crowd. And yes, I've used them before.
Point 7: "You CANNOT use it to generate a half-decent document..."
Point 7 refutation: Please piss up a rope. No one is trying to make you use it. You don't even have to like it. Just don't try to confuse your not liking it with it not being a good way to go.
Mac users are very parochial about the UI. I don't mind using X to run useful apps like Unison, but most would.
It's hard for a product that doesn't exist to become too popular. If Adobe had actually produced a Mac OS X version of FrameMaker in the 4+ years that Mac OS X has been around, perhaps consumers might have been able to vote with their wallets, but not even a crappy carbonized version was to be had. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophesies.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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.
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.