Adobe Unveils Open Source Library

anamexis writes "Adobe premiered (no pun intended) opensource.adobe.com recently. The first two libraries available, titled Adam and Eve, respectively, take on complex GUI issues in applications. They are written in C++ and have been released under the MIT License, an OSI-Approved Open Source License."

Comments

Acrobat Reader

[jamesshuang]

If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...

Re:Acrobat Reader

[Stevyn]

What's wrong with it? It works well with firefox. It's a lot less bloated than version 6 for windows. Loads faster than the bloated one for windows. I prefer that they haven't filled it to the brim with crap. Every once in a while I'll get a warning telling me it might not display the pdf correctly, but it always seems to work fine.

I'm not discounting any problems you've had, I'm just curious as to what they are.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[dsginter]

If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...

We don't want Adobe Reader on Linux. For that matter, we don't want it on any platform.

Adobe, like a page from the Evil Corporation book, has taken it upon themselves to cash in on the success of Acrobat Reader. Currently, if you're a Windows Joe User who wants to download it, you'll wind up with all sorts of stuff. You'll get the Adobe Download Manager, the Yahoo Toolbar, Adobe Photoshop SE, and some mysterious Adobe Internet Printing that just appears in the start menu. Didja ever wonder why SO MANY people have the Yahoo toolbar even though they don't use Yahoo?

This is bullshit. While I realize that, in an ideal world, everyone would uncheck the little checkboxes and opt out of it but this isn't an ideal world. Adobe needs to be punished.

If some programming hero wanted to step up, it wouldn't be hard to knock a few hundred million dollars off of the value of Adobe's stock. Here's how:

1) Create free, open-source PDF writer and reader with none of the typical Evil attributes.
2) Distribute.

Adobe derives a significant amount of their revenue from their Acrobat Writer product. Most people simply want to create PDF files so they buy it. The company that I work for has thousands of licenses because they just want simple PDF creation functions. This is mind-boggling. They use none of the advanced features.

While we can all create PDFs in OpenOffice for free, I think that a set of PDF tools would devastate Adobe. This needs to happen if only for the simple fact that they've crossed the line.

PLEASE!?

Re:Acrobat Reader

[PoprocksCk]

You're right, it is less bloated. But the point is that they're still using some ugly, closed-source GUI library, and that they fully neglected Linux users for one whole major version.

Sure, they announced a 'beta' of version 7 for Linux, but has anyone ever *seen* it? They cancelled the public beta after a few days. So it's not so much that the product is a poor one (version 5.0.10 is pretty decent, really) but that they see Linux as a tier-2, unimportant platform. I truly hope that that changes in the near future as Adobe begins to embrace OSS.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[shawb]

Thankfully, Acrobat is not a monolithic piece of crap. All the stuff that takes so long to run is extra plugins, and they can be disabled. There are even programs to do it automatically, but this is something that I would trust doing manually over some program. I mean, if I somehow mess up Acrobat removing some plugins, I reinstall Acrobat. If the program messes up the system, is loaded with spyware or whatever, then the whole OS might have to go.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[uss_valiant]

A friend uses acroread 7 (beta) on his solaris (or was it linux) machine and it's really good. I'm also very pleased with the reader in version 7 on windows. It's so much better, faster, more responsive, ... than version 6. It's probably as fast as version 5 with more features than version 6.
After the disastrous version 6, Adobe fixed the issues with version 7 and I can honestly recommend using the most recent Acrobat Reader version again.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

they see Linux as a tier-2, unimportant platform

In my experience Adobe views everything that isn't Windows as a tier-2 platform, and would like nothing more than for them to go away. They have killed or frozen many products for Linux, Mac OS, and Solaris in the last few years. One particularly galling example is Framemaker. It is the single most popular application for writing manuals and technical publications, due to it's unique feature-set (developed before adobe bought it). Adobe killed the Linux version completely, and never released an OS X native version. Mac OS 9 users made up 65% of their customers, but for some reason when OS X came out, everyone stopped buying the Mac version. (everyone was waiting for an OS X version). It never came. Now it is a Window's only product. I know a number of people who run it in the Classic OS 9 emulation environment and a number who have switched to alternate products. Other users just switched to Windows. This is typical Adobe's attitude in recent years. Even with their flagship, Photoshop, Mac versions have sometimes lagged behind, or been missing features of the windows release. It is all just symptomatic of a company that has bought into Windows development, and only supports other platforms when there is just too much money coming in. Adobe has lost my trust, and I think lost it's way. I'm just waiting for a real competitor to appear.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[Hmmble]

Acoording to this article (Dutch) the Linux version of Adobe Reader 7.0 will be available somewhere this month (March)

Re:Acrobat Reader

[ColdWetDog]

While I just love bashing Adobe (their support is non existent for Photoshop, their documentation worse), I'm not sure that your statement:

"Even with their flagship, Photoshop, Mac versions have sometimes lagged behind, or been missing features of the windows release."

Is correct. Most of the real Photoshop CS manuals (third party) use the Mac version. It's awfully common to come across a phrase like "we do it this way on the Mac with this cute little shortcut, but you can't do it on Windows" and no "windows only features".

Not sure about any of thier other products though. I sure do hate thier "activation" feature on Windows... Doesn't work reliably with firewalls or antivirus programs (you're supposed to turn them off... in Windows... right...). If I leave Photoshop CS on my laptop running whilst hooked to the net, an hour later it complains that the "activation configuration license is missing. Please uninstall and reinstall the applicaton".

Of course I will. I have lots of time to do that. Well, I could use all of the wasted hours reading slashdot to do that but it's lots more fun to complain.

I would love a credible competitor to Photoshop. It is a great program but Adobe as a company is awfully annoying. And lets not get started with GIMP, it's Photoshop 3, maybe 4 at best. I check it from time to time and it's improving, but not there by any means.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[OldMiner]

I troubleshot this problem before, but I don't have the links handy. The short version is that it's a bug in the program itself, where it asks for too-general of a font, which causes buffer overflows. When requesting a font in X there's a whole bunch of dashes and asterisks such as -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-iso8859-1 . Each of these asterisks is an "I don't care" value. "I don't care what foundry it's from." "I don't care about its resolution." Or say -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-* which also says "I don't care about its encoding."

The encoding part is what you're getting around. When you have a proper LANG setting, like "en_US" the libraries you're using will recognize this and provide you with a nice beefy font. You'll often get a font which is not a nice, normal 8-bit font. It could be all wacky with like thousands of freaking characters, for, like, doing stuff outside of the Latin language set. Crazy.

When proper international fonts were being developed and the developers started to test applications, they realized that there were a ton of applications with this problem. They simply requested a font where they didn't specify encoding, and they couldn't deal with certain encodings that were returned, and they'd segfault. Therefore, making international-capable fonts standard was put off for many months while developers were encouraged to fix their applications. Unfortunately, Acrobat Reader is one of the stragglers. The recommended solution I've seen is to rename acroread and add a script in its place which sets the LANG variable and then runs the renamed executable.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[Leo McGarry]

they're still using some ugly, closed-source GUI library

A Linux user accuses somebody else's program of being ugly? That's rich.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[ThousandStars]

I'm just waiting for a real competitor to appear.

If you're a professional who uses InDesign, FrameMaker or Photoshop, that's unlikely to happen anytime in the near future. I've posted similar comments to GIMP threads, because the fact remains that Photoshop is so many man-years ahead of the competition and such an excellent program that a viable competitor with anywhere near Photoshop's combination of (relative) speed, ease of use and features seems highly unlikely. Commercial competitors will probably never appear because Photoshop eats the high end, Photoshop Elements now offers a low-mid end and the GIMP, for all its problems, probably gets the rest of the market. The GIMP suffers a variety of ills, including the problem of difficult OS X support and an unfortunate name, but it still gets some love for simple uses. Finally, even if the GIMP managed to threaten Photoshop, I'll bet on 1:50 odds that Adobe comes out with their patent canons firing, and today's patent situation makes them all too likely to triumph in the United States.

FrameMaker, meanwhile, is simply too much a niche and too well entrenched to see any serious competitor take it out, and InDesign probably falls into the same category. Quark, meanwhile, has become a non-entity and continues to survive solely through cruising; it makes Sun look like a vibrant, growing company by comparison.

I'm also disenchanted with Adobe as a company, but logically I can't see anyone else arising to challenge Adobe, because their products are too good, too complex and too much of a niche. Hell, the FOSS community can't even get close to OO.org parity with MSO, and a whole lot more people use office suites than Photoshop, InDesign and Framemaker combined.

Good post overall, though -- I agree with most of your points.

The GIMP

[justforaday]

Not being familiar with the MIT License (too lazy to RTFL), just wondering what use these libraries could be to projects like the GIMP.

Re:The GIMP

[1010011010]

Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:

The MIT License

Copyright (c)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".

Re:The GIMP

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".

You mean "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software"? I think most (all?) "open source" licenses have a similar requirement. Don't confuse your dislike for Adobe with reality.

Re:The GIMP

[lordpixel]

That's not the obnoxious advertising clause.

The OAC was a part of the BSD license which used to say you had to print out a message when your program started up giving props to the Regents of the University of Berkley, CA or some such.

This was probably the only real difference between the MIT and BSD licenses, but since the BSD license dropped this clause, they're the same for all intents and purposes.

Re:The GIMP

[Homology]

Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:

The OpenBSD license is even shorter :

Below is an example license to be used for new code in OpenBSD,
modeled after the ISC license.

It is important to specify the year of the copyright. Additional years
should be separated by a comma, e.g.
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004

If you add extra text to the body of the license, be careful not to
add further restrictions.

/*
* Copyright (c) CCYY YOUR NAME HERE <user@your.dom.ain>
*
* Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
* purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
* copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
* WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
* MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
* ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
* WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
* ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
* OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
*/

Re:The GIMP

[jeffy124]

shortest license I ever saw was the "Beerware" license. Went something like this:

Copyright (c) xxxx Joe Q Programmer. Permission granted to use this thing however you want, subject to the condition that if you see me on the street, you buy me a beer.

Re:The GIMP

[Richard_at_work]

Theres no Advertising Clause in the MIT license - what the grandparent is calling the OAC is simply the bog standard copyright acknowledgement that goes in each sourcecode file. See the post a few posts down about the OpenBSD license - that certainly has no OAC and has pretty much the same wording.

Re:The GIMP

[molnarcs]

It makes it incompatible with GPL just like the original BSD license

No, it does not. It prevents you from stripping off the copyright notice, just like GPL or current BSD licence does.

Re:The GIMP

[molnarcs]

Some folks misundertand parts of the reason some developers use the BSD licence: it is not just more altruistic or something, it can be more practical. I remember an outburst from an mplayer developer saying that he sees no point in the gpl, for they have no means to prevent misuse anyway. Also, once you use the GPL, you have to keep on eye on violations, you have to keep vigilant, otherwise, what's the point of using it? So, some devs think that they don't want to be concerned with possible violations, they don't recurrent themes of whether or not it is okay to write binary only drivers for the kernel because of the GPL, and so on. They want to program and that's it. This might be the spirit some refer to as "academic".

Some developers go farther than this, and think that even the two clause BSD licence is too much legalese. Hence, code written by Poul-Henning Kamp is distributed under the beerware licence :))) (hence my reply to your post) - this is how it look like:

* "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
* phkATFreeBSD.ORG wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
* can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
* this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
*/</blockquote>

Whether or not you agree one agrees with him (I understand the point and usefulness of the GPL very well btw) - one has to admit that sometimes this kinda licence might give more freedom not only to the user, but to the developer(s) as well in the sense that a 3rd party vendor writing a binary driver or piece of code won't cause a shitstorm on the BSD kernel mailing list (as Brandybuck put it in one of his posts:))))

Re:The GIMP

[worf_mo]

Actually, you will find the term "obnoxious advertising clause" at Various Licenses and Comments about Them. It is referring to the fact that the Original BSD license contained the following clause:

"All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors."

This clause does not make the software released under it non-free, but it can cause practical problems and makes the license incompatible with the GNU GPL. Your parent poster most likely confounded the MIT and Original BSD licenses. (The MIT license it compatible with the GNU GPL.)

Re:The GIMP

[pavon]

This is not a free license, or indeed a copyright license at all. Licenses can only grant the users rights which they did not already have. They cannot require service in exchange for the license - that requires a contract. Suggest modifying license to request a beer, not demand one.
</anal> :)

If is looks like the acroreader for linux...

[jsheedy]

We are in for treat.

Re:If is looks like the acroreader for linux...

[Noksagt]

While acroread 5 is horrible (and the parent therefore deserves the Funny mod), the beta version of acroread 7 is a nice enough GTK app. I still have complaints & it isn't enough to switch me off of xpdf, I no longer cringe when I need some peculiar features from acroread.

Adam & Eve?

[carninja]

Insert Cain & Abel joke here...

Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

I was expecting some amazing graphics library but it is just a bunch of fairly trivial C++ templates. Nothing Boost cannot already do.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Gorath99]

From the documentation: Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides. Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written. I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Jadeus]

Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.

Dammit, I should have said yes to my g/f's maintenance contract...

That's cool...

[PoprocksCk]

...But please, release something worthwhile under an open source license, like the backend stuff for Acrobat or something...

And for the love of God, release Reader 7.0 for Linux, and do it soon!

Re:That's cool...

[TuringTest]

release something worthwhile under an open source license, like the backend stuff for Acrobat or something...

So what about the backend stuff for Photoshop? 'cos that's what they've released:


Eve (the name is derived from Express View Engine) is a layout engine and declarative language for constructing a human interface (HI) layout. Eve was developed originally for Photoshop (a prototype version was used in Photoshop 5) and has since seen gradual evolution and integration into other Adobe applications.

Re:That's cool...

[Leo McGarry]

PDF is an entirely open format. There's zero need for Adobe to release any of their Acrobat code.

Furthermore, if they did release it, it wouldn't help anybody. Acrobat does some important things, but it does them very badly. For PDF rendering alone, you can do much better. Compare Acrobat to Apple's entirely home-grown PDF rendering code, for instance.

Re:That's cool...

[the quick brown fox]

Actually it's more like the frontend stuff for Photoshop--or more precisely, the engine that drives parts of the frontend.

Dmitry Sklyarov

[digitaltraveller]

I welcome Adobe's efforts to work with the open source community.

That being said, I am still too afraid to use any Adobe products after DmitryGate.

I think it's going to take alot more from Adobe to win the trust and respect of this community, or at least this member.

I should mention that I am also a former Adobe customer.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov

[Icarus1919]

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978497.html

He ended up not serving a sentence at all. He was released from charges by the government which went after the company he worked for instead, and the jury acquitted the company of all charges. Looks like the system worked for once. Too bad no one took advantage of the chance to strike down the DMCA (or at least parts of it) as unconstitutional.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov

[alwsn]

To those wondering what the parent is talking about... ElcomSoft verdict: Not guilty

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov

[StormReaver]

"He ended up not serving a sentence at all."

He stayed in jail for 6 months waiting for his trial. Adobe can rot in Hell as far as I'm concerned.

uhoh

[justforaday]

Combine these with an Apple and you have the downfall of mankind...

Re:uhoh

[zerblat]

But what happens when you use Adam and Eve with Darwin?

Re:uhoh

[maxwell demon]

You get Evolution, of course!

Just what the world needs...

[Anonymous Coward]

...another GUI library.

Re:Just what the world needs...

[TheAwfulTruth]

If we get one that:

1) Works
2) Is clean
3) Is usable verbatim on Linux, Windows and Mac
4) Is not supidly licensed

Then yes, we need another GUI library!

So far there is not a single library that fits all 4 of those definitions.

FWIW...

[PoprocksCk]

...Searching for "Linux" using the site-only Google search on the opensource.adobe.com website, yields one result: http://opensource.adobe.com/pipermail/pythonphotos hop/2004-January.txt

And that one result no longer exists (you get a 404 when trying to access it). So if any of you folks are preparing to post "Oh boy, that means Photoshop for Linux is just around the corner!" -- you'd better think again.

It looks like the x11 license to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 License
This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

This license is sometimes called the "MIT" license, but that term is misleading, since MIT has used many licenses for software.

source

adam - overambitious?

[dhbiker]

from the webpage:

The most ambitious library, Adam, stems from the intuition that the logic behind a simple human interface can be distilled to a function:

f(x) -> x'

Is it just me but does this not sound a little to broad a definition of a library? I mean I can write anything like this:

My most ambitious library (The_Meaning), stems from the intuition that the logic behind the entire universe can be distilled to a function:

f(x) -> x'

obviously there is much work to be done on "The_Meaning" but when it is finished it will do everything (and the answer will turn out to be a disappointing 42 ;-) )

MIT License

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't looked at what they've actually released, but kudos to Adobe for not creating yet another "Open Source" license like so many other companies seem to do in this situation.

On MacSlash since yesterday !

[mirko]

This article was featrued on MacSlash since yesterday !

Where are the previous open source projects?

[SimHacker]

For several years, Adobe used to have several other open source projects on their old web site, that have now been removed from their current web site, http://www.opensource.adobe.com. The missing projects include:

Simulated Partial Specialization for non-compliant C++ compilers. Allows a user to obtain many of the benefits of partial specialization of C++ templates without direct compiler support.

Python action plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. Allows a user to write Photoshop action plug-ins using Python. Has Python interfaces to all the actions APIs.

Python plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. An Illustrator plug-in adapter that allows users to access the C level API from Python

Python plug-in for Adobe After Effects. An After Effects plug-in that allows users to access the C level API from Python.

Python module for Perforce SCM. A C coded Python module that provides access to all the calls in the Perforce source code management system SDK.

-Don

Help me out...

[BlueThunderArmy]

For the less code-literate among us, what exactly do these files do? Adobe's site doesn't make it clear at all, so R'ing TFL doesn't help...

Re:Help me out...

[dauthur]

These files can be used to make newer "user-released" projects, just as how Linux works, as well as E-mule, Mozilla, Soulseek and other opensource projects. Anyone can update the program to tailour their needs.
Say I needed to fix a compatability issue in Photoshop so I could run PSP/JFR files from Paint Shop Pro. The problem is getting Adobe to read PSP files, and getting PSP to read Adobe files. If I needed to do this, I wouldn't have to wait for Adobe to come out with a fix.

Re:Help me out...

[Swamii]

For the less code-literate among us, what exactly do these files do?

In layman's terms, it's a collection of pieces of code (Application Programming Interface) for building a user interface. This aides developers in writing applications that have user interfaces (i.e. most desktop applications).

Re:Help me out...

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Eve do? I can answer that as i've used it myself. It's a component of an application framework.

Eve is a UI layout engine. Eve's input is a text file that contains a platform neutral expression of User Interface. It's output is a dialog platform resource on whatever platform you are using.

Eve is used to layout many modal and non modal dialogs in various Adobe applications.

Eve aids with UI design, tweaks, revisions, localization.

Read the "Introduction to Adam and Eve" and you will see.

http://opensource.adobe.com/group__asl__overview.h tml#asl_overview_intro_to_adam_and_eve

Flame? (was: Re:Acrobat Reader)

[leonmergen]

I'm sorry, but I do not agree with you on many points... seriously, the Hotmail signup process requires a LOT more unchecking of boxes than the 3 unchecks you need when downloading Acrobat... it's a very common practice, and even Joe Shmoe who is able to find out he needs Acrobat is aware to not check everything... besides, at least Adobe doesn't sell your email addy to dozens of third parties...

Secondly, what's wrong with a business paying for creating PDF's ? There's nothing really wrong with Adobe Acrobat's business model: create a portable document format, make readers available for free on any OS, guarantee that it looks the same everywhere, and let people who want to create PDF documents using Acrobat pay...

Now, there already are pdf writers other than acrobat, so what's the problem...

IMHO, you're highly overreacting.

Something easy and useful

[Tom7]

How about "open sourcing" (or just making freely available) the damn Photoshop plugin SDK?

Sounds like an ambitious undertaking

[TeeJS]

From the article: (referring to Adam) "The code providing this functionality accounts for a third of Adobe's code base and nearly half of the bugs found during development."

combined with: "The Eve layout engine has already saved Adobe millions of dollars in localization costs."

Means this contibution (mainly UI work based on Boost) is a very decent contibution.

Let me volunteer

[Swamii]

For the love of God, Cain't they find better names? Just right now, I was Abel to think of a few just off the top off my head. My mind is being Flooded with ideas for software names, in fact. Funny story, I used to Noah guy who could Babel out a hundred names on command...what a Nimrod that guy was.

Re:Let me volunteer

[Xiaran]

Enoch already with the puns.

Dmitry Sklyarov was executed on November 3, 2004

[doublem]

Oh, he was executed for "Crimes Against Copyright".

The dirty little secret of the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits is that the people who refuse to settle and pay "damages" are being charged with the same crime. Fortunately for the file traders, most of these cases are being settled in one manner or another, but they aren't going to arbitration or a courtroom. Some DHS agents just walk in, arrest the "file trader" and charge them. While the 12 year old girl and the 80+ grandma who got served reached the media, there's already about a dozen 20 something file traders that have been put to death by the federal government.

One poor slob was running Freenet as well as eDonkey, and was promptly charged with distributing child pornography. Most people don't know that the courts have taken running freenet as "proof" that the user is distributing kiddie porn. Remember folks, if you can't police the content, police the utility.

Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here.

[Gorath99]

From the documentation:

Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.

Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.

I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.

Re:Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here.

[pVoid]

Yeah, to quote the grandparent post nothing Boost couldn't do, rtfa:

ASL is being developed in C++, and relies heavily on the Boost libraries http://www.boost.org/ which are required for building ASL.

Aside from the obvious stupidity of the grandparent, I'd like to add that I'm really impressed a big player like Adobe would be using Boost and not some internally cooked up library that they try to shove on everyone else.

Adobe ported Photoshop to Sun years ago

[SimHacker]

I still have my original copy of Photoshop 2.5 for Sun Sparcstation (from around 1993, registration number PUW250S7100427-380), which uses the ever-popular Flex license manager.

Adobe used the Quorum Latitude Macintosh application porting libraries to port Photoshop to Unix and X-Windows.

The result of using a complex Mac emulation library that mapped quirky Mac toolbox calls onto the byzantine X-Windows graphics model and shoddy Motif/X Toolkit API was an absolutely horrible, ugly, buggy, unusable version of Photoshop. I could quickly cause it to core dump with three clicks of the magnifying glass tool.

Here is a case study of porting Adobe Photoshop to Windows and Unix. It describes some of the reasons Adobe decided to use the Macapp emulation approach for Unix, instead of properly rewriting their code to be platform independent.

Quorum had been around for a while. When I started porting SimCity to Unix in 1991, I evaluated Quarum Latitude, and decided that it was not worth using because my goal was to make a better version of SimCity than the one that ran on the Mac, not a crippled one. For example, I implemented multi-player support via multiple X11 connections to different servers at once, which would have been impossible if the program though it was running on a Macintosh.

-Don

Re:Adobe ported Photoshop to Sun years ago

[Leo McGarry]

Actually, Photoshop on IRIX was spectacular. It worked exactly like Photoshop on the Mac, and was very, very stable. And far from being ugly, it looked precisely like the Mac version. As opposed to every other Motif program, all of which were physically painful to behold.

Maybe the Sun version was different.

The only problem was it was more expensive and ran slower than the Mac version, and it only ran on computers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It just didn't make any sense from a commercial standpoint.

What about their UI Patent?

[scooch]

Has this been removed from their library? If not, doesn't it conflict with the whole concept of opensource?

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5546528.WKU.&OS=PN/5546528&RS=PN/ 5546528

Adobe is starting to worry about GIMP

[melted]

Once GIMP people implement 48bit color and color management, they'll have a potential to take away a large portion of Adobe clientele - web designers and photographers (i.e. people in no way related to prepress and CMYK). When two products have equal capabilities in relation to your tasks, but one is $650 and one is free, the choice becomes really simple.

Right now GIMP is not yet there, but this doesn't mean it'll never be.

Re:Adobe is starting to worry about GIMP

[TheAwfulTruth]

Well since you said it yourself, "CMYK". The GIMP will not be comparible to the full $700 Photoshop product, without CMYK or the host of other press features PS has.

There may be a day when The GIMP is comparible to Photoshop Elements 3 which is now "48bit". But PSE only costs $99 retail and is frequently single or dual rebated to $69 or even $49.

So compare free to $49, it's a lot more fair and a lot less FUD like. And frankly, PSE still wins hands down, and it wouldn't take even the poorsest student more than three pizzas to afford it. PSE is The GIMP's real goal, and it's pretty stiff competition, even given the price difference.

Re:Adobe is starting to worry about GIMP

[Leo McGarry]

Sigh. It sounds like you've never actually used Photoshop.

The difference between Photoshop and Gimp is more than high-resolution color support. It's the tool set. Does Gimp offer layer comps? Does it offer actions? How are its antialiasing facilities? Can you create image slices? How can you automate it? Where's the third-party filter support? Can Gimp run DFT, for instance? For many users, if it can't, that's an absolute show-stopper, end of discussion. Does Gimp have pixel aspect ratio correction? How are its compositing tools? Does it have adjustment layers? How about layer effects? How are its matting tools?

These aren't bells and whistles. These are key features that I use every single day, and I'm not even pushing the program very hard.

It's not about file-format support. Hell, it's not even about color management. It's about the tools. Until the tools are there, no, Gimp will never even be on the same planet as Photoshop.

And where is the wrongdoing?

[KZigurs]

Linux IS tier-2, unimportant platform as far as it concerns Adobe. You know, that Desktop Linux - Yeah, This Is The Year.

Scientific community on unix is pretty settled down on Latex or postscript and you truly have no need for PDF in server envorement.

Re:Python Photoshop plugin for Mac?

[SimHacker]

Funny you should ask. Adobe always had a problem with scripting languages, which has held them far back from their potential. They've finally adopted JavaScript after all these years, but they should have been pioneering scripting languages years before that, not catching up to the rest of the industry years later.

Adobe never took the open source Python scripting extension their own employee developed seriously enough, nor did they continue to develop and support it, and now they've white-washed it from their open source web site. But they certainly should have given it more consideration: It was a brilliant idea.

Photoshop and AfterEffects would have been vastly more useful if they had well designed built-in scripting languages supporting binary plug-in interfaces, the way 3D Studio Max has MaxScript, Gimp has Scheme, or Poser and Paint Shop Pro have Python.

Profound Effects, a third party AfterEffects plug-in developer, has created an amazing plug-in called "Useful Things", which true to its name enables you to easily script AfterEffects in Python to do all kinds of useful things.

Adobe has always left the scripting languages to third party developers, but they should have been doing it themselves to achieve a much deeper intergration than is possible through third-party plug-in interfaces.

3D Studio Max originally didn't have its own scripting language, but then Lyric, a third party 3D Studio Max plug-in developer, implemented a plug-in called "MaxScript", which enabled developers to easily script 3D Studio Max. The important thing about MaxScript is that it had its own plug-in interface, which enabled developers to plug their own primitives into the scripting language! MaxScript was so powerful that Kinetix (now known as Discrete) bought MaxScript and built it into Max, integrating it as deeply as it should have been in the first place.

The ability to plug external binary code into an application's scripting language is vitally important. On Windows, that's traditionally achieved through ActiveX/OLE, which you can use in any of the Windows scripting languages like JScript and VBScript. And you can plug the scripting language into your application and expose your application's API to it throught ActiveX/OLE.

But cross platform applications like Photoshop can't use ActiveX/OLE (or decided not to -- OLE and ActiveX were ported to the Mac and Unix years ago, but weren't widely used or supported).

Python is an excellent choice for a cross platform extensible scripting language. It's a much more serious language and it's much easier to extend that JavaScript, and there is a huge library of existing modules to draw from.

-Don

The Book of Photoshop 1:1-4

[adamfranco]

From the modules description...

"In the beginning the programmer created the language and the code. And the code was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the screen of the computer. And the programmer moved upon the keyboard of the computer. And the programmer said, let there be Photoshop: and there was Photoshop. And the programmer saw Photoshop, that it was good: and the programmer divided the Command Parameter Modeling Code from the Underlying Framework." - The Book of Photoshop 1:1-4

After reading the full module overview I must say that this looks pretty nice. Note that releasing Adam and Eve won't let every program just take over Photoshop's look and feel (thank god!). You still need to provide all of your own widgets, all of your own event generation code, all your own application back end, as well as write the event handling and layout descriptions. The advantage of this system though, is that the event handling is described cleaning in Adam Expression language which can parsed to execute in any environment. Likewise, the layout can be simplified by describing it in an environment-neutral way that can then be bound to Adam values.

It doesn't seem revolutionary, but it is a nicely worked out evolution in interface building.

Adobe's docking tab window patent is invalid.

[SimHacker]

Adobe's docking tabbed window patent is totally bogus, and it should be invalidated.

Here are some pictures of dockable tab windows in a visual PostScript debugger for NeWS called "PSIBER (for PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines)", that I wrote at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in 1989. And also Tab Windows with Pie Menus for The NeWS Toolkit that I wrote at Sun in 1990.

What's ironic is that Adobe wrote PostScript, so I corresponded with Adobe employees about PSIBER when I was writing it, even sending them early copies of the source code. Understandably they were very interested in a visual PostScript debugger. So Adobe certainly knew about prior art of docking tabbed windows since 1989.

-Don

Re:Worthless as is...

[Anonymous Coward]

umm... did you download and look? there is a directory full of examples. Looking and learning isn't as much fun as bitching on /., though, I suppose.

Re:Worthless as is...

[the quick brown fox]

There is an example right in the introduction.

Looks like an interesting pair of libraries

[podperson]

Adam and Eve are two separate but related libraries.

Adam allows you to express a bunch of things in terms of other things (e.g. this button's right edge needs to be 10 pixels left of that button's left edge OR this HSV setting is related to that RGB setting) and then have them automagically be kept updated. Neat.

Eve is a UI library. It seems to allow for automated layouts (as well as manual?) and depends on Adam for some of its functionality.

Both depend on the boost C++ libraries.

professionals

[guet]

Actually, I'd say the quality of Adobe products has declined over the last few years - they've reached that stage where they try to milk the current line for as long as possible, while adding more and more mis-features rather than listening to their customers and splitting out features into different products. Quark in its time was also an innovate company, and look what happened to them...

Personally I find the Photoshop CS menu bar over-crowded, and the Layer Style dialog byzantine (quite apart from the fact it takes an age to open). Double clicking on stuff in the layers palette is also a bit hit and miss - click on the text and you get to edit the layer name, just off the text and it opens the layers dialog. They are suffering a little from featuritis. Compared to The GIMP of course, it's a dream to use.

The File menu in Illustrator CS on OS X now includes the gem 'Save for Microsoft Office' which isn't in the Export menu where it belongs but at the top level - a sure sign that the marketing department has taken over, quite apart from that Online Services... stuff and the recent emphasis on copy protection.

I don't agree that there will be no competition to them - Apple for one have the incentive and resources to create a competitor if Adobe continues their slide towards windows. Already the CS suite are pretty slow on anything but the high end hardware under OS X, because they obviously haven't optimised for UI performance on OS X. A competitor doesn't have to produce a category killer all at once; they can start small and cheap, and build up, as Adobe did with InDesign when competing with Quark. In fact on OS X 10.4, with core image, it wouldn't be too hard to produce a competing product to Photoshop Elements, and build from there.

Having said that, yes Adobe will dominate the professional market for years to come, due to inertia if nothing else - I'm still stuck working in quark under classic for quite a few design clients, who would love to switch to InDesign but haven't yet for legacy/cost reasons : )

Free Object-Oriented License

[edisk1353]

You might want to check out the Free Object-Oriented License, written by those compression pioneers over at lzip.

Highly, highly recommended reading. If you're curious about the tone of the license, consider the acronym formed by its title.

Re:Another Widget Set?

[arekusu]

EVE is not a widget set. It is a layout engine to put widgets in the right place, according to a UI description. Given a set of rules about what your platform widgets look like, and a list of translations for your text, it automatically adjusts the layout.

It's pretty good.

An on-topic post

[arekusu]

Disclaimer: I used to work for Adobe. I left a few years ago.

I have experience with EVE that may be more interesting to read that a bunch of anti-Adobe slurs: For a while it was my job to localize Illustrator, and part of that involved converting the old DITL and .rc UI resources into expressviews (the precursor to EVE.)

At the time, Illustrator had somewhere around six or seven hundred dialogs. Times fourteen languages. Times a few platforms (OS 9, OS X, 95/98/ME/NT, XP). That's a LOT of UI to program, translate, and test.

EVE lets you describe a dialog with one XML-ish text file, and have that layout work for all languages on all platforms. That is a significant potential reduction in UI programming (and hopefully bugs.)

It looks good, too. Take a look at Photoshop or Illustrator's UI. I don't mean the wacky custom controls-- I mean look at the widget layouts. Can you tell which ones were painstakingly created by a human, and which ones are being generated on the fly?

When I was working with this technology, there were a class of problems that couldn't be easily handled (such as alignment across separate view hierarchies) but it looks like EVE2 is fixing most of those areas.

I can't really comment on ADAM since that wasn't at a usable stage when I was at Adobe. Some people have commented that the static binding dates it, compared to say 10.3's Cocoa bindings and KVO. Maybe, but any sort of binding that gets rid of huge chunks of UI glue code is a good thing. It's in C++ because that's what Adobe's giant cross-platform codebases are.

So, this is good stuff. It works. Now you can play with it. What's wrong with that?

Re:An on-topic post

[cheesybagel]

Sounds interesting. But that is mostly a problem for something like Windows Common Controls which demand pixel acurate coordinates and sizes. You can easily make an app in, for example, GTK+ 2.0 which has none of those problems. The containers and widgets automagically adjust in size and placement or dimensions are relative. Most GNOME apps, for example, are localized and use a single set of UI code.