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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."
If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...
We are in for treat.
Quid Pro Quo, nothing more, nothing less.
Insert Cain & Abel joke here...
So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
...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!
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.
Combine these with an Apple and you have the downfall of mankind...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
...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.
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
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.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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
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.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
The OpenBSD license is even shorter :
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.
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
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
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.
T.J. Schmitz - the man, the myth, the legend - o
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.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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.
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
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
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.
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:
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.
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 : )
Disclaimer: I used to work for Adobe. I left a few years ago.
.rc UI resources into expressviews (the precursor to EVE.)
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
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?