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Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4B
Kobayashi Maru writes "A press release from Adobe announces that they will buy Macromedia for approximately $3.4 billion. The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
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Woho! Saviour of the Universe
Seems like a bad idea to me!
Now we'll never see DreamWeaver on Linux.
What does it mean when the two most instrusive web browser plugin makers merge?
Great, so now we can expect embedded flash in the PDF?
This is quite an unexpected surprise for Monday morning. Woo!!! Now all the best graphics apps will be under one name!
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
Coverage from CNET news.com.com, from Reuters.
Well, if any of you are irritated by Flash, this move should reduce the number of folks using it. It'll be too bloated to load within a release or two.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
April fools is long over!
If this is not a joke, then we'll finally get good support for exporting Illustrator files to Flash!!
Hopefully we'll see some integrated flash/illustrator products -- or at least, standardizing the commands/menus so that if you can operate one, it's easier to operate the other.
stuff |
Wouldn't this merger give Adobe a near monopoly on many software products in the visual design field?
Flash will stick around for sure, but what will happen to Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Freehand? Adobe may go with straight market share and keep Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator as the pro tools, and push GoLive, Fireworks and Freehand as the consumer versions, or they may drop them all together. I can't imagine many buyers interested in picking up the fight against the Adobe juggernaut.
Bring on the horrors...sigh.
From an Inkscape developer:
I think it's good news for us. There will be people scared or disgusted by the forming monopoly and looking for alternatives. Also, it seems likely that Freehand will be either discontinued or at least downplayed so as to not hurt Illustrator, which means a lot of users will have to migrate. All this gives us a certain opportunity.
Does this mean an end to Macromedia's product, or will they just slowly fall to the back, similar to what happened to Netscape? I'll admit, I'm definitely a fan of Dreamwaver. Adobe's editor isn't bad, but are they actually going to make it better by combining it and Dreamweaver, or is it just going to slowly move into a dominant position?
Now, we're sure to see Flash get an improved user interface. I guess this is a case where Adobe's patent really helped it innovate.
...we'll get better PDF support in Dreamweaver etc now!
Could not open
Bad news?? We might actually see a standards compliant plug-in out of this that actually has a good development environment to go along with it. Adobe certainly will be inserting their SVG magic into the Macromedia environment. Plus think of all the integration possibilities with Adobe/Macromedia products.
I personally think this is at LEAST *promising* news!
Who gets Freehand this time?
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
Yes, it's bad news :(
Am dismayed. Macromedia was really starting to shine as a rich media application innovator. Hopefully, Adobe will be able to lend enhancements and not hinderances.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
There is no 3rd.
Would competition regulators look to block this merger??
If Ford wanted to merge with General Motors, there would be serious investigations. Oracle needed to show there was competition from SAP & JD Edwards before it was allowed to acquire Peoplesoft.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I keep wondering what's going to happen to Freehand. Adobe bought the original marketers of Freehand (Aldus, also the guys who made PageMaker) back in the day. Now they're buying the makers of FreeHand AGAIN.
-mkb
I for one wellcome our new massive software giant overlords...
Are they going to keep the Macromedia branding and just not compete with each other, or will we see Adobe Dreameaver?
And will the flash plugin have that terrible update software like Acrobat reader?
This is probably not good for anyone except Adobe, including us.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
As most designers will hopefully agree, Adobe's software is stable, well designed, consistent in operation and relatively intuitive. However, their web offerings are limited. On the other hand, Macromedia's web centric software is unstable, (IMHO) appallingly designed, inconsistent and very hard to learn. So, now Adobe and Macromedia are one, hopefully they can combine the pluses of their cultures and products to the benefit of frustrated designers & developers everywhere.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Perhaps FCV audio will be accessable, someday.
Why? Because 2 big corps merge it's evil? Since Macromedia seemed to be Adobes Photoshops main competitor and Fireworks, I'd bet that they are basically buying out the competition. It can only mean good things if you are an advocate of FOSS applications like Gimp. If you are desperately waiting for Dreamweaver on Linux, then there is something seriously wrong with you! I'll be glad to see it slowly die when Adobe stiffles Macromedia products in favour of Photoshop.
postmodernsideshow.com
SVG is Flash's biggest rival, but Adobe has always supported it. I hope this means there will be more open standards in Macromedia Flash.
The impact of Flash on the web, however, has been unforgivably negative, in my opinion. I boycott companies who require flash to view their web sites, there's no reason to ever need it for most web sites out there. I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and flash isn't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
For programs like freehand, fireworks and indesign! Such a same. All great programs, but they don't stand a chance now that they have merged with illustrator dreamweaver and such. Less choice is always bad!
This will probably mean:
- Adobe will kill off Freehand, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, and incorporate any good features from them into Illustrator, GoLive, and ImageReady, respectively.
- Photoshop and Flash will remain the same, since neither had competition from the other company.
- They'll probably maintain 'lite' versions of all of the above, giving consumers the illusion of choice.
- Corel will acquire the company that makes Preparation H, since their asses will hurt so much from shitting a few tons of bricks.
This is my signature. soid st egr.hyTa rsiugm usnin Any questions?
Adobedriva.
This makes good sense from both companies' perspective and this is clearly signalled in the fact that it comes with the blessing of both boards. Adobe has traditionally been strong in the offline graphical design business particularly with respect to desktop publishing in the newspaper and magazine publishing world. The company has also made its PDF reader ubiquitous in the desktop space and has a strong enterprise play.
Macromedia, on the other hand, has a much stronger presence in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the desktop with its Dreamweaver and Flash product set. Both companies have made plays into the wireless market with the promise of rich media applications and cross platform access.
Macromedia, however has made stronger inroads into this market with recent deals with key operators and device manufacturers that will see Flash expanding its reach from the desktop environment to wireless platforms.
The deal itself is not without issues from a competition standpoint since the resulting business will almost certainly hold a sizeable chunk of the GUI market that would make it difficult for some smaller vendors to play in. The companies have overlapping product sets and a product portfolio that goes in many different directions. That is both a positive and a negative and will need to be addressed, going forward.
Iran captures three CIA agents
Ah. The Yahoo toolbar link becomes apparent.
For those of you not sure what I'm talking about:
Here for the Macromedia angle
And for the Adobe angle, open up Adobe reader and look to the right of the toolbar. A little Yahoo icon.
Gah. It's like invasions of the... something nasty
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
PDF is also the imaging technology underlying Quartz, the display subsystem used on Mac OS X.
This is horrible. I just bought $3,000 worth of software (Contribute). I bet Adobe gets rid of it.
At this point, where will the commercial support for SVG go? Now that adobe has the defacto vector drawing platform for the web I fear that their support for the SVG format will go the way of the dodo.
It is bad enough that Adobe thought it right to allow embedded javascript in PDF files and thus tracking via Internet of who is reading, writing in, or otherwise using a particular PDF file (without end-user notification). But Macromedia has allowed its vector drawing plugin software to be used for the evil of tracking web site visitors who have turned off cookies (formally indicating they don't want to be tracked) and spawning pop-ups when users have tried to turn that "feature" off as well. I don't like where this is going when these two companies get together as one.
So far, the market seems to think Adobe is paying too much. They were paying a 33% premium when the deal was announced. ADBE is down over 11% so far today. MACR is up slightly.
One can only hope that this will increase the viability of open souce design and display technologies (GIMP, etc).
It will also be interesting to see what they do with ColdFusion, which while it had floundered for the first couple of years under MACR, had recently come out with some pretty impressive capabilities.
I have to wonder what this means for the new version of Flash. I remember reading an article from Macromedia (linked off /.) not too long ago that discussed the Flash development team's big plans. I hope that still goes off well...
After years of trying to out-do each other (LiveMotion vs Flash, GoLive vs Dreamweaver, Illustrator vs Freehand, etc) they just merge.
This is bad for everyone. Now there won't be competing products and there will be no reason for Adobe Systems Inc. to keep innovating since there is no one to try to stay ahead of.
It rubs me the wrong way when when one company buys another not to grow their product line with complementary products, but to simple vanquish the competition.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
while most seem to prefer photoshop, I can get something up and running for the web much more quickly with Fireworks than I can with any Adobe product.
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig
hmm...I started to submit this story, but I guess taco beat me. So I'll just post the story I submitted ;)
e andmacromedia.html."
As reported here and even on Adobe and Macromedia, Adobe will be aquiring Macromedia for $3.4Billion. From the Macromedia site: "The two companies are developing integration plans that build on the cultural similarities and the best business and product development practices from each company. The companies will make additional details and information about the acquisition available at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adob
With Adobe recently putting out reader 7 for linux, what should our hopes be that linux apps will be kept reasonably up to date in the integration plans?
ColdFusion is a great web technology thats usually underrated by web developers. I hope Adobe continues to develop it. I prefer it over other languages such as PHP, ASP, etc. With the MX version, you can actually write java code and call the methods directly from ColdFusion. It would be a shame if it ends.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
If people depended on those products that much then surely there's an opportunity for another company to move in and set up shop. In a free economy, holes like this should be filled by new ventures.. not by government intervention and beauracracy.
If software companies are taking advantage of the current administration's neo-conservative leanings, then watch the next administration's Attorney General shake down the industry with antitrust prosecutions.
The calculation I keep running over in my mind is:
Adobe PDF + Macromedia Flash = Annimated PDFs
Somehow I think Bill Gates is behind all this
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Just great. Now all my reasonably-priced Macromedia products are going to be replaces with Adobe's expensive bloatware.
Macromedia has a generous upgrade policy and great educational discounts. Adobe charges out the yin-yang for their software ($1000 for CS, can only upgrade if you own the next most recent product.)
Macromedia's web design software was built expressly for web design: Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Adobe tacked a few tools onto Photoshop (which, by the way, does not deal well at ALL with vector art, not like Fireworks does). I don't know how well GoLive works - never used it. But I know that Dreamweaver has made great efforts to allow front-end developers to create standards-compliant XHTML.
If Adobe rolls Macromedia's great software into their own mediocre offerings, I may never upgrade again.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
From a we-can't-have-any-monopolies point of view, it is rather bad news. However, from a product suite POV, it's probably a good thing.
Look at it this way: Dreamweaver is considered to be about the best commercial HTML editor out there. And Flash is totally ubiquitous. However, Fireworks and Freehand are generally no-so-great (in comparison to Adobe's stuff). Photoshop and Illustrator are the de facto standards, and are great at what they do, yet Adobe's LiveMotion and GoLive are both pretty godawful.
Now that the two companies are one, you can be damn sure that you'll be able to get a package deal with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver all in one box, and they'll be as nicely integrated as Studio MX currently is. As someone who uses these on a regular basis, I'd consider that to be a pretty good thing.
Now, if only we could get Linux versions of these programs...
I saw a demo where Jaguar had embedded a user-controlled VR of the inside of their latest model in a pdf. Even though the image looked like a picture in the PDF, there were buttons to pan and zoom the view so you could get a 360 view of the interior.
PDF (like HTML) has long strayed from its original purpose into uncharted territory. This is not (IMO) a Good Thing
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
...Adobemedia Dreamlive.
IRC: Grounded0 @ IRCnet. "I was lucky get into computers when it was very young & idealistic industry" -Steve Jobs
You just forgot the largest prist/press media company: Quark.
However... they won't stay at no.1 for long.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
What I want to know is what is going to happen to folks like us who bought multiple licenses of the huge expensive Macromedia all-in-one package of software, with the intent of taking advantage of the upgrade pricing for years to come. Is my investment totally down the drain?
And what about all those websites on Cold Fusion. Those folks
are seriously out of luck. (We don't use it though, thankfully)
I, for one, am giddy as a schoolgirl armed with the knowledge that Adobe's superior .swf making tool will absorb make the promise of Flash 8 look like Flash 4!
Maybe even Flash 5 -- it had functions!
--- -a- "I'd love to change the world, but it'd be easier if the universe exposed its API."
a good scenario would be we get a bundle with flash, photoshop and dreamweaver :) for a decent price
a bad scenario would be.... prices go up since there is no competitor anymore?
or is microsoft's longhorn with its vector graphics such a threat to macromedia that they had to find a way up?
i only have one question in mind.... WHY
who wants to rule the world?
They're the third... maybe behind by leaps and bounds, but there you have it.
They have a Photoshop alternative of themselves, they have Paintshop Pro as the el-cheapo alternative, they've got Painter, they've got technical drawing, vector drawing, etc. etc.
They even have Wordperfect (*chuckle*) - more importantly, the suite.
That said.. Adobe/Macromedia merger is still sort of scary.
They better not axe Dreamweaver because GoLive is pretty craptastic.
Adobe has obviously been insanely jealous of Flash's success for quite some time. Everything else Macromedia has, with the possible exception of Dreamweaver, I imagine is expendable in Adobe's eyes. Maybe they'll sell off FreeHand, et al and they will live on. Or maybe Adobe will revel in killing all their competition. That would leave a lot of people high and dry. I can't see Adobe being interested in keeping Macromedia's competing products alive for more than a token product cycle or two.
This sounds ripe for a "Conan O'Brien" "If they made it" sketch, complete with pictures of hideous Adobe GoWeaver pictures.
"...The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
Who else is holding out for Macrodobia?
AT&ROFLMAO
I don't know how this is going to be good for Adobe in the long run. It smells a little like the HP/Compaq fiasco.
A few thoughts:
1. Many of the companies' offerings are substitution goods. Most web developers I know are shelling out for the MM Studio MX upgrades and the Adobe CS upgrades. That works out to about $1000 every year. I doubt one company will be able to squeeze us for as much in a single upgrade cycle. Especially when there's so much overlap (GoLive v. Dreamweaver, FreeHand v. Illustrator, Fireworks v. Photoshop & Illustrator, etc.)
2. Apple is going to have to be a little more careful about trying not to piss off Adobe by walking into their turf. Adobe has a bigger credible threat now in terms of ending Mac support.
3. This is going to make design shops hesitant to buy CS2 upgrades. I, for one, am more likely to wait for a suite that has the specific Macromedia apps I need for web development. That might mean waiting out this one upgrade cycle.
4. This does eliminate Adobe's fear that Microsoft would acquire Macromedia. That might be the only good reason for the buyout.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
Actually Fireworks is much better than Photoshop if you are creating lots of web graphics and you are committed to working within the dreamweaver system. I'll be sorry to see it go.
Fireworks certainly wasn't meant to compete with Photoshop when it comes to all the features and supported files, but there's one thing it can do that beats the pants out of Adobe's stuff is image export for the web. Image Ready just plain sucks in comparison... and don't get me started on usability, Photoshop is stuck 5 years behind Macrodedia when it comes to palette layouts, ...
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Hmm? InDesign is a DTP application, with its only near rival being Quark. Most who use them professionally prefer InDesign to Quark on merit, a reversal from the old-time Quark-over-Pagemaker situation. In fact InDesign was the challenger, Quark the established behemoth only a few years ago.
Freehand and Fireworks I'll grant, but Macromedia has nothing in the same area as InDesign.
Cheers,
Ian
Other tools are also in trouble...
:-(
Macromedia just bought eHelp (makers of RoboHelp), and we were expecting a long update cycle as MM digested eHelp. The bright side was the possibility that MM would make a DreamWeaver-based help product.
Now we're probably doomed to a longer wait and possible integration with Adobe's poorly though out Web tools.
I expect DreamWeaver and other tools to see something similar to the FrameMaker situation:
1) Buy the tool
2) Learn from it
3) Deprecate it in favor of a lesser tool (InDesign in the case of Frame)
4) Proft!
Sigh
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
PDF != Adobe. The implication in many historical documents concerning OS X is that PDF was chosen as the basis for Quartz precisely because it was an open, royalty-free format, unlike Display PostScript (which powered OS X's predecessor, NextStep - or NeXTStep, or ... nevermind).
I do all kinds of PDF work (viewing, generating) and have not a single Adobe application on my system.
Who in their right mind cant learn Dreamweaver? Shit, is there a product with more free tutorials online, with sites devoted to teaching how to use the tool? How many books have been written about Dreamweaver?
Now, I understand if you are some kind of FrontPage jerkoff who has never tried to hand code HTML or CSS to begin with but get real, buddy.
For as bad as you say it is, most of you would give a testicle to have a Linux version of the product, because there really aint nothin better.
I don't care about fireworks, flash, whatever. BUT if they kill off Dreamweaver, I will have a major vendetta with Adobe!
This is honestly one of the worst things that can be imagined for most of us in the web world. The reality being that web development products will suddenly be submerged in a see of pure WYSIWYG. While I've been looking forward to seeing what features are going to be in GoLive CS2, I'm not too optimistic.
I don't know how many other people feel like this, but it does seem that we're heading back to the days of developer and designer being in completely different realms, and where the graphic designer thinks he or she can do whatever as long as they see it beautifully.
At least there's still GIMP and NVU, right? Maybe they'll get a lot more support once Adobe jacks up all the prices again.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Well now, I thought THIS was an April fools joke.
Then I realized it's not April 1st and I'm hung over.
Maybe now we'll get a 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux?
Oh wait. You have to admit, if this was an April fools joke, nobody would even believe it.
They should call it Macadamia! Just a nutty suggestion..
I use it for almost all of my web related graphics stuff. Among other things, Photoshop just doesn't have that same blend of bitmap/vector editing (vector MASKS??). Sure, Fireworks isn't really a standout in any one area, but it's still a great web oriented graphics editor. Count me worried.
I've counted a few dozen "this is bad" comments. How would everyone feel, at this point, if someone with pockets as deep as MS's were to launch a (real) initiative in this area? Maybe, buying up Corel, and fattening it up to compete? Suddenly, Bill would look, well, just swell. Unless (and this is very unlikely, of course) there were any hypocritical leanings here on slashdot, I'd assume we'd be rooting for a new underdog in a suddenly completely consolidated industry.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I tried to get the press release from Adobe, but their site seems to be /.'ed. The text below is from Macromedia's Site
--
ADOBE TO ACQUIRE MACROMEDIA
Combined Company to Deliver Industry-Defining Technology Platform for Rich, Interactive Content
SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 18, 2005 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.
The combination of Adobe and Macromedia will provide customers a more powerful set of solutions for creating, managing and delivering compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media. Together, the two companies will meet a wider set of customer needs and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets, particularly in the mobile and enterprise segments.
"Customers are calling for integrated software solutions that enable them to create, manage and deliver a wide range of compelling content and applications - from documents and images to audio and video," said Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe. "By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software - along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform."
Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe's and Macromedia's closing prices on Friday, April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock. Upon the close of the transaction, Macromedia stockholders will own approximately 18 percent of the combined company on a pro forma basis.
In the combined company, Chizen will continue as chief executive officer and Shantanu Narayen will remain president and chief operating officer. Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia, will join Adobe as president of worldwide field operations. Murray Demo will remain executive vice president and chief financial officer. Dr. John Warnock and Dr. Charles Geschke will remain as co-chairmen of the Board of Directors of the combined company and Rob Burgess, chairman of the Macromedia Board of Directors, will join the Adobe Board.
"Both Macromedia and Adobe are passionate about creating and enabling great experiences across a wide range of devices and operating systems," said Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia. "Our combined teams will be a powerful force for innovation around cutting-edge platforms for delivering content and applications."
Integration
The two companies are developing integration plans that build on the cultural similarities and the best business and product development practices from each company. The companies will make additional details and information about the acquisition available at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia.html.
"While we anticipate the integration team will identify opportunities for cost savings by the time the acquisition closes, the primary motivation for the two companies' joining is to continue to expand and grow our business into new markets," said Chizen.
The acquisition, which is expected to close in Fall 2005, is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by the stockholders of both companies and regulatory approvals. The transaction will be accounted for under purchase accounting rules.
Due to the absence at this time of estimates of the acquisition-related restructuring costs and the allocation of the purchase price between goodwill, in-process R&D, other in
Now we can expect to see a proprietary version of Flash with some important word tagged onto the end (like professional, unleashed, power, etc) that's a total breakage of Flash, that you have to pay $600 to be able to develop for with their new software. The new software would be bloated, slow, take three hours to render a flash movie from raw frames, etc. Its not good for the consumer, but then again..is the consumer really what the government is worried about anymore?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
nicely summed up there. now, which way will adobe lean towards? they might probably come with a better range of packages that suit each profile of users - they already have done that. photoshop, flash and dreamweaver would be a web studio, maybe the other range would be for graphics works for the print studio(they can play around more than adobe's own golive and livemotion). there's also some talks abt adobe not favouring linux. well, i see it this way. recent MS talks about browser being obsolete in longhorn might have blown the fuse at macromedia and adobe - and adobe relies on thier acrobat heavily too. its safer for them to invest in linux in the longer run. only problem with linux is the proliferation of desktops, when they see the numbers, they will come in.
You've obviously not tried Dreamweaver MX 2004 and set a document to XHTML mode then - it does all styling in CSS. What more could you want?
$3.4B and can't survive a slashdotting?
somebody needs to invest in some hobby boxes...
As somebody who writes in Flash, I can't image how awful this Adobe Sandwich is going to taste. What's next? Will they buy Publisher and Front Page from Microsoft and integrate that functionality into my beloved Flash. I'm sick already.
jon
http://www.jonfritsch.com
Macromedia's upgrade policies are far from generous - especially as an edu customer. For instance, did you know that the only way to upgrade an edu version to a professional version is to pay the difference. For example, you can't upgrade version 4 (EDU) to 5 (pro) either. Did you also know that you CANNOT use Macromedia edu products for any professional purposes. You buy it, you graduate, it's TRASH!!!
Adobe, on the other hand, gave me new serial numbers for all the EDU products I bought. I upgraded from Photoshop 5.5 edu to Photoshop 7 (non edu) with NO PROBLEM!
I would much prefer Adboe own the software then the other way around!!!
A PDF reader for Windows that doesn't suck.
I use it with firefox. You click a pdf link. Foxit opens. It displays the PDF. It doesn't mess up your system. It runs quickly. It feels much more like reading a PDF on OS X or Linux, which is nice.
Adobe is a company that is focused on graphic designers. They are losing ground to Apple in the motion graphics and video editing markets.
Macromedia is a company whose target market is web designers.
More and more graphic designers are doing web site design.
This move makes since for adobe because it gives them more tools to offer their target market.
Bloat hasn't caused people to run screaming from ColdFusion, which eats up RAM like a flesh-eating virus on steroids...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Apple has rapidly developed/assimilated software products that bite into Adobe's marketshare. Final Cut Pro first rivaled Premiere, then Avid and now it's in a league of its own, backed by the core technologies in Mac OS X 10.4.(1)
Just yesterday they got oohs and aahs from the crowd at NAB with new versions of their video apps.
If you've seen the demos for Tiger's Core Image architecture and know a bit about Quartz and ColorSync, you'll know that they have a Photoshop killer laying dormant within the OS, just waiting for the right moment. It's all there - bitmap, vector, text and colorspace manipulation, much more elegantly and efficiently than in Adobe apps. See the last WWDC keynote for glimpses of it.
Motion already started work on the UI of such an app, though it's concerned with video. (You could even actually use for still images a bit already, in some ways more flexibly than Photoshop.)
Photoshop is a standard, but so was Avid. Pro Tools is in their sights right now. If Apple comes out with anything semi-pro in the image editing area, something innocently cheap and labeled 'Express', then Adobe should be very worried.
J
To me it always seemed like these products came from the same company anyway. Both are definitely MAC companies, so good luck trying to get useful products for any other OS's. Adobe does do graphics better than anyone, but I just don't see their benefit but to buy something that looks like it was made for a 4 year old. Macromedia has always been an annoying company with annoying software that has no use for anything but wasting time. I agree with the boycott of Flash sites, but I never realized I did. I never intentionally decided to not go to a flash site, but everytime I see it, I just back my browser up. In the old days i can remember cringing everytime i seen a website say anything about Adobe or Macromedia because all it meant to me was SLLLOOOOWWWWWW. Now in the days of broadband It may not be slow, but it could be, either way it still sucks resources, and basically makes the browser flake out or creates memory leaks until its killed. I just wish web plugins would go away. I don't want my browser loading any other program to use a webpage.
Hopefully, this will finally put an end to all this Flash nonsense :)
Must-not-watch TV!
So now when I open a PDF, I'm going to get a whole bunch of obnoxious animated cartoons... wonderful...
Insightful? How is what you said insightful??!!
Adobe and Macromedia's software portfolios don't overlap by very much.
Most of Adobe's software are general design tools, like Photoshop for 2d raster imaging, Illustrator for 2d Vector imaging, Premiere for 4D (time based) and Indesign for Press + Layout. It's all used to create images for use in both realworld media like print and film as well as online apps.
Macromedia's portfolio is mainly for online applications, like Director, Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion etc. They all deal with Interactive design, 2d animation, layout etc in an online enviorment
The two companies products compliment each other, not fight for the same marketspace.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I see comments that Adobe apps are (supposedly) stable. Since when? I've had to try twelve straight times and do some massive registry editing and uninstallation of codecs to get Premiere just to install, and another five days of further fiddling to get it to start correctly, and even then, I could still go for a bike ride around my entire county and come back before it did finally finish loading.
It looks to me like Adobe is competing with Microsoft for needlessly bloated code.
Macromedia apps on the other hand install right the first time and start correctly, but never seem to do anything that I want them to do, that the docs explicitly state they should do.
So now we get apps that won't install correctly, won't start in a reasonable amount of time when you do finally shoe-horn them in, and then won't do what they are supposed to? This is like the graphic design equivalent of Windows 95 first release.
I second, third, fourth, etc. the question on the wisdom of allowing the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging without a viable #3 and #4 fast behind to become the new #2 and #3. Are we to expect Corel to pull a miracle out of their nether regions to compete? Will we b*tch and moan if MS steps to the plate with offerings that it bundles with Windows?
Sorry, but as a tech with some scruples I gotta say we shouldn't be letting the creation of a new Microsoft of the graphics world get going: a behemoth company that puts out stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't care but you don't have much of a choice because you're already joined at the hip and reliant upon their stuff for your daily business.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
It's such a niche tool, but there's a whole lot of corporate training that's *still* built with Authorware.
--- -a- "I'd love to change the world, but it'd be easier if the universe exposed its API."
Personally I've always enjoyed FH more than Illustrator. Freehand's colour panel and drawing tools puts Illustrators to shame, absolute shame. The only things I want to see in FH from Illustrator is the better layer management, the very sexy mesh gradient and the better custom strokes.
my utility belt tells me its to the bar batman
"Macrobesoft (mak-roh-bee-soft) today acquires Baskin Robbins. CEO Gill Bates says we are likely to see features such as creating new, dynamic flavors realtime with photoshop filters, Comprehensive search, One-Click web-publishing and partial Unicode support. However, new users will not be able to save down to IceCream 1.0."
I hope to God they don't try incorporating any of that GO-Live cr#p into dreamweaver. Pricing is going to go up. Licensing agreements for bigger shops probably more so and service and support will take a hit.
On top of that - we no have no choice. What else is there? Front Page and Paint?
On the linux side , I agree it doesn't bode well, but I don't think Macromedia were making any definite plans to release an open source version any way - which in itself puzzles me given the extremely extensible nature of the product...
...the headline is incorrect. What actually happened is Adobe downloaded a demo of the Macromedia company. Then they found and ran a crack so that the trial never expires. The $3.4 billion number is how much Macromedia was trying to sell their company for to make up for pirated copies being distributed via p2p.
I, for one, welcome our new graphic design overlords.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It wasn't so long ago that Adobe was semi-threatening to drop the Mac version of Photoshop.
What if, in the future, things get a little choppy and Adobe drop GoLive and ImageReady (or Dreamweaver and Firewors - whichever survive). What is the alternative? Buy a PC?
This gives Adobe incredible leverage over Apple - should they need it.
Adobe might go the other way and purely push Flash. I'm sure Adobe has been dying to own the Flash market.
In fact, Adobe might have bought Macromedia just for Flash. Flash for the desktop (Flex) and Flash for mobiles (Flash Lite) are the areas of big potential. The rest of Macromedia's apps -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and the rest -- they're in a very mature and saturated market, as Adobe knows so well.
I used to say "PDF combines all the disadvantages of an electronic document and a printed book into one". When they add Flash support to Acrobat, I will have to say "...of an electronic document, a printed book, and a web page..."
Well, if any of you are irritated by Flash, this move should reduce the number of folks using it. It'll be too bloated to load within a release or two.
I hope you are right. In my mind, Flash represents the triumph of the content creator over the user of the internet. HTML, in its original incarnation as a markup language, gave power to the browser - the user of the browser controlled how tagged text was rendered, the user controlled the pacing of pages, etc. Lightweight HTML pages loaded quickly and let the user actively move in a self-paced fashion. WIth HTML, the user could actively control what they saw, how they saw it, and when they saw it.
Flash takes to much of that control away -- the content creator forces their vision of layout, type size, and pacing on the hapless, passive viewer. I have seen so many flash sites that turn a broadband connection into a 110 baud experience of slowly appearing words (get a clue, I don't want to see letters swirling on a page, fading in and out, etc.). Flash prevents browsing. You cannot glance at a flash site, you cannot control what you see or when you see it. You are forced to wait for it to download and wait for it to play. Although I admit that a few, too few, flash sites add substantive value with interactivity, it is far to little to compensate for the incredibly frustrating body of flash on the web today.
We can only hope that Abode screws this one up so that the browser of the internet can enjoy more control and escape user-interface micromanagement by flash content creators.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Hmmm, all these years I've been using Fireworks and wondering if I should move to Photoshop. I suspect this buyout means no more Fireworks. Hopefully, Adobe will integrate the best of Fireworks into Photoshop, then I can have the best of both worlds. Of course my biggest fear is that multimedia tools are about to get a lot more expensive!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I'm currently in a subsequent large scale Flash / ActionScript project. Flash MX 2004 Pro sucks as IDE but the Flash Plattform and Technology totally rocks. This stuff has made my living for the last 14 months. I so very much pray to god they don't screw this up. ... :-)
... So this is the kind of stuff you're actually spared from when you go OSS only.
But then again, if they do and some people push XUL or Blender, there will be room again for the fast, small and agile oss cracks. That would save me the bianual upgrade costs.
I so very much hope the ActionScript 2 Team stays in charge. Those are the only ones capable at programming over at MM. Seriously.
And I hope that they don't fuck up the Player. And don't make a must-have compiler with a crappy IDE (as MM did) and just double the pricing.
My gosh, listen to me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Adobe produces GoLive .. Macromedia produces Dreamweaver. These are in direct competition.
Adobe produces Illustrator .. Macromedia produces Freehand. These are in direct competition.
Adobe produces Photoshop .. Macromedia produces Fireworks. These aren't direct competitors exactly, but Adobe wants everyone who uses Fireworks now to use Photoshop instead, regardless of how much bloat Photoshop has today, or how clean its generated code is.
The problem is, I like Macromedia's products. I don't want to use Adobe's. If they axe Dreamweaver and Fireworks, I won't have a choice anymore. That is what they call "bad".
I'm not happy about this at all.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
This means the next version of Flash MX will get a sleep(20) inserted in the startup code to match the startup time of Adobes products.
And even though I'm not really interest in what patents Macromedia holds or who made Flash MX, the next version will probably teach me that as well.
"I like PDFs, it allows me to download my tax statement, bank statements, government forms, and all kinds of other stuff that I used to have to fork over $3 to some government agency to get ahold of."
Yah, it isn't like you can do that with open standards like PNG, JPEG, HTML, or even plain text. They obviously needed a semi-closed, really bloated, high-resolution, stuck-on-the-idea-of-dead-trees system to give you your bank statement.
/SARCASM
It really irritates me when I go to obtain some basic information (like my bank account details or some product info) and the web server insists on shoving a PDF down my throat. HTML would be so much better: Smaller, quicker, open, no special software, device and software independent. Why PDF?
PDF (and things like it) are great when you actually need the rendered output to be the same everywhere. For example, if one is sending proofs of a marketing brochure around, one wants consistancy. But somehow Adobe has duped a bunch of people into thinking it is vital at all times. (Hence the Orson Wells reference in my subject.)
So many other things use PDF (or at least the PDF mindset of "It has to look the same everywhere") when there is no need. The web was *designed and intended* to look different depending on what the user wanted. That's a good thing. It means you, as the content producer, *don't have to worry about* how it might look. Computer, cell phone, printed page, direct mind-link to my brain -- it was all supposed to be automatic.
But too many PHB's and similar types come up with things like "I want this five pixels to the left", not understanding that not everybody has their (the PHB's) computer.
Content producers really need to stop worrying so much about how somebody, somewhere, might possibly have some influence over the presentation of their work.
/PET_PEAVE
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
This merger of technologies seems very interesting. However, I think there is room for caution given recent issues on Acrobat and Flash:
There is the document tracking (via javascript) that is turned on by default in Acrobat Reader 7.0. This "feature" was uncovered by LWN.net and was previous mentioned here
One web site mentions Flash's ability of using local share objects to restore deleted cookies or to store them at a third party web site. Although I don't understand the details, this ability seems in part tied to javascript as well. They provide a link that is "dedicated to securing your local Flash-player installation".
Adobe's web site isn't responding at the moment, so I couldn't look for their explanation of Adobe Javascript.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Time to brush up on Template Toolkit - far superior to anything Dreamweaver templates have to offer.
The new Dreamweaver is Even More eXpensive
*SCNR*
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
For people worried about SVG: RTFPDF. Adobe cites SVG in their PDF-based FAQ, saying both Macromedia and Adobe will continue to support SVG, as they're part of the W3C board that manages it and stuff.
Also, please get over with it: SWF isn't SVG and SVG isn't SWF. They're not competitive, they're two different technologies for two different situations. Adobe will not kill SVG, and SVG will not replace SWF.
"Adobe certainly will be inserting their SVG magic into the Macromedia environment. "
What, exactly, makes you so sure? You got a portal to the future you're not telling us about?
Adobe *loves* the idea of lock-in. Remember, this is the company that had someone *arrested* for reverse-engineering Adobe's eBook format just so people could view and make backups of their files. (See http://www.freesklyarov.org/ for details.)
So given the choice between something like SVG, which Adobe doesn't totally control, and Flash, which (assuming this goes through) Adobe will own, lock, stock, and barrel, I strongly suspect they will go for the latter.
Money follows the path of least resistance.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Wow, Adobe Systems will now be called Adobe Systems.
Dude, they just bought someone else's business. I don't have to tell people what my name will be every time I buy a Big Mac.
Why don't the bigwigs just get real and say, "we have swallowed Macromedia. It was yummy."
It means happy /.ers with a lot more to whine about.
Hey maybe we can hope for a QuickTime and Real Audio merger too.
I've seen dreamweaver using CSS, and it usually goes "style1, style2,.." etc. and not a single style re-used.
This is hardly better than using the FONT tag. You'd have to set the style manually to make it work as intended. I guess you can do that in Dreamweaver too, but most Dreamweaver "experts" don't seem to care.
Maybe my attitude towards Dreamweaver and Photoshop would be best described by the ad slogan: "The right tools to get the job done even if you have no clue".
There is irony in that line, but I guess most people whose identity is defined by being an Photoshop/Dreamweaver expert will probably miss it.
I'm sorry, I should have shut up, but I think Adobe and Dreamweaver make a good match.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I don't know man. I'm anxious for Adobe to FIX Macromedia's notoriously horrible user interfaces and mile long list of bugs.
I'd rather have one slow load time, as opposed to relaunching an app several times just because the damn thing keeps quitting every 45 minutes.
Geeks may be angered by this merger, but professional designers are going to be very very happy today.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Acromedobia; Madobeacromia; Crow-dobe-doobie-doo... Wait - split the difference! Madobe Macrobat - as used by Madonna.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
I hope Adobe embraces BitTorrent for the inevitable 50Meg Flash player download to come. *sigh*
Well I hope that the Linux Flash player is maintainted-if Adobe kills it, I won't buy any additional Flash studio products...
I don't think they'll completely ditch dreamweaver.
you might even see them dump golive. Since they will also have Flash and Coldfusion I doubt they will just kill DW.
=1000101
I wouldn't call Photoshop and Fireworks as competition. Fireworks has always been geared towards vector graphics, which some vauge image manipulation thrown on. Photoshop is geared towards raster, with some terrible vector manipulation thrown on.
Idealy, either they need to merge these into one kick ass raster/vector program, or keep them separate, and deliniate them more.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Ahhhhhhhhh!
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
No real competitors?
Photoshop is great, and a category-gorilla, but there are tons of competitors.
Dreamweaver? Lots of competiton.
Flash? It was cool, but from what I can tell, Ajax-based rich web clients are eclipsing both Flash and Java (applet) as the technology of choice. Even when Flash is used, it is just for front-end widgets -- all of Macromedia's investment in server-side technologies (a la Cold Fusion) are losers now.
Adobe sees Microsoft coming in a big way. Expect more acquisitions -- this is nothing but an attempt to form a bigger, harder-to-kill installed-base/revenue base so that the combined entity will have more pieces that Microsoft will have to chip away before total annihilation occurs.
Maybe we'll finally see an OS X update for Fontographer - admittedly a niche product, but one I still have need of once in a blue moon.
This is great! Now my two least favorite web plugins are under the same roof. I only have to hate one company now.
SEO Firefox Extension
Try this, 'tis most excellent! Makes Reader load in 1/2 sec or so, terminates quickly, and hardly ever crashes. It seems it's all those damn stupid bloated plugins causing the problems. To fix:
1. Install Adobe Reader 6.0 and notice where it is installed.
2. Navigate to that folder in Explorer, locate the plug_ins subfolder and rename this folder to plug_ins_disabled.
3. Create a new plug_ins folder.
4. Move the files EWH32.api, printme.api and search.api from plug_ins_disabled to plug_ins.
Try it, you'll like it!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Is it a bird, is it a plane? No it's a pig.
Look at the main assets of the two companies:
They obviously believe they can be a better force to destroy the WWW and HTML (and the W3C) with their proprietary, untransparent formats and "plugins" if they work together (possibly making their WWW-destroying formats work better together or even merge).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I for one welcome our graphic monopolist overlords!
Macrodobe Media anyone?
I mean, pdf is a free format, still Adobe is making load of money out of it, so why not do the same with flash? I mean I know part of flash is standardize, but they could open it and be the maintainer of THE solution for animation and multimedia online, becoming popular with most, while keeping their excellent IDE. I know a lot of people who would use Flash more if it was open more, evrybody's got flash after all, and flash can play almost everything, I use it to play mp3 online because it just make sense, no other plugin needed, and it stream, so please big giant, be nice to the little people, you got enough software there to make enough money, open the door and people will love you
Sad to see macromedia get absorbed by adobe.... I guess the SWF format now will become adobes 'plaything' and the next update will feature all manner of unwanted additions!
Great, now flash will bog down your machine, take over the resources and run like a pig that swallowed a medicine ball
Will this be the case? I've always been under the impression that Adobe's relationship with Apple has been a bit chilly of late. What I wonder is if things will get any better with the buyout.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I saw this on irc and thought "whoa, 3 dollars and 48 cents?" That price would have been understandable for this garbage, though...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Is everything now going to be sponsored by Yahoo! like the newest Acrobat? I don't want to be asked to install the Yahoo! toolbar every single time I open a flash file!
This is a typical response coming from a Photoshop 'old-hat' who couldn't actually take the time to figure out why Fireworks shines over Photoshop for web graphic creation.
Photoshop is total bloatware for web graphics design. Outside of some slick filters for raster images and admittedly better processing capabilities, Fireworks just owns PS for low-res, faster image creation. Adding insult to serious injury, Fireworks can export its native vector files into half a dozen other formats and maintain editability.
Adobe needs to deep-six Image Ready and replace it with Fireworks. They've been trying to 'shoe-horn' Fireworks' feature set into that piece of junk for years - so far unsuccessfully.
the only difference between a rut and a grave, are the dimensions
Could this mean we may be seeing a 64 bit version of flash soon? Macromedia didn't seem too interested in creating a port (or at least until a 64 bit version of Windows is released), maybe this merger will rekindle the debate.
There are plenty of good programs out there that make .swf's, Adobe even had one for a while. But the reason the Open Source community rallies behind .PDF and not .SWF is that unlike .PDF there are no good open source programs to make .SWF's
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
With what I've seen of CS 2 - Adobe is incorporating Flash elements into Illustrator and After Effects into Photoshop. At the time I thought "sheesh - Adobe is going after Macromedia and motion graphics in a big way... wish they'd develop stand alone apps instead of bloating up Pshop and Illus..."
But now this... alas. 3D, animation and motion into Illustrator - when is enough enough? They could have just made the bezier tool in Photoshop as good as the Illustrator tool and made motion and 3D stand alone. Now there are more useless "features" I have to learn (that I won't use) just to be able to say "I know Illustrator and Photoshop"
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Having just come from an academic staff job, I really loved the academic pricing on Adobe and Macromedia products. Problem was -- I still had to buy BOTH friggin' suites to get everything that I NEEDED to build websites, graphic design, etc. After my money was spent, I had all this that I really didn't need or want to use:
- Adobe InDesign
- Adobe GoLive
- Macromedia Freehand
Now, I can get Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop (preferably with some Fireworks features integrated later on), Flash, Acrobat, etc. in one suite rather than two bloated ones.
Only problem is -- will Adobe bump up the pricing (academic or retail) of said suite so that it's the same as buying the two older suites separately?
Overall -- not really happy about this buyout.
IronChefMorimoto
now all I need is for Apple to buy Adobe once they have Macromedia.
In one foul stroke they can make sure that the Mac version of all these programs continues, is the best version and that all new features come to the Mac platform first.
They can continue to support windows but as a second class citizen - where it belongs.
OSX does NOT use PDF.
[rant] OSX uses Postscript, and PDF is based on Postscript, that's all. The two are not the same. They are not interchangable. This is about the 13 Millionth time this has been pointed out here on /. It's not even the first time it's been pointed out this thread. Yet still I keep seeing Quartz is based on PDF. There are an awful lot of people here who need serious work on their reading comprehension and retention skills. [/rant]
And don't try telling me Aqua Extreme is different - it's just a theme that uses the underlying engine (aqua on mac, and what ever XP's engine is called on PC).
Sorry about the rant, but stupidity offends me, and it's Monday morning. And I consider it stupidity, not ignorance, when the information has been handed to you repeatedly and you still don't learn.
TommyOpen Source for Open Minds
Just want to point out that Adobe stopped developing LiveMotion. It never made it into the CS family, and they don't mention it in their lineup.
I suspect Fireworks will replace/merge with ImageReady, as Adobe never really managed to turn it into a successful standalone. ImageReady had the better imaging, but Fireworks had the better editing tools. If we're lucky we may keep the Fireworks tools and get the picture quality of ImageReady.
Dreamweaver and GoLive are so different in programming, but my hope is that we get Dreamweaver's coding/layout GoLive's site management tools. I just hope they maintain Dreamweaver's codebase, as I loved their plugin architecture.
Director may actually see a revival, but I suspect that Director may end up like PageMaker: a tool that the users refuse to let die, so Adobe will stilll half-heartedly develop it further.
Poor Freehand. It used to be my favorite software. I wrote letters with it, made all sorts of illustrations and multipage layouts. A huge amount of my docs and illustrations are in FH8/FH9/FH11 format. Will another company come and "rescue" Freehand again? I doubt it: instead we may see some FreeHand tools integrated intro Illustrator (but not the multipage: Adobe's philosophy doesn't accomidate that).
nuff said.
:T:R:A:N:S:
...they can make an advantage of this. Buying MM is all about breeze, flex, flash.lite and whatever flash byproducts MM as been raking in heaps of cash with lately. Now this all is going o be part of one big slow monopoly.
The only existing potential competitor to all this is Suns Java Media Framework. It needs serious polishing and usability for non-eggheads but it has the power to step into the ring with Adobe/MM in this ballpark.
Did I say "If Sun is smart"?
Never mind.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ever thought that they might make one product that would take the best of both competing products? Even if they decided to axe one, there's no reason they wouldn't do that. This is all premature anyways.
http://hughgordon.com/
The (former) owners of Macromedia have lost out to greed... shame on them! So much history is about to go down life's pan because they want an easy life on a sunny Med beach while coders battle in vein to use the backwards standardised (Adobe) interface in the latest Flash MXXXX 200X release.
And now, how long will it be before Microsoft release their own scalable vector graphics animation package, or just buy the rights to Flash outright from the Adobe Megalords (of which they may easily afford)?
Not long.
Bah!
The other guy put valid points forward.
You respond to none.
Toughtful argumentation is not bashing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
However, there's also the possibility that we could get the worst of both worlds, and without any other real option except to go to an ordinary text editor.
Good news? Bad news? Hard to tell.
They're gonna screw with the interface again, aren't they?
Just shoot me.
I hope Homesite does not die :(
***Weeps***
sex is better than war!
Flash, Contribute, ColdFusion are the reasons Adobe is buying Macormedia. ColdFusion is, amazingly, still selling because it has a very good IDE and makes web app development easier.
The other stuff is going to get canned in some way or another. Adobe will NOT develop Dreamweaver and GoLive concurrently. It makes no sense financially (two development teams who have to be paid) and it makes no sense competition wise. They might take over some of Dreamweaver's server side stuff (asp, php, jsp, cfm etc), but I can't see them keeping both.
Director is something I'm worried about. They might keep it, as it has its own niche market (Computer Based Teaching, interactive DVDs etc), but Adobe is nothing if not hyperefficient financially (anyone remember LiveMotion, PageMill, Style etc?) and they usually kill products that aren't major sellers.
Freehand is as good as dead. Period. And, given how Illustrator has become such as huge bloat app, that is a real pity.
I can see Adobe taking most of the web development features from Fireworks (easy drop down menus etc) adding them to Image Ready, and canning Fireworks.
Flash will almost certainly get the Adobe Workover(TM), which means a shiny new interface. Given how bad Flash's interface is, this might actually be a good thing. I actually hope they'll integrate some of Livemotion's interface in there, such as After Effect style timelines and easy paths. This might be the best result of the whole buy out.
Apple could not have bought Macromedia, for the simple reason that Adobe would have done its monopoly abuse act once again, and threatened to drop Photoshop, Illustrator and Golive for the Mac, like they did with Premier. I'm pretty sure Apple could have developed very powerful apps out of Macromedia's stuff, but the Adobe apps are industry standard, sadly. which would have meant a hefty kick in the soft parts for Apple's marketshare.
In fact, the only company that has both the resources and marketshare to compete with Adobe these days, is Microsoft. If Microsoft really wants, they could develop their own creative applications, bundle and sell them at low low prices, and kill Adobe.
In fact, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I would like to see this happen.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
I agree with you that flash loads too slow for general site navigation on the slower broadband connections, and most people aren't using flash to its potential, but I'll have to disagree with you that having the content producer controlling the layout of a site is a bad thing... it's just more crap the designer has to deal with in order to make a truly usable site, and most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment. In my view, users should be able to just enjoy the experience as easily as television but that experience should be enhanced by the two-way communications provided by the Internet. However my opinion on this may be a little skewed from the rest of slashdot after developing websites meant for television for several months.
Ok....
Reminds me of when the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads merged. The new company decided to keep Union Pacific's first name and Southern Pacific's last name...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I intensely dislike what has become of Adobe, that's true. I dislike so many things about that company I don't know where to start. For starters:
1. The way that Adobe behaved when FCP came out. I know that corporations often behave like 5 year olds, but dropping Premier *because they afraid of competition* was about the most disgusting piece of crap I have seen in a long time.
2. As addendum to the point above, they way that Adobe is now powerful enough to dictate the market. They can basically tell you to go to hell and there's sweet f-all you can do about it.
3. Prices. Adobe, since it became so powerful that it was the only game left in town in various markets (read photoshop, i.e. image editing) can now, and does, charge as absolutely much as they possibly can. Look at the discrepancy between what PS costs and what Illustrator costs. In the professional image editing market, they have a monopoly, up until now, in the vector editing illustration market, they didn't. I am waiting to see what Illustrator will cost in the future. Adobe is even less controlled than Microsoft. They will basically bleed the market for what they feel the market can take.
4. Activation. While nobody feels piracy is right, Adobe was massively profitable before they came up with product activation. I'm less worried about the irritation value of activation than I am about the potential for abuse with it. In 3rd world countries, no one, and I mean, no one, has the money to pay for Adobe's ridiculous prices, which is why piracy with Adobe's stuff is so rampant there. Rather than doing something creative and innovative about it, such as lowering the barrier to entry in those markets, they introduced product activation.
5. I dislike Adobe's habit of killing off applications that are not wild successes but still popular. Live Motion was such a product. For Flash animation, not prgramming, but animation, it was way better than Flash itself and served as a useful addition to a lot of Flash designers. There are other products in that market, such as ToonBoomStudio, which also do Flash animation, and you don't see them killing off their product simply because it doesn't replace Flash entirely, now do you? I have been burnt once, badly, with mTropolis, which Quark killed after they bought it, and I'm pretty sure, just judging from the Adobe forums, where people almost crapped themselves when Adobe killed off Live Motion, that thousands more poor bastards were once again burnt by a big corporation. Yay for them.
6. Given Adobe's behaviour in recent years, where product bloat has replaced efficiency and raping designers for all they can is now standard practice, I don't see things getting better.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, Flash does nothing well except make it easy for web developers to produce bandwidth-consuming tinsel presentations with no content, and the world would be a better place without it.
If 99% of the Flash content you see is ads, you need to browse better sites, not ones that are all ads.
Flash shouldn't be used where HTML/CSS will suffice. Where it won't, though, Flash now fufills all the promises that Java applets couldn't keep from the 90s.
(As far as I can tell - Java is a great platform but applets are largely broken mostly due to Sun not being able to enforce proprietary controls over M$. )
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I wonder what's going to happen to Cold Fusion? It's already the black sheep of the Macromedia "familiy". Maybe they'll just keep "supporting" it as poorly as they do now...
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Adobe is a pretty conservative company. When they acquired Aldus, they killed everything but PageMaker (so SuperPaint and a bunch of other apps.)
So, expect everything NOT in Adobe's interest to die suddenly, especially if it wasn't getting much support from MM (i.e. JRun).
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Honestly, who says "will need to be addressed, going forward" on Slashdot.
Maybe we'll get a better flash plugin with Linux now, seeing how much support Adobe has shown to Linux. Might not go out of sync.
--
I just posted something very similar above, but -
Flash shouldn't be used where HTML/CSS will suffice. Images shouldn't be used where an HTML table will suffice. (I'm all for a chart, but not a picture of a table) Webpages should convey all their content in lynx unless there's a really good reason not to. Also, people who suck at creating interactive content shouldn't create interactive content.
Where HTML/CSS won't suffice, though, Flash now fufills all the promises that Java applets couldn't keep from the 90s. You can easily make multiplatform applications that don't require individual installation. They can do things that are totally impossible in HTML. And they Just Work.
(As far as I can tell - Java is a great platform but applets are largely broken mostly due to Sun not being able to enforce proprietary controls over M$. )
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Acrobat is beyond bloatware.
Flash tracks users better than cookies.
Both were being used to push 3rd party products.
I'll stick with RTF and TXT.
Look at it this way: Dreamweaver is considered to be about the best commercial HTML editor out there.
NOTEPAD.EXE is the most used HTML editor, I'd have to disagree with your sentiments above.
The lack of back/forward functionality is definitely crippling and very annoying.
What I find worst is Macromedia's attempt at making their own form controls (textbox, drop down list), which are woeful compared to the native ones.
Nothing costs nothing
IIRC it is ok to create programs that generates .SWFs but you are not allowed to create programs that can display .SWFs (such as a browser plug-in).
People like to laugh at Adobe and Flash, but until you put a better alternative forward, you might as well shut up. (Start hacking SVG or something.)
With enough call home and DRM to satisfy even the needs of Draconian governments and corporations. Look forward to having to give an SSN to read product manuals soon!
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
I would suspect that would be the least of it... more like first born child. BTW...people actually read manuals???
Take everything from the plug_ins folder and move them to the "optional" folder.
You can still use any of them whenever you want, they just load on the fly.
Funny what happens when you read the docs that come with a program. My Adobe Reader 7.0 loads in well under 2 seconds on my 1.8Ghz.
So here's the deal, this merger will only increase the amount of software for stupid wanabe hacks out there chargin $200 to make a web page. Some unholy child will be born that will use sliced images for everything, a sea of poorly named styles and 200kb of javascript to print Hello World in a blue box. It will then try and sell you webhosting, ask you to upgrade, crash while doing it and forget how to load it's own template files.
I've been using DW since the very first beta, why? Frankly I started because I didn't know my right hand from my left and Javascript, or rather ECMA-262 was scarry and I didn't understand it and I thought CSS was bad and tables were the way to go. Tools like DW keep users in the dark making crap for people who deserve better.
Heres a clue kids, go download the GNU editor Crimson Editor and learn to write your own code. You'll be faster, more efficient and make better pages. Just give it time.
Crimson Editor is as good as the likes of EditPlus etc. Learn to make meanigful data to define your meaningful content.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment
You make a good point -- perhaps you and I don't disagree as much as it might seem. Some author-control of layout is not a bad thing. A consistent site page design certainly aids navigation, comprehension, and usage. What I would like is more control of type size (new versions of HTML suffer from this too) because some designers choose excessively small or excessive large type. I'd also like more control of color because too many designers make bad decisions (e.g.,. yellow text on white backgroud, non-standard colors for HREFs, etc.).
most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
This is the heart of the problem with Flash today. The technology itself is not evil, but too many of its developers are just bad and they ruin it for the better developers that do do a good job with Flash. Perhaps if Flash had a certification program or some scheme for regulating who used it, it would be better. In architecture, you have to have license to practice and perhaps Flash needs that too.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
This is where you and I part company. I absolutely don't want a TV-like experience -- this is my biggest reason for Flash-hatred. I prefer interaction, manipulation, and navigation. I want a self-paced, not a author-paced experience. I want to be able to randomly access the parts of the site I'm interested in. I want to spend as much or a little time dwelling on any given part of the site as I choose. I want to be able to navigate back and forth over the content. I want to be able to copy-paste snippets of text (I use the web for research). Too many Flash site take that control away from me and I don't like it.
If the fraction of bad Flash dropped, I would gladly become a fanboy. But until Flash developers realize that some people don't want a passive, linear, author-controlled experience, there will be too much bad Flash and too much knee-jerk hatred of what could be an awesome technology for interactive sites.
Thanks for writing an insightful counterargument.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm a designer (print/multimedia/web) by profession and have been for years. To say that Adobe and Macromedia aren't in direct competition is lunacy. Look at the creative suites the two companies offer, with few exceptions, both present programs that do the same thing.
Photoshop & Fireworks = Raster editors
Flash & After Effects & LiveMotion = Motion graphic editors
Dreaweaver & GoLive = Extended HTML WYSIWYG editors
Illustrator & Freehand = Vector editors
The major differences between the two programs of the same type is how efficiently you can accomplish tasks and how much control you have over what you design. In reality, a good designer can make virtually identical pieces using products from either company. The only major difference is the time required to do it. The design community is used to the fact that there are things that Adobe has perfected and the same holds true for Macromedia. Truth is, outside of some minor annoyances, they work very well together. In any design firm in the world, you'll be able to find offerings from both.
In the world of core graphic design software, there are only two players: Adobe and Macromedia. Without including 3D programs or strict painting programs (which are typically marginalized in most standard print or online applications) no other company comes close.
When all is said and done, this merger is MAJOR. No one can argue that a merger between the two companies could easily produce the "end-all" design suite. I don't know that that scenario is in our best intrests, though. I firmly believe that design has blossomed as much as it has in the last 10 years for print, multimedia and web because there has been at least moderately healthly competition between these two. Removing competition from the playing field is never good for consumers. As for the alternatives out there, I've tried most, and I've gotta give most of them two thumbs way down. As much as I love Linux, open source solutions, and start-up underdogs (and I do love them) you'd be crazy in a business where time is always critical to go with anything less the best.
Just my two credits.
Instead of making you wait when you open a PDF it loads crap on startup.
I wish PDF would just die. Nearly all PDFs are bloated resource pigs.
What I like about Dreamweaver is that it lets me handcode my HTML and CSS without messing up my code like the dreadful Microsoft's Frontpage would, and still gives me an option to see the results of what I'm doing, and that preview is pretty close to what the end result really is. Letting Photoshop generate the code for the sliced page design produces even scarier results than Frontpage. It's a nightmare every time i have to dig into somebody else's code that was generated that way - the dumbest possible approach to creating tables, too many spacer images without real need for them, etc. Adobe shouldnt' be let even close to automated code generation - they've got bad coding style. If this purchase screws up my Dreamweaver I'm gonna be very pissed off.
Outsourcing Software Development
I'm quite happy about this. The reliability of Macromedia products, Flash specifically, on Mac OSX has been horrible. Adobe products on Mac OSX have in general been reliable. Hopefully Adobe will kick Macromedia's programmers in the buttocks so that things like save dialog boxes being covered by greyed out panels like the actions panel won't happen any more. That's actually a small annoyance compared to Flash crashing half of the time when I click and drag my cursor, or the timeline problems that force me to open the file on my pc for certain operations. I love macromedia, but macromedia, she no love the Macintosh!
Now our printed pages will have pop-ups, too.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Is there really a problem with Photoshop jpegs?
I'm an amatuer web designer... I have Fireworks and Photoshop CS, and I produce all my jpegs for web from Photoshop.
Will I see an improvement if I use Fireworks?
I'm starting with Cannon raw files, converted to tifs, uploaded to photoshop, saving to jpeg from photoshop cs.
Can Fireworks do something good with a photoshop saved tif when I do the tif to jpeg conversion and save for web?
Can you describe the difference you see?
I don't like the idea at all. I mean what going to happen to the prices of the software if there is no real competition. I mean it's already a $1000 dollars to get studion mx 2004. How much could they charge if theres nobody to compete.
Winners:
./'ers will welcome their new desktop publishing overlords.
Adobe has encircled Quark's publishing product with Illustrator, Photoshop, and now Flash and Dreamweaver in their stable. It will likely be a slow and painful death for Quark.
Quark is privately held , so chances are good they will sell to Adobe at a premium way above what Adobe just paid for Macromedia.
Losers:
Employees at both companies. I smell RIF's coming soon.
Consumers lose big. I don't see much innovation. But there will be big price increases in Adobe pro/consumer products coming.
I've been modded down for some muddled comments regarding adobe's monopoly in the past, so I guess
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Some of the alleged benefits of Flash might be fine if they were integrated into the browser. They're not. Instead, what you get, is an embedded world, an environment within an environment. The only people who actually enjoy this world are, as the OP said, the content creators and their management who don't understand what they're doing to the user experience by ghettoizing their content into a closed, non-standard format.
anyone else remember a suit at macromedia saying this? i wonder what's going to happen with that...
sig.
After Adobe won the interface court case a few years back, Macromedia had to change all of it menu and interface structures to be obtuse and retarded because anything usable would be considered to be an infringement on Adobe's patents.
Maybe now Dreamweaver and Freehand will be returned to their former, usable state.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
And we need this because??? Seriously, I've been Linux only for websurfing for over a year now, and not once have I had any reason to miss shockwave. I'd just as soon see all proprietary closed standards just fade away on the net. They serve no real purpose other than lining some corporations pockets.
It annoys me that at some time I'll probably have to install Acroread v7 to fill out a form that could have just as easily (or likely more easily) been done in html. I was going to get some SDK or another from Adobe, but couldn't because they made you fill out a PDF form, even for the Linux SDK. At that time Acroread for Linux was still at 5.0.
If I'm trying to download a SDK for linux, doesn't that imply that maybe I'm using Linux? I'm a musician, and was considering PDF to distribute sheet music, since most people use Windows and don't have LaTex support. Not any more, though. If you want sheet music from me you'll need to find something that can print a LaTex file. Sorry for the inconvenience, it's Adobe's fault.
TommyOpen Source for Open Minds
Yeah, livemotion is so awful that Adobe KILLED IT over a year ago!
This blows. As my fellow prepress and publishing professionals know, Adobe has begun to act more and more hostilely toward the Macintosh platform. An important VP there -- brought over from Microsoft, no less -- has repeatedly spread ridiculous anti-Mac FUD, in everything from press releases to book reviews, and Adobe's development for OS X has been dreadful -- still nothing, except for the very latest version of Acrobat, is Cocoa, and Adobe has insisted that Photoshop will not take advantage of OS X's best graphics-performance features.
In all this, some of us had hoped Macromedia would, eventually, save the day. Of course, they have a very long way to go to offer a professional replacement for Adobe products, especially Photoshop, but we still entertained some hope. And, as previous posters have pointed out, at least there was healthy competition.
DTP and prepress are huge consumers of the Mac -- one may go so far to say that they are what has kept Apple afloat through bad and good times. Now what? If Adobe continues to push Windows, DTP and prepress may be forced to make that odious switch, and Apple may be jeopardized. Let's devoutly hope my predictions don't prove true.
Sadly, this isn't going to do anything to fix the proliferation of idiotic version "numbers", as both companies have fallen off the deep end with inscrutible nonsense like "CS 2" and "MX 04".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
DragonHawk: "Hence the Orson Wells reference in my subject."
tverbeek: "Oh, did Wells produce a movie version of George Orwell's Animal Farm?"
*sound of head against desk, hard*
I. Can't. Believe. I. Did. That.
Can I moderate my own post with -1, Blatantly Stupid Error?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
An April Fool's day article that didn't get thru on time, maybe? Wow.
When MacroMind moved into the SoMa district of San Francisco, a large group of "content creators" set up shop nearby giving rise to "Multimedia Gultch".
In the early 1990s, they renamed the company to Macromedia. As the world shifted from CD-ROM to web delivery, both the company and creators became the world nexus for web content production, giving rise to the "dot Com" boom and bust.
Adobe, being in San Jose, is 50 miles away from this. Having lived in both cities, I know the artists won't move South, since San Jose is BORING. At least the train has been upgraded to only take an hour.
Perhaps Adobe will retain a major presence in SoMa. I hope so, since the synergy between Macromedia and the user community was and is most important.
Adobe will be buying its way into so much more than just print/web design... Macromedia makes Authorware, manages its own middleware, not to mention Breeze, Flex and the other odd ones that defy categorization. How will these interesting technologies fare if they dont fit into Adobe's larger plans?
"Play Outside on Sunny Days." - Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto
I'm guessing that a lot of employees will be laid off as they merge products and HR and PR and all the other little departments. While this is going to make one mega-company, my feeling is that it's bad news for everyone but the shareholders. With a lack of competition a lot products may go the way of IE 6. I can only hope that the laid off employees and others band together to turn out the firefox of dreamweaver/illustrator/flash/fireworks.
at south by southwest, i witnessed an excellent demonstration of what will, hopefully, become flash 8 - the player at least. the IDE will likely be called MX2005. regardless of how it's named, the next version of flash will be (will have been?) a great leap forward in performance, especially on mac and linux browsers. while vague on timing, the indication was that the player and IDE would be released or at least previewed in the next couple of months.
the single biggest question i have about this whole merger / acquisition / eating of the corspe of macromedia is 'are they still going to release flash 8?' or will it be put on hold until adobe has a chance to crap all over it? don't get me wrong, i hate flash with a passion, but it keeps me billable. i have to shut off whole parts of my brain to work within its interface, but i'm used to doing that just to talk to my coworkers, too... i can only imagine how bad it will be if adobe takes and futzes with it before release
i recall the days of golive 2 - i didn't have enough sense to start down the road of dreamweaver, but then there were a lot of things i regret from those days... anyhow, adobe bought golive, shat out the next release with the adobe interface plastered on, called it a must-have upgrade so they could make some more money that quarter. it was a hellish mix of the old and new keyboard shortcuts, dialog boxes, menu and naming conventions. there were even several error messages that still said "golive cyberstudio" on them. similar things can be said of the first release (hell, all releases) of pagemaker since they bought aldus. and after effects - that was an improvement, at least, but they didn't get it right until about version 5.
as it is, i can generally switch gears pretty well when going from an adobe app to a macromedia one (and again to an apple one). how much will it mess with my instincts to go into some hybrid of the two for the next release?
being in charge of purchasing software for the macs at my company, i'll recommend for my office that we sit out the next version of the CS/MX suites. i'm probably not alone.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
What's so funny about Corel. I prefer CorelDRAW to Illustrator any day of the week.
BTW, you guys should check out the new Xara X1. Xara is independent from Corel again, and their vector program is truly unique. It doesn't have the feature bloat that CorelDRAW & Illustrator have, and it can make some stunning graphics. Definitely not a replacement, but a great addition.
Dom
I would really like to see an Authorware runtime for Linux. I never thought it would happen from Macromedia, but perhaps under this deal part of their "new markets" will include Linux. As has been noted, things are interesting with Reader 7.0 and it is a trend in the industry.
While somewhat tangentially related, it's worth noting that National Instruments finally came out with a Linux version of LabView. I see Authorware and Labview as cousins of sorts. It would be great if they were completely open source, but seeing them at least available for Linux is a great step.
Based on the replies I'm seeing, it appears I failed to make my point clearly.
As I said, PDF is great when you need visual consistency. When you actually something to look the same everywhere. Obviously, if you're distributing electronic versions of dead-tree forms, you need that. (I might argue that it would be better to just implement an electronic form submission system, but that's not always a realistic solution.) PDF is useful here. That's not what I was getting at.
However (and this was the point I was trying to make), people and organizations get far too attached to the appearance of a document, when they should be focused on the content. It's the substance, and not the form, that counts. That's my major point. Distributing, say, a bank statement in PDF to make it "look the same" as a "real" bank statement is inherently silly. What makes the PDF more "real" then an HTML presentation? What does having the same format of another document make something I print myself "more real"?
Look at stlhawkeye's reply, where he says the HTML version of his bank statement wasn't accepted. Now, that justifies a demand for his bank to make "look alike" data available as a PDF, but let's look beyond that. Why the hell does anyone care the source of the print out was HTML? It's not like there's a universal standard for bank statements. And simply having a bank statement is not the point. The finance company (or whoever) doesn't want proof that stlhawkeye has a bank statement -- they want evidence of financial credibility. That's independent of format and presentation. How it looks doesn't matter. Yet they make an issue of it. That's bad.
As for those who complain that HTML does not look the same everywhere: That's the point. HTML is supposed to look different everywhere. It's a feature, not a bug. An HTML document can be presented one way on screen, another way printed on a laser printer, another way on a character-only line printer, another on a cell phone display, another way as audible voice from a speech synth, and so on. Done right, you could have the computer in your car read you your bank statement on the way to work.
This concept, which HTML embraces, opens up huge potential in information systems. Yet things like "Best viewed with so-and-so", or "Download SecretSoft's plug-in", are killing this off. That's bad.
(And, yes, obviously it was George Orwell, not Orson Wells, who wrote Animal Farm. Total brain fart there. I have placed a virtual brown paper bag on my head. Etc, etc.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
what's left is the player, but there are some projects to build one, too.
We don't need more adware floating around.
Sidenote: Why does Download.com allow this crap?
...properly done flash gives WAY more control to the user...and guess what, you can change anything WITHOUT reloading the page like shitty crap 1970s html you fucking throwback jerkwad.
On both counts: WHAT??
I'd really like to see some explanation here. What the hell do you mean by "change anything"? and what is that statement about reloading the page? Are you referring to what Netscape use to do way back in version 4.7 when you resized the window?
Troll.
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
When Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994, it was forced to spin off Freehand. At the time the two companies, together with Quark, were the dominant players in the desktop publishing software industry. Freehand was Illustrator's only real competitor on the Mac, and desktop publishing was almost exclusively the domain of the Macintosh, sans FrameMaker on a SGI workstation.
After the acquisition, Adobe was forced to spin off Freehand for anti trust reasons. Macromedia was formed from the combined products of Macromind Director and Aldus Freehand.
Now Adobe is acquiring freehand for the second time. My guess is that Adobe does not really want Freehand and will gladly sell it off. Dreamweaver is the best application Macromedia has, and Adobe wants it as well as Flash. Fireworks is pretty good; Coldfusion and Director are dying.
If Adobe wants to keep Dreamweaver, maybe Adobe can strike a deal to sell off GoLive instead? I am sure they will prefer Dreamweaver over GoLive mainly because of its market share.
The question remains, who will to form a company based on Freehand and GoLive?
I would have to disagree there. One thing Adobe is really well known for is a standard interface accross all of it's products. Golive currently fits into this very well. We may see some of the code behind DW being used in Golive, maybe they'll even switch the products completely, but one thing I'm certain of is that the interface will remain, which effectively kills dreamweaver.
Because 64 bit linux users don't have an acceptable flash solution yet. There are open source efforts such as gplflash, but none of them are near complete yet.
You have GOT to be kidding me! Freehand is by far more user friendly, more feature rich than Illustrator ever was. I have to use both in my line of work (and have done so since the Altsys days...) and when I have a choice, I ALWAYS choose FreeHand - a far more productive tool.
This is two companies with quite similar products, e.g. Freehand/Illustrator, Dreamweaver/Golive, Flash/SVG stuff.
Wouldn't antitrust laws prevent this from happening?
If not this is the beginning of yet another software giant that will be in the position to charge their customers whatever they like.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
macromedia does need cleaning but yoour reasoning is rubbish even by slashdot standards. 1.fireworks beat the pants off of it's adobe counterpart: imageready. 2.Flash is really just dumbed down Director and as such, you get it or you do not. 3.Freehand has fallen off a cliff since Version 10 - not much quibble there. The important thing is that Freehand forced Adobe to innovate Illustrator. 4.Dreamweaver is clearly capable of producing standards compliant pages - the coding end of it is really just Allaire's HomeSite. You get out what you put in - if you understand standards, standards will come out. 5. Dreamweaver/Fireworks almost single-handedly helped the institution of CSS and the png format. Macromedia's biggest problem has been quality. Each generation of their software has been successively less stable than the previous version. Once upon a time they were at least as good at Adobe if not better. Adobe is the Microsoft of the market though-- attention anyone who wants to succeed: corner the business market and the designers will be forced to follow. Microsoft cornered the business world and Apple was left kissing education and designer ass. Now even education and designers are on the microsoft platforms. Adobe focused on PDFs and their overwhelming Photoshop dominance. Business used PDFs exlusively and bought Adobe products to help build them. Macromedia focused on the web designers, essentially eschewing their print market, and now they are kissing Adobe glutes. Regardless, this is not a Good Thing for the design world.
Seconded. Flash is good for one thing: looking cool. AND NOTHING ELSE. Let's go through the list. Number one, takes a significant amount of time to load. This is the internet. Information on demand, as fast as the modem can manage, instantaneous responses. Every second a user sits waiting for your site to load, he is getting more bored and more likely to hit Back. Number two: by definition, the interface on any Flash site is non-standard. It doesn't matter how user-friendly it is, it's different from the norm and that makes it harder to figure out how to get the information you want. And that causes frustration. Number three: not every computer runs like the wind. Equals low framerates. More alienated users. And even with all your animations running at their smoothest, that menu is still taking time to open. Hint: I didn't click that menu to see a pretty animation, I clicked it to choose something from the menu. Number four: useless for presenting information. Suppose there's a page of text you want to show. In any normal browser there're about six ways to scroll through that text: arrow keys, Page Up/Down keys, mouse wheel, dragging the scroll bar, clicking part of the scroll bar, clicking the scroll arrows. In Flash you'll probably get one - usually just a pair of scroll arrows, which works by mouseovering it instead of clicking it. And scrolls at constant, slow rate. That's typical of a Flash interface. And it sucks. Flash has its uses, presenting content isn't one of them. Use HTML. HTML is powerful and EFFICIENT. Number five. NOT EVERYBODY HAS FLASH, and many of those who don't, don't want it.
qntm.org
There even was an open source flash player somwhere but I don't think it ever got past version 3 or 4.
.swf is just as open as .pdf, but the open source programs just aren't there.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
Saying SVG is Flash's biggest rival is so wrong it's not even funny. It's like saying Java is Flash's biggest rival. Or Ajax. Or Javascript. Or HTML. It doesn't make much sense. They're different technologies for different purposes.
And for the last time, Adobe specifically says on their FAQ that both MM and Adobe will continue their support of the SVG format.
Well, the fix for Adobe Reader sluggishness on Windows is given in the other replies.
I don't see any satisfactory alternative to Adobe Reader. Pdf's are everywhere in academia; they are the standard platform-independent way to exchange articles, even whole books. I have hundreds, maybe even thousands of them on my harddrive.
And sadly, nothing else for viewing them seems to work well enough. Files made with Latex and converted with ghostscript have embedded type 1 fonts (if they're any good at all, that is.) Foxit PDF Reader doesn't appear to use the embedded fonts; can't tell for sure because it gives no font info, but the rendered text looks crappy. Pdfreader is full of adware. For Linux, xpdf and its derivatives appears not to work well under Ubuntu (saw a message that it renders in tiny text, but I can't find it anymore.) Kghostview I know doesn't work well enough; for the files I tried it on, it showed nothing at all, just blank pages! For more info on this, see
The Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers
If anybody knows a free pdf reader that shows all standard files in good quality and has a text search function, I'd love to hear about it, especially if it's for Linux.
Is this what all those 'futurists' were talking about when they said there'd be a 'digital convergence'?
You have to ask yourself, why are these products as good as you say they are?
Because they had to be good in order to beat the competition. And competition is precisely what we're going to have less of as a result of this deal.
I don't disagree with the original poster that competition did drive these two to one-up each other's features, but you're right(er) on the essentials: Adobe has continued to be the traditional publishing giant, and Macromedia has had the Web world edge. They've been in slightly different markets, and to some extent their competition has injured the consumer in unnecessary ways.
For another non-trivial example of the way their competition has sometimes stung us, take a look at how Fireworks has, and hasn't, and then has been able to use various PhotoShop filters. The upgrade path for Fireworks has been affected by this, for me. I don't want to upgrade my software only to lose a bunch of third-party filters that suddenly won't work in the new version. Caused by Adobe and Macromedia sparring it out, pure and simple.
That said, I'll believe Adobe can rationalize the overlapping product lines when I see it. They can't be stupid enough to kill off the Dreamweaver line in favor of a GoLive, for Gawd's sake, but it wouldn't amaze me if they kept trying to fold in Fireworks' html-exporting features and wound up confusing PS for no real gain.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I think these Adobe guys will raise the already exorbitant prices* of their new Adobe Freehand/Illustrator/Whateverthefuckitisnamednow and make Flash even more of a tycoon-only market. That will make my personal favorite format, which shall SVG remain nameless, even more visible via Inkscape, Sodipodi, OpenOffice.org, and even MS Office's Visio and the like.
Thank you, Adobe and Macromedia, for enlightening us with thy holy matrimony.
*as if people actually purchase *cough*othermeans*cough* Adobe software
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Maybe now users of RoboHTML and RoboHelp will get some decent support.
Macromedia took Blue Sky's legacy of crap support to all new lows. Adobe's support is a hell of a lot better than Macromedia's. This is great news for the writing/publishing community.
The only Help product that came out of Macromedia that was of any great use (and not bug-ridden, bloated, and slow) was RoboHTML for Framemaker and they killed it off.
Maybe now Framemaker user's will get a decent FM to help system!
Photoworks! Illustrand! GoWeaver!
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
Well said. I'd go as far as suggesting they be codified, ala the Ten Commandments:
#1 "Flash shouldn't be used where HTML/CSS will suffice."
#2 "Images shouldn't be used where an HTML table will suffice."
#3 "Webpages should convey all their content in lynx unless there's a really good reason not to."
#4 "...people who suck at creating interactive content shouldn't create interactive content."
Of course, #4 is only a nice theory - like the commandment against coveting thy neighbor's wife. Great idea, impossible to obey.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
Well that actually along the line of what I was thinking. I think DW with a new(very needed) GUI would be their next product. The sooner I stop getting JS error from DW's ui the better but I'm using gvim more and more. So some kind of OSS will most likely be my home by then anyway.
=1000101
Is anyone else thrilled to hear Macromedia has been taken over! And now they'll get the same happy treatment they doled out in years past to companies they acquired.
Macromedia hired a ton of people right out of college, with zero experience, promoted the most obsequious/self-serving, and you know the rest of the story. 26 year-olds with no industry experience running the show, promoting their friends, etc. It was a very disfunctional company, with some really talented people who somehow survived in the chaos. Hope the creepiest ones get cut first.
good luck, Adobe, you have some major prima donnas coming your way.
If you actually need to use a function in Enterprise, and the client is happy to buy CF Enterprise, then I don't see what the problem is. You can develop at home on single-IP Enterprise and run the same code on the standard version for them (As I am presuming that they do not need the funky features to populate content.)
For that matter, if the client is buying Enterprise for your application, just run it on your server until development is finished and then transfer it over to them.
(And if you aren't overly sensitive to breaking the EULA, you can just stick the developer version behind a proxy and access it from as many machines as you like - technically I don't think you _would_ even be breaking the EULA if you were careful not to use it at the same time as your client.)
Ugh.
Honestly, this is a little distressing. I've been a long-standing user of both companies' products and I'm not even sure what to think.
Probably my biggest fear is that they'll do something to ruin Flash.
Now before you say "good riddance" (I realize that
Prime example: since version 2 of Flash, I've had a desire to be able to write Flash-based apps in a traditional programming or XML tagged based environment. Macromedia finally released my dream with Flex -- an XML development platform that uses Flash for the display teir without the worry of browser or platform incompatabilities.
There's a "sales-y" video demo of a shopping cart system in Flex as well as some example components and existing apps that you can view if you what to see what Flex can do.
It's still fairly young and I'd really hate to see this combination of technology fade into obscurity due to mismanagement from a company primarily involved in developing content-creation tools, and who seemingly doesn't listen to its customers as well as Macromedia (just my personal experience).
I'm hesitantly optimistic that I'm worrying for no reason.
Ponder this for a second...
p ple.software/), and with Final Cut Pro, Motion and Soundtrack, Apple seems to really be cleaning Adobe's clock with their video software.
d s-open-source-flash-development/) compiling .SWF files on OS X without the Flash IDE, how hard would it be for Apple to step in and build their own development environment for Flash content?
Did Adobe kill off a competitor, or did it just make itself more of a challenge to be taken over by someone else?
Piper Jaffrey and UBS have both stated that the key to Apple's continued growth is in software (http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/04/12/firm.on.a
Apple can't compete with Photoshop at the professional level, but Adobe's lack of support for the core image functionality in Tiger could prove disasterous for continued adoption, if Apple decides to jump into the Photo editing arena and go head to head, as Final Cut Pro did with Premiere.
If Apple's "Pages" application takes off, how difficult would it be to publish out of Pages with the appropriate rights management features to a PDF format? Apple could then *potentially* compete with InDesign?
With open source efforts like MTASC (http://www.actionscript.com/index.php/fw/1/towar
The point of my questions is simply this: I'm not worried about Adobe's support for the Mac. Apple seems to be able to find partners who will develop with them -- or they will buy/build a product themselves and outdo the competing product. So Adobe will either bring their A-Game in enhancing these products for Apple, or risk being outdone (or bought out).
--- -a- "I'd love to change the world, but it'd be easier if the universe exposed its API."
Now I think I understand. What is everyone complaining about in relation to PDFs? The plugin. What does FlashPaper do away with ? The plugin.
Well, not really, there's still the Flash plugin. But instead of two proprietary nonstandard plugins, you'll get one, with features ( as needed/desired ) provided through the Flash app. Which is a good thing if you're targeting small devices like cell phones, which is how they're trying to spin this to the market.
Can't wait until EA buys them both. HURR HURR
The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
I think Macrosoft would be a more appropriate name.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As is the case with proprietors. Instead of relying on the proprietor and hoping they'll fix what you want fixed, it's better to depend on free software where you get the freedom to develop the software yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
What the free software community needs to do is make it easier for people to find developers who are willing to do this kind of work. They are out there, but they aren't very well advertised.
Digital Citizen
Adobe has a bad history of integrating two similar, but different products.
When Adobe bought FrameMaker they already had PageMaker. Instead of figuring out some integration or replacement product, they have slowly stopped improving both products and made a PageMaker (not FrameMaker) replacement called InDesign.
Best of both worlds? Hardly. Worst of both worlds? Close. InDesign is a pretty cool product for the layout crowd (PageMaker and Quark users), but it doesn't do nearly unusable for large document authors (see Notes on InDesign 2 as compared to FrameMaker 7 for reasons why). It's really just an evolution of PageMaker. If Adobe had focused on improving PageMaker, they'd probably have a better product than InDesign by now.
So, if history is any judge, Adobe will continue to sell GoLive and Dreamweaver, while creating a competing tool to GoLive. Nobody will know what to buy ("Why not buy all 3?", Adobe will ask), and none of the products will improve rapidly.
I'm way excited about this. It seems a lot of other slashdotters are too. So why is the ADBE & MACR stock falling through the floor??
It looked like the headline said "Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.48." I pay more for my coffee.
If Practice Makes Perfect, And No One is Perfect, Why Practice?
They advertised that Acrobat files can be read on "any platform" when all they offered was Mac and Losedows versions, even when there were quite a few operating systems out there, especially Linux, with millions of users at the time, that could have used Acrobat, and people were begging and pleading with them to support those operating systems, even at a cost.
They incorporated software into Photoshop CS to thwart the forgery of money, just to prove that they believe their customers are low-life criminals. Not that this necessarily inconveniences any legitimate user, except for the extra unnecessary processing overhead, but it shows what they think of their customers.
I don't like Adobe. Luckily, I am the one who specifies hardware and software purchases for our company. I buy software from Adobe's competition. The first item above, Mr. Sklyarov's arrest, is the primary reason that I do so, but the second and third items only show that Adobe thinks their customers are stupid (the "any platform" thing) and criminals (the money thing). Too bad. They could have been a first-class company.
Well, he _did_ say Acrobat reader 7.0
Looking in my Reader (7.0) directory, there is indeed an "Optional" folder.
There's no mention of it in the help file, but there is a README in the directory itself which says "Put unused plug-ins in the optional directory."
Maybe that's the documentation he was talking about?
Advanced users are users too!
It's not surprising really. Both Adobe and Macromedia have very different segments of the design pie. Both have suites of software that would compliment each other very well. There is a lot of room for cross-over and integration. Yey finally Illustrator and Flash might be a bit more friendly to each other. The only segment in which they compete REALLY is WYSIWYG html editors.
Over the years there have been exchanges of brainstrusts between the two companies at different times. One example is Apple's Final Cut Pro. The core of that team originally worked on Adobe Premier 4 and then defected to Macromedia to work on a new video app (the embrio of FCP). Macromedia then decided that video wasn't a core part of their business and it all shifted to being Apples baby (or there abouts).
Yes we may have gimp for photoshop - but it doesn't compare. Ask anyone who uses photoshop to try gimp, and they will immediately get frustrated with the interface, lack of some features etc. As for flash editors. MM Flash itself it an 'OK' product, but for most people that I know will not take the time and effort to produce a flash, when a gif will suffice.
Although it can be funny, tell them to plug the power in.
Adobe and Macromedia really, really like to sue eachother for patent infringment. One will sue, the other will countersue, and this seems to happen at least once every year. The merger will probably pay for itself by the end of the decade because the companies wont have to employ an army of lawyers with a larger population than North Dakota.
Microsoft will buy Adobe... and with the combined power of Flash and Photoshop, MS Paint will PWN.
I don't know why I didn't really see this coming, but I am totally shocked. It could be that I don't keep up to date with these two companies as I used to (and should still), but this really shocked me and made my jaw drop to the floor.
:(. I'd love to have them both still, but I don't really see that happening.
Personally, whether this is good or bad only time will tell. I don't know how they are going to work out certain software deals yet, because as you know Macromedia's main graphics program (and a very good one at that) is Fireworks MX and it's tightly intergrated into Dreamweaver MX, but now we have Photoshop into that deal (which most developers used over Fireworks anyway) so now we have two good graphics editing programs back to back from the same company... my biggest fear is using the better one in this situation, which would be Photoshop and getting rid of the one that lacks, Fireworks
Other than this, it seems like it'd be a great thing for the world.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
1. Embed fonts in the document
2. Operate a page at a time; PostScript can change information anywhere in the document that affects downstream pages. PDF doesn't.
3. Support index, hyperlinks, and toc.
enuf?
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
This is probably old hat but, if you have both kate and kBear installed, you can give kate {which has excellent, customisable syntax highlighting of its own BTW .....} a filename like "kbearftp://user@myisp.co.uk/filename" and it will use kBear to make an FTP connection to myisp.co.uk, login as user, prompt you for a password {with a tick-box to remember the password in case the FTP session times out while you are busy editing the file}, and save the file as filename. Once this is done, you can treat the file just as though it was a local file. You can even bookmark ftp directories. It's the next best thing to being able to mount an entire ftp site.
..... I'd recommend gFTP every time if you want a pretty, graphical FTP client ..... but this way, you don't have to use the GUI, only the API.
IMHO kBear is ugly as sin
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Now, if only we could get Linux versions of these programs...
That's one of the consequences... Well...
Desktop Linux is a small, but extending market. If you have 1% market share and release for Linux, you
can get significant advantage, that's why, say, Opera is a cross-platform browser.
If you have a few percent marketshare, you gain from Linux market too, provided that the porting efort
is not too hard.
If you are Mr. Second in the market, the only incentive is to become #1 in new market and help its
further expansion, thus undermining your competitors in both market.
If you're the major vendor, you are not interested in any change and the only incentive to release for
Linux is to do it before #2 does.
That said, I see mutual competition as the primary reason for Adobe and Macromedia to release anything
under Linux.
You can see the same thing with nVidia vs ATI -- Linux users don't make them much money, but good
publicity and entering new market before competitor is worth porting drivers.
So, now Adobe has no need to fight for a small Linux market, and Macromedia... well... there's no
Macromedia. I don't think the merger helps getting more products ported to Linux.
I am not a marketologist(sp?), so I would appreciate being proven wrong.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
I just found out: if you install CFusionMX7, you get a free Java PDF jar in your lib-directory: iText.jar
I would be very honored if Adobe would sell ColdFusion software and ship it with the F/OS lib I created...
I'll stop linking to the journal entry when people stop bashing Flash for no reason other than the fact that they don't know what they're talking about. The number of misconceptions about Flash have decreased slightly here, but ignorance still abounds.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And the prophecy became true.
... soon, knocking your door
One oligarchy for Operating Systems professionals.
One oligarchy for Graphic Designers professionals.
The third and the last the databases oligarchy
Then, the world will became a better place..... u believe it
Isn't this the kind of thing that businesses are not supposed to do? I mean the only real comptetition that PhotoShop has if Macromedia Fireworks (which I personally think is a much better product). So what they going to do now? continue to develop 2 programs? I don't think so, they're going to combine them and then go the way "they" think the product should. And left to compete with them is? What?
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
I don't think that most web users are as tehcnically discerning as you are.
I changed a static website selling custom tailored clothing into a flash site. Still user driven, but looks much nicer. Sales have improved tenfold.
As long as people keep their flash sites low bandwidth and user driven, it can be a fine tool.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Gawd I hope you're right... I have a feeling you are, but evilness as, well, evil as Flash just makes me scared ;-)
Death to Flash!
Ciao
Zak
This is a common misconception about the capabilities of SVG. Many people think that it can do only one thing: Scalable Vector Graphics -- it's in its name, isn't it? And you cannot blame them for that: this is how they see SVG used these days. But, the same way Flash is mostly used for banner ads and site intros. Does that say anything about the real capabilities of Flash as a application development platform? I used to build apps and small games back in the old days of Flash 5 and I already know that it can be done (probably a lot easier in Flash MX). However, after being involved in real programming I no longer think it is a very good platform for the development of most games -- but it is still a valid choice for most arcade and kids games.
Returning to SVG, with SVG+JavaScript you can do EVERYTHING you did in Flash. Yes, you can develop full fledged applications or games, and a friend of mine is working on a widget library for a SVG editor written in SVG. Can you do a Flash editor in Flash?
With SVG not all things are as easy as they are in Flash (yet). It is a lot easier to build "crappy banner ads and stupid site intros that serve no purpose" with Flash. But, for real application development the complexity is similar. The difference is that with SVG you get to use a collection of open standards and are not tied to one particular platform, vendor or authoring tool while with Flash you are tied to Windows, Macromedia (Adobe Systems now) and Flash.
-----
PS: Yes, I know that for "crappy banner ads and stupid site intros that serve no purpose" you can also use SwiSH and others. You are still tied to Windows though.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)