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Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger
Steve Nixon wrote to mention a CRN article discussing the shareholder approval of a merger between Adobe and Macromedia. From the article: "The deal, announced in early April, is slated to close this fall pending government approval. On Thursday, the companies said nearly 99 percent of the outstanding Adobe and Macromedia shares voted were cast in favor of the deal. Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."
that one day soon we will have one company to blame for all those god awful, firefox slowing, IE crashing plug-ins. Not to mention on company to blame for the proliferation of flash adverts...
Now, they just need to buy/merge with Real, and you'd have a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.
Apart from the money making obligatory installation of an OS on every machine....
THAT'S why M$ are huge.
Adobe and Macromedia already have huge penetration with Acrobat and Flash respectively on 90% of machines, but that doesn't make them close to the behemoth that M$ is.
At this point, there's very little information available about which products will and will not survive the merger. Why would any shareholder approve a merger when all he/she knew was that the two companies were to merge?
-twb
As a designer that uses both companies programs extensively....photoshop and dreamweaver the top 2 right now, I am very curious as to how this will play out.
My biggest hope is that this will create some real cross program compatibility between all of their native formats. Adobe is very good about making the jump with a file between all of their programs, and I'll look forward to doing that to MM stuff too.
My biggest fear is the monopoly of programs angle, and losing the magic that made these companies what they are.... the innovation and usability being key.
I hope they take the best from both and do something great.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
what competition will there be in the market after this?? theyll have the leading animation, photo editing, and web developing suites all in one company!
"Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."
.pdf files and flash crud that have been a blight on the internet for years should be a powerful rival to Microsoft, whose operating systems have been a blight on PCs for years, in the competition to see who can fuck the world up more.
I agree. The
This can only be a maneuver to prevent microsoft from buying either one of the two companies. Combined they dont necessarily stand to make more money than they would alone, but it creates a united front to keep microsoft out of their media software niche.
Microsoft could easily clone their technologies and make them free.
The only thing flash is good for is cartoons.
PDF does have a grip on academic publications, but
there are other technologies that can duplicate it.
I'm not so sure the sum of the parts is more than the components, in this case. They might be better off dodging Microsoft seperately.
Now we can have a Flash ad with an embedded PDF document which plays a RealMedia clip!
Besides, "a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft"? Um.... Microsoft makes office software and operating systems. They make almost zippo from Windows Media Player. Two big multimedia-oriented companies and a pain-in-the-ass-that-just-won't-die video tech company have what influence on Microsoft?
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I see this as just normal patterns in a maturing industry. As the technology era matures, the number of significant players decreases. This is happening even faster in the modern era where governments are pulling down barriers to this type of integration in the name of "free trade." There are of course downsides to this pattern. The larger the entity the more difficut true innovation is. True innovation will continue on the fringes of the industry in the smaller startups and by individuals.
I think our real fear should not be of this kind of commercial merger squashing innovation, but of our screwed up patent system strangling the type of innovation that started the technology and information revolution.
cheers, ben
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
...Macrobe!
Eye kneed eh Grammer chicken.
...what are they going to call the new company? AdobeMedia? MacroDobe? Macrobe?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
... And we will have one extension to thank for never seeing a Flash ad.
(OK, maybe two)
Perhaps, but PDF is an open standard, and ubiquitous. Search for a document on Google and you get a screen full of PDF links. You want to download a manual for your new sound card? PDF. You want to print up a corporate shareholder report? It's probably a PDF.
PDF isn't going anywhere.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Insiders report they will collaborate on an exciting new standard of interoperability that will lag the complete shit out of your browser.
There is truth in humor.
Adobe vs. Microsoft.
l 0 .asp
AFAIK Microsoft is getting their PDF and Flash replacements ready as we speak.
http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000587.htm
http://www.pdfzone.com/category2/0,1874,1836049,0
I'm just curious, if this article gets duped(which it most definitley will) does that mean there is going to be Like Macrobe and then like Adomedia... two different companies O_O
Honestly, I like PDF. It guarantees the exact replication of how a document is intended to apperar. Almost everywhere.
That's the main advantage of a typographic file format.
Oppositely, I utterly dislike flash. I consider it just useless to the user. Only eye-candy here. Not much more.
Yes, it's interesting from the developer side, with its event controlling script engine and the ability to not be obligated to follow a rigid frame order.
But still, it's just a waste of resources.
I'm guessing if Adobe and Macromedia will try to join both or just - as written by someone else - keep 'em separated to prevent the Evil from embrace and extend (to be read as: copy and screw).
Install these:
p ?id=636&application=firefox
p ?id=433
pdf download
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
flashblock
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
its NOT an open standard...
It means adobe's nice products will have macromedia's junk in it, so CS3 will most likely suck.
.Net at least it has a decent of tools for it. I'm sure there's other really good editors like that for php and what not. DW's tools are truly pathetic all around - no matter what you do with it. Heck, CSS support? The little class picker is useless. It's faster to type class="whatever" than using this thing. It's 100% useless for editing code of any nature. No debugging. Heck, even editing plain xml files (small ones which do validate) it crashes on me all the time (even editing CSS files). The site setup dialog? Worst thing I've EVER seen. I hate DW with a passion.
Everybody seems to say "dreamweaver is the best", but I'm sorry, it truly sucks. Just an app for n00bs to make webpages, just like frontpage. It's mostly useless for making real web apps. Slow, buggy, expensive... It sucks all around! I'll take ANY text editor over this POS any day (short of edlin or "copy con page.htm" perhaps).
Heck, even M$' new toyish editor (visual web developper) is worlds better! Intellisense *everywhere*, expand/collapse, lots of cool stuff, and while it's only useful for
I've been praying this merger wouldn't go thru, so adobe's apps wouldn't start to suck so bad. Photoshop rocks (if you know how to use it), lots of advanced tools that work. No crashes, no n00b crap - a real professional tool, unlike macromedia's junk.
That's what it's coming down to! Major suckage.
Who the hell would want to buy stock in a company that can't even port their flash reader to X86_64 (AMD64)????
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
Really? You'd think someone would've fixed the Wikipedia article if it wasn't.
Before people rant on how much Flash and pdf's suck, please step back and think.
Go back to about 5-6 years ago, when CSS and "design" weren't really associated with websites. They mainly consisted of lots of tables and a lot of annoying animated gifs with the occasional embedded music. But there were also the "good" sites that were easy to read, helpful and good on the eyes. If you don't get my point yet.. Flash and the PDF format have a bad name mainly because of their abuse. PDF is really not very bad. If you don't like the firefox plugin, DONT INSTALL IT. Let firefox download the pdf and voila, you have a nice, relatively small and fairly cross platform file. Then we have flash. I have seen Flash being used for a lot of very stupid things, like the ads... but I have also seen it used for some very cool things, like educational games, kiosk presentations and such. They are also being used for things like statistics with things like Flex. And with the new versions, its much easier to make Flash a lot more accessible, including language strings.
So before you start a large flame... please think of how GOOD these pieces of software are. I am personally very excited about the merger. Maybe they will soon have a Addobe + Macromedia Studio where they will just have Dreamweaver + Flash + Photoshop instead of two incomplete studios (CS and Macromedia Studio)
Cheers
My hope is that this merger does not weaken Adobe's support for SVG.
greetings earthlings
"Greed is good!"
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FLEX ....
Do some research !!!!
You forgot the rest of the Dreamweaver crap: it can't display floated elements, code view loses focus when launched and the lousy layout update, especially with tables.
Maybe those Macromedia folks can teach them how to make a browser plugin that doesn't hang or kill the browser!
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
...if only because this means they wont be suing eachother on a quarterly basis.
Now Adobe can make a reader in Flash (using new Flash APIs) similar to how Macromedia did Flashpaper... which is surprisingly decent if you don't need to get the data OUT of Flash.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Hi, I'm back to tell you about the time when I lost my virginity at age 18 to my ultra-buxom mother. I say ultra-buxom, because there is no doubt that in my mind (and to most men who have actually seen her), she is the most gorgeous creature to have graced the Earth. She is 5ft.6inches of pure female curves. I know for a fact that she wears a 34 EEE bra, since I got used to sneaking into her room after school to " borrow " some of her lingerie and wank myself to oblivion. Once, I didn't manage to angle my oversized shaft out of the way in time and I splattered her bra cups with several wads. Unfortunately, a wad for me means the equivalent of several whole orgasms for a normal guy. You can guess that I made quite a mess and no matter how hard I tried to clean the thick gooey sperm off, there was still some left. I guess she just had to wear a bra with her own son's cum stains for a couple of days before putting it in the wash.
But I digress. My mother, Angela, is only 35 years-old. This means she got knocked up in high school (probably by a jock stud) TWICE. That's because I have an older sister, Kate who is two years my senior. She is, of course, the hottest little piece of ass at school, but I'll come back to her later. My mother must have broken up with my dad pretty soon because I never got to meet him. It never bothered me in the least when I was a kid because my mother was the best mum ever. And ever since I started developing huge muscles at around age 14, I became the man of the house, which of course suits me fine. So our family was as happy as any other family, I could argue even happier than most considering that I never heard any argument at home and we all love each other very much. The fact that both my sister and my mum are super-hot only reinforced the protective feeling I had for them. And they loved me back in return because they could see I was quite the stud and I would be prepared to die for them. I'm sure they both knew I had an enormous cock and it excited me to have them stare at my crotch in awe all the time.
I started exercizing when I was 12, my muscular mass increased dramatically such that I resembled an adult body-builder by age 16 in all but my youthful face and skin. Also, I found out that the extra muscle mass allowed me to sustain much better erections. By fifteen, my cock would be absolutely rock-hard and I would not feel the least bit dizzy from the rush of blood. I could stay hard longer and recover faster. So fast actually, that by sixteen, it would take me at least three orgasms for my cock to deflate. Now at age 18, I can achieve four powerful ejaculations in a row, without losing any of my hardness in between fucks. My orgasms are also much more powerful than a normal guy : I come at least twenty massive wads everytime, even after three orgasms in a row. Despite the many porn movies that I've seen so far, I've never encountered any man anywhere near as potent as me. I remember reading on a porn movies' box cover that " John Holmes will amaze you with his 15-inch cock ". But when I viewed the movie, I realized that they were counting in " porn inches "! I was bigger than that guy when I was 10! There was another porn movie with a guy named " Peter North ", who supposedly came like a firehose and had a big cock. Again, I wasn't surprised to see that I was much bigger soft than he was hard and that his " massive cumshots " were a mere trickle compared to my humongous loads.
I had just celebrated my eighteenth birthday a month before when I decided it was time to make a move on my mother, Angela. I had been fantasizing about her for almost two years now and, judging by her behaviour lately, the time was ripe for my mum to bust my cherry. She was dressing up more sexily everyday, thrusting her curvaceous hips sideways as she walked when she knew I was behind her and my eyes were fixed on that perfectly shaped ass of hers.
It was a Thursday night when it happened. I was down in the basement where we had installed a small gym for the whole family's use. I was
Or is it Adobomedia? Macrodobedia? AcroMacrobe?
To all of you conspiracy theorists and such, this could actually be good. Think beyond the "replacement for Microsoft" argument. Seeing as how Google is expanding and Microsoft if just Microsoft. The more companies that become bigger means the more threat to Microsoft, and even Google to a certain degree. As long as there are companies who can threaten such giants, be they other giants or just small groups (Mozilla Foundation). Competition is exactly what a capitalist society needs to thrive, otherwise it gets stale. This could cause an improved product from everybody. So dont get worried when another merger happens, just be happy that this means more competition for everbody.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
I think your site needs more tables...
Amid Microshaft battling Google and Apple, this quitely slips under the radar. The shareholders approved it 10 fipping days ago. We must really be on edge about the three aforementioned. I can only think positively about this, something that I rarely do with an acquisition. I see it can only be good for web standards and web development. Dreamweaver + Flash meet SVG + PDF. Great vector graphics, web publishing tools, and document formatting.
Can't you just run two instances of the 32-bit version?
Flash? lol
Perhaps things will go the other way with all the good things about Photoshop etc going into Flash/Director and Dreamweaver.
... not so long ago these 2 were duking it out in court over interface similarities. Now the offending apps will likely have more in common in terms of interface.
One thing that surprises me is how most people miss the point that flash isn't just about animation any more. It's a platform! Consider this, ActionScript is a full featured OO language. Flash is installed on almost any computer. Wouldn't this begin to suggest that you could use Flash to create truly platform agnostic web-distributable applications?
Screw web "pages", the future of the web is about web "applications". Cross platform web applications marginalize (actually commoditize) Microsoft's operating system (and a big portion of it's business model.
Why do you think MS is working on Avalon?! To tie "rich" internet applications to windows, and not to other OSes like Mac or Linux.
Perhaps we should all learn Flash and start writing applications in it... this might do something to help knock MS off it's thrown. (Not that I care, but it's something a lot of Slashdotters do care about.)
No, I didn't forget anything - I just omitted including the other 6000 pages of issues with it. I just love the MM_crap garbage pretend code it generates too. It's just lovely being stuck fixing someone else's work that was done this way - it's usually a horrible mess (it's quite unefficient, too).
Another big issue with it is that too much PHB's have been contracting n00bs to make stuff for them (which turns out to be broken and extremely buggy - if it works at all!), and then once you've fixed their job (with real hand-coded stuff), then they complain it's "not [easily?] maintainable" because DW doesn't understand anything that wasn't created by itself. Tons of stuff doesn't show up on the preview pane, so to them it sucks. They'd rather have that garbage generated by DW than nice C# code-behind asp.net pages, multi-tier architecture, using stored procedures, with an MVC and everything. Everything's gotta be point-and-click, brainless, GUI oriented stuff. Really sad. I blame it on all these idiot self-proclaimed "web designers" (they're the only ones who seem to care about DW really).
I'd like to understand what they actually like in DW, as it makes no sense to me. Those toolbars at the top that take forever to navigate to generate tags for you? It's much faster to type them (especially with something like intellisense or macros). If they can't remember simple markup they're in the wrong business.
Adobe's Strategy:
1. Force propreitary technology, discredit open standards. "Who's going to support it?" they tell their customers.
2. Open standards winning, so embrace & extend standard to make it proprietary.
3. Launch overpriced under-featured Adobe application.
4. Make software easy to pirate.
5. Destroy competitors with lawsuits and loss-leader pricing.
6. Merge overpriced software into Photoshop.
7. Profit.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
PDF is a subset of Postscript with extensions like font embedding and compression. It's a description model, which is why it's so cool that it can be used to store documents that appear the same everywhere and have it printed to look just like it is on screen (and that OS X's Quartz is based on the PDF model).
What sucks is Adobe Acrobat. PDF is just fine. Try any lightweight PDF viewer.
"Sufferin' succotash."
TeX, maybe...?
Actually, if you just don't install the plugins package Acrobat is both really snappy and well behaved (this is on Ubuntu). That's why there are tutorials all over the web on how to remove most plugins from Acrobat on Windows. The actual reader is lightweight and nice, it's all those unnecessary extras (including DRM and privacy-invading javascripts that some are so afraid of) that's the bloat.
It's actually pretty funny that they've designed the application in a good way so things can be removed and added like this, but at the same time seems to want this to be a secret and prefers to tell the users that they need it all. Of course, this is probably just sound marketing strategy from their point of view, and the average user probably rather waits a bit than for something not to work. Not having those plugins installed means that URLs aren't clickable for instance, but I can live with the occassional copy/paste instead - and if I really wanted to, I could manually get that plugin.
So, Acrobat is really the choice as far as I can tell, even though it's not a good moral or political choice. Sure, there are plenty of other alternatives to choose from under Linux, but so far I've found none that's actually useable unless you only do sequential reading - page by page, from start to end. The few PDF:s I use are usually references and manuals of some sort, or sometimes large design documents. I need the ability to navigate these quickly. Search, bookmarks, ToC, and thumbs all those things are either missing or seriously hobbled in all the alternatives I've tried at least.
Feel free to inform me of the one I've missed. I can live with crappy rendering, if needs be, but I do need a good UI.
Spine World
Why... the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer, of course!
PDFs are so much of a pain that someone went out to make a javascript script that, inserted into each document, puts a little icon of warning indicating file type next to each link that could potentially lock the browser, your computer, and life in general (link preview)
But yeah, PDFs are annoying to no end. I see that they're useful, but why must they freeze my browser with such alarming consistency? Another curious note, whenever I close a PDF file in Firefox, adobe acrobat doesn't exit. It sits there taking up 30 megabytes of memory. I have to go control+alt+delete on its ass before it shuts down. Why's this?
Now I only have one corporation to hate on instead of two. This frees up hatred for new and upcoming businesses.
Complaining about buffering, is like complaining that water is wet. Don't like it? Get broadband. The laws of physics are more accomodating there.
Take note: Historically, whenever Adobe has interacted with another company, as it has many times, the formula for the name change has always been the same. This makes it easy to predict the new company name.
Extrapolating past trends to current developments, we can probably say with certainty that the new company name will be...
Adobe.
I can see it now: A few month from now, Slashdotters will rant on a post about how Adobe mangles the Macromedia brand.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
It takes forever to load up a PDF document, and it makes the computer slow.
I hate flash banners and such, they annoy me when I try to read information on the webiste, which is why I probably came to the website. I also dislike propiertary file formats.
As somone who refuses to install flash, I'm wondering if I might be stuck with the ghostscript viewer for PDF's on windows.
And WTF is up with windows acrobat reader prompting me to enable javascript every time I close the app?
Who the hell wants to write TeX?
PDF has a grip, because Adobe and Quark have a grip on the publishing industry. It's along the same lines as to why most home computer users run Windows, because it's been around, and peopple are used to it.
You forgot the "grip on academic publications". Hard science folks just love to use tons of equations and cite millions of sources, and don't care particularly about cool visual look as long as formatting looks really tidy, so LaTeX definitely isn't going away any time soon in those circles.
And (La)TeX to PDF conversion is easy, which means that they're both used extensively. =)
How will this merged company have greater leverage against Microsoft than Adobe and Macromedia have, in sum, as separate companies? It's still just Acrobat and still just Flash. And a number of products like Freehand and GoLive are likely to fall by the wayside. How will any of this hurt Microsoft or stave off their advances?
Perhaps you should just educate yourself then.
Instead of wasting your time with convoluted, non-friendly DHTML/Javascript (read: AJAX) applications that are not cross-browser/cross-platform friendly by any measure, you take a look at what Flash can do in the way of RIA development. Easier to develop, cleaner, better user experience, more accessible, far fewer incompatibility issues, looks better, WTF else do you need? If it slows your computer down, thats down to shit-poor programming, not Flash itself.
Blaming Flash because a bunch off A$$holes design annoying ads and cheesedicks who think Flash is an excuse to create useless splash screens is like blaming your Television for bad commercials and movie cameras for Ben Afleck.
Or am I wrong? Maybe we should start slamming GIMP for all the tasteless JPEG advertising and GIF animations? Those bastards! 'course, only decent folk use OSS, so those guys must be using PhotoShop...
This will be the end of both companies. Luckily I don't really care about the software from either. PDFs are nice, but since it's an open standard I don't need Adobe for it. Macromedia just makes annoying advertizing enabling software as far as I can tell. I guess if I can't get a 'modern' copy of Photoshop (OSX-intel say) because the company has cratered that might be an issue, but I don't use is professionally, and I imagine other companies will setup up to fill the void.
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They're betting their entire printing system on Metro. So either it works, and works well, or they simply won't ship it.
As SVG is an open standard for vector graphics, the way the merger will affect is very important to any of you, Slashdotters. And to all people who care about open standards.
Dreamweaver used to be the last app keeping me tied to XP since font sizing on DW-OS X was so lame. Not that I needed it as an editor since I use Emacs for everything. It was just the templating, crude as it is. When I discovered Perl's Template Toolkit that was all I needed to ditch both DW and XP. Now I code websites while viewing in Mozilla and only right at the end will I boot XP to view in IE6, 5.5, 5.0 to fix CSS bugs. Works like a dream unless a client insists on messing with the templates and has heard of DW's "amazing" features.
Heh. What do you know. I just stumbled upon Evince, which is a part of Gnome, a fork/replacement of GPDF. I'm not sure if it's generally available yet, but it (version 0.4.0) was possible to install in Ubuntu Breezy. This might just be the Acrobat killer I am looking for, it seems very promising at least.
Being a general document viewer, it shows not only PDF but several other formats with more coming, like ppt and OpenOffice.org formats if I read it right. It's also supposed to preview supported docs in Nautilus, but that doesn't work for me (I guess that will be in 2.12, I've seen screenshots though).
It seems to have everything I need in form of navigation, search and so on, looks real nice. And it feels fast too.
Spine World