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Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005
dennison_uy writes "Adobe Systems Incorporated and Macromedia, Inc. today announced they have either received or been notified they will receive all regulatory clearances necessary to complete Adobe's pending acquisition of Macromedia. The companies expect to close the transaction on December 3, 2005. Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?"
To the tune of Yankee Doodle Went to London
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
That's today you insenstive clod!
I for one live in the future, which puts December 3rd as, well, right now.
I hope it's not the end of Freehand, it's far better for tracing bitmaps to vectors than illustrator... Still, flash 8 is fun, just got to wait for everyone to update their bloody plugins before I can start rolling out with it!
Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?" ...it means the end of flash, but I know its just a dream.
Funny, I just posted a journal entry of a letter I wrote to the Tribune about what appears to be a really annoying Macromedia "rollover ad".
Maybe Adobe will encourage users not to do this... (I know this is WAY off topic... but I'm upset about the abuse.) Mod me.
I have my own personal bets about what will be going, but of course, that's from my own perspective. From what the majority of analysts say, yes, Freehand will likely go, as will GoLive.
Much speculation exists regarding Fireworks vs. Photoshop. Photoshop will, of course, stay. What I wonder about is whether or not ImageReady will go. If they could merge some of the features of Fireworks into Photoshop, it would be a fabulous product. I've never liked ImageReady to export photos for the web, and I've not liked using Photoshop for creating simple graphic elements for online either. With enough support, Fireworks may stick around by itself, even.
While I've consistently used products from both companies, and many an employer will likely reap an initial cost-savings from the merger, I am sad to see that competition in this industry has faded. I don't think even a company with as much cash to burn as Microsoft can break in any time soon. However, the tools themselves are pretty well set, so I think the next cool thing will be modifying the user interfaces to be even MORE user-friendly and intutitive. Go GIMP and bring on some competition!
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Why do you seem so concerned? Since Adobe was one of the major companies behind it, I'm sure they will continue going forward with their plans. It's still a very nice vector format.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
How the Adobe-Macromedia Merger Could Impact PDF
Interview of both CEOs
Staff's comments
Article with a bit more bulk on the subject (The article linked about is quite small)
do.what.promptcmds
Macromedia and Adobe both have histories of understandably bundling some of their related/popular products together into sets with rather high price tags so that we consumers can gag over the steep prices, and then wheedle our bosses into thinking that yes, we do need Flash MX Professional (while all of your fellow web designers sigh with disdainful looks).
One would expect some sort of bundle to pop out of this merger that would combine Adobe and Macromedia products...anyone have any ideas on what it might include? Anything you can think of aside from the "obvious" suspects? (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator)
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
At what point does consolidation hinder a company's ability to produce and perform?
All these corporate acquisitions have me worried.
...more like Borophyll...ui I thought this was news over a year ago...come on adobe speed it up a little...!
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
With all those great minds together, maybe they'll find a way to make pdf's load in less than half a day. Both companies have great offerings, but Adobe's products are slow with a side of slow and an extra helping of slow...
Unless they buy Corel too and Painter dies. But surely the Valar would intervene in such a case. Boy, the Silmarillion really ought to address this sort of problem.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Why would Adobe eliminate a successful product line with a loyal fan base? Why sell only one product when you can sell two? Cheers, Adolfo PS. There is no competition for Photoshop in the image editing market, but for me, Fireworks remains an indispensable website prototyping tool.
It won't spell the end of Dreamweaver, GoLive or Flash. I'm getting sick of wading through MM_SwapImage() crap in sites I didn't build but have to maintain.
From the article:
."
"About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe is the world's leading provider of software solutions to create, manage and deliver high-impact, reliable digital content. For more information, visit www.adobe.com
They redirect you to the site you are already on, genius.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Because Adobe and browser manufacturer's can't get along. You have not seen a new release of the svg plugin in forever, and the functionality has been broken over and over again with each release of browsers. Why would Adobe want to continue working on the svg side of things when they can reproduce a more widely integrated technology of flash?
image how good flash could be if adobe cleaned up the interface (so say the properties box isn't different for every tool.)
Corel Land? Why not direct your boat to inkscape shores?
This annoucement just means less competition. Which is always bad for users...
Animoog.org
Actually, no.
While FreeHand is a great product, it really can compete with Illustrator on smaller shops that do Web and Print, but Illustrator print capabilities are better and even if you make your art entirelly on FH you'll need Illustrator to generate a professional-grade printable file (be it TIFF, PS or PDF). Think about FreeHand as a companion for Flash, it is the ideal place to generate all those flashy graphics that you'll animate on Flash.
Fireworks goes the same way, and it's even more web-centric than Freehand.Fireworks actually complements Photoshop and Dreamweaver so I don't think that it will be discontinued. You won't use Fireworks to retouch you photos, but you may use it to put them inside a flash animation, or on a static web page made with Dreamweaver.
I bet things will work like this: Create with ADOBE and publish on the web with MACROMEDIA.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
"Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?"
God I hope so. What steaming piles.
being FORCED to have flash in order to have acrobat. decisions decisions,
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I suspect Adobe will abandon SVG, but because they (now) control the Flash format where SVG is an open standard. Using Flash -- the more widely-distributed technology anyway -- will give them more control over the direction of the format.
I've used Macromedia products since their early days. They used to be cool - a big focus on the developer and keeping everything open. They don't feel so cool these days, they just seem to want to squeeze as much money out of me as possible, and I've started to resent it.
For instance, making a "professional" version of the Flash tool - I'm sure pretty much everyone who buys Flash is a professional, the "professional" version is just an excuse to charge extra for things that should be in the main product.
And they are trying to push developers in the direction they want them to go, rather than providing what developers want. For instance, they have a heavy focus now on using Flash for on-line forms and applications, but when was the last time you actually used a Flash application online? And yet many developers use PHP and are now interested in Ruby and AJAX but Macromedia have very poor support for those technologies.
I would like to think something positive will come out of this merger, but I'm afraid the new Adobe will just use their new powers to try to force developers in the direction they want them to go and find new ways to squeeze more money out of them.
is really not a steaming pile at all. It's the only decent app out there that handles vector graphics as well as bitmapped equally well. It's a godsend for an awful lot of people. Plus, it's much easier to "dive in" than with photoshop for someone who doesn't do much graphics work, but is forced to every now and then.
PNG support is also much better, it produces smaller, better quality files than Photoshop manages to.
I do agree with your comment on freehand however, it is indeed doodooo.
I am NaN
whoa there tough guy, relax. Flash can be bad, but it can be good too...it's the knuckleheads that so completely overuse and abuse Flash that give it a bad name, for simple uses and some relatively targetted other uses, Flash is very effective and cool.
dB Masters
Does anyone think that Adobe's primary reason for buying macromedia was part of a build up getting ready to sue MS over anti-trust and monopoly abuse. MS is going to "bundle" sparkle with Vista, and many think it has the potential to kill Flash. In any case, there is not much debate that it's going to at least take a bite out of flash's market share.
Macromedia is expensive for Adobe, but it might be enough to slow/stop MS from jumping into Adobe's primary business (Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign). We have all seen MS's expressed interest to get into the Photoshop business, but do they want to do it at the cost of another anti-trust case? Another major one could get them broken up.
With everyone commenting about the art tools, I have to wonder what Adobe's plans are for ColdFusion. I know that the official line is "CF is selling very well, so they have no reason to dump it." I'm not sure if I put that much faith in Adobe's common sense.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Macromedia should school Adobe on how to do proper Help files. Seriously, for high profile products like Adobe has I have NEVER seen worse built-in "help". Acrobat and Premiere use PDF files. Photoshop and Premiere use clunky HTML pages. Both suck ass. I realize Adobe likes to standardize on cross-platform solutions, but they seriously need to consider proper Windows help file formats, preferably HTML Help 2.0. Their existing HTML help files are already probably 80% of what they need to be for HTML Help 2.0. At least Macromedia provides decent Help. Adobe should take a cue from them. Unfortunately, they'll probably take only Flash and Dreamweaver and toss the rest.
Dood, FreeHand is not at all web-centric. It's gone (far) downhill since ~ v7, but its roots are as firmly planted in print publishing as Illustrator's and I've produced dozens of EPS, PDF and PS files for various printers using FreeHand. Heck, circa Flash 4/5 and FreeHand 8/9 you had to export FreeHand drawings as Illustrator files to get them into Flash at all -- hardly what one would expect from 'a companion for Flash'.
Back in the day, FreeHand was at least competitive with -- and in several respects, superior to -- Illustrator. FreeHand still does multi-page documents (Illustrator doesn't as Adobe wants you to buy InDesign for that), offered better text formatting for largeish blocks of text (or did through Illustrator CS1) and has a much better trace tool, among other things. Its lens fills were pretty spiffy when they were introduced (v8?) too -- Illustrator had to wait another rev before getting transparency.
Of course, MM let Illustrator catch up with -- and surpass -- FreeHand while they futzed about with Flash, and that new UI (sparkle? spackle? dazzle? drizzle? whatever it's called...) is abominable. FreeHand has long since lost its place in my toolbox. But it's not a 'companion to Flash'.
Adobe could've done the same thing, when they bought Aldus. In fact, they kept Page Maker around long enough for them to get InDesign up far enough for them to start pushing that instead.
But how did they deal with Freehand, when they already had Illustrator? Why, they sold it off to someone else, and conveniently enough, they're getting it back again.
So, if they feel that there's a legitimate reason to maintain two seperate programs that do similar things, they'll be likely to slowly change the two until you get to the point where it's easy to jump ship to the one they prefer (basically, make sure that any outstanding features have been migrated to the other product line), and then kill off the old one.
In the case where they're no significant differentiation in capabilities between the two, they may see the benefit in getting some money back by flipping it to some other company.
By the time we're done, Freehand will have seen more company trades than WordPerfect.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
What would be nice is if Adobe starts to integrate their powerhouse bitmap transforming & rendering technologies into Flash.
Actually, Adobe already tried this with Flash competitor called Live Motion. It was a tool that had great potential, but it couldn't make inroads into the market that Flash totally dominated. Adobe admitted defeat and pulled it from market in 2003.
don't smuggle dope or you will get hAngZ0ReD!
With 2 as 1 maybe they can make Acrobat Reader launch faster or atleast not crash my browser oh btw http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php A nice small pdf reader
Now flash will not only make for highly intrusive ads, they will keep running after you block and shut them down, and hog your system resources like never before.
But the problem is: nobody wants to work with so many programs. If I don't absolutely need some of those slightly more web-centric features of Fireworks, I'm not going to bother using it when I've already got all of my files open in Photoshop; it's not like it can't compensate for such things.
As much as Fireworks compliments Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I don't think there's really much of a necessity for it if you already have a program that is technically capable of doing everything.
Using an open standard allows it to be natively supported by browsers. As you can see in the example of firefox natively supporting it in 1.5. Problem is that their support is very limited and treats the svg document like a raster image at this point. Flash won't ever have that opportunity and will always be just a plugin. Another benefit is that because it's just a standard, I can write whatever programs I want to take advantage of the implementation of svg. I don't need to purchase some flash author in order to accomplish a simple task. The only reason svg got as far as it did was because of the backing of Adobe. If Adobe doesn't push forward, you won't see the other major browser manufacturers supporting svg. Possibly mozilla could take the torch and continue, but that's something of a stretch.
Bye bye dreamweaver. Never liked you much anyway! Go-live is much easier to design with, fewer steps and much less junk code. /silly off
Seriously, this really is bad for all since lack of competition among the top two means less innovation, higher prices and less money in our wallets.
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
will bring us more:
- more PDFs on web pages
- more Flash on webpages
- more Flash in PDFs
- more PDFs in Flash
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
The current versions of Freehand and Fireworks are tightly integrated into .SWF creation. Since the Macromaedia crown jewels are SWF, you're not going to see an immediate dismantleing of the porduct line. However, The underlying object models are not the same and it will take quite a bit of engineering effort to move FH/FW to I/PS.
This won't be completely straightforward. There are design and user philosophy's that will need to be reconciled between the engineering groups.
I believe it will be 2 years or so, before you are going to see Illustrator and Photoshop be able to be feature equivilant so that you can finally shut down Freehand and Fireworks.
"PNG support is also much better, it produces smaller, better quality files than Photoshop manages to."
That's odd... short of saving at 16bits/channel (which maybe Photoshop can't do - I don't touch that thing), I don't think there are any quality settings with PNG per se; it is a lossless format, after all.
...embedding Flash "things" in PDF files. It would be cool to have a motherboard manual with an interactive Flash diagram of the board. While not exactly useful, it would be neat.
There's always Blue Dragon...
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
Bill Gates III
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
PDF SpeedUp 1.42 (win32)
Not only a fancy way to disable the plugins, it actually removes the splash screen, removes crappy GUI elements (advertisments), etc.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
That was supposed to be ironic / funny. Alas, the fact is that gimp sucks compared to commercial offerings and is a major black eye for proponents of F/OSS.
Does this mean that Adobe will speed up the development of a 64-bit Flash plug-in? IMO, that's long overdue.
Yes, this does mean the end of Fireworks and Freehand. Neither have ever been the "professional's choice", meaning Adobe has to justify it's investment in the whole CS2 line over the last several years.
But consumers should benefit from integrated products nonetheless. Let us remember the big interface lawsuits of just a few years ago between these companies. Adobe sued MM over the fact you could configure your interface with floating palettes to look like just like their products, and MM was forced to come up with the whole dockable palettes thing.
what I imagine is going to occur, and what I have held off purchasing the latest MM studio for, is this:
1) Freehand goes away completely, it's already too much like Illustrator to survive.
2) Fireworks gets rebranded as an Illustrator lite, and some of it's rasterization features are taken away. It's made into a lightweight production tool for Flash and Web graphics and given all sorts of hooks into Illustrator.
3) Dimensions returns as a 3D solution for Flash.
M
I use Acrobat Pro for 90% of what I do at work. I can only hope that this merger will force some versatility into the pdf format. We're stuck making our data compatible with 4.0, which is virtually impossible when you generate a pdf in 7. If we can't make it backwards compatible, a massive customer can't access data they are paying for. But Adobe doesn't care. It's more important to make image masks easier to genrate. Too many widgets, not enough usefulness.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
have you tried Flash 8 font anti-aliasing? For me that's the single reason to force the update on your users : highly readable vector fonts (me hates bitmap fonts, used and abused by flashers worldwide). now I agree this is more a question of flash 7 and previous being bad with fonts, but still a "killer-reason" to go for requiring flash 8 on a website
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Instead of jamming more things like Flash into PDF documents, Adobe should be working on ways to streamline it's bloated PDF format. The stupid PDF reader already takes 10 minutes to load up. They should make it more like a live TeX renderer or something. PDF just seems so bloated and slow.
Because I can't stand the bloated, difficult to use Photoshop (Athough the same could be said about Flash TBH).
My Portfolio
It might be a great app for the average user to throw up a good looking templated site, but it isn't going to be much use to anyone who wants to make complex, original custom designs.
I am sick and tired on websites that use 30% of my CPU just to show a useless, animated logo, or using Flash menus that can't be searched in or for, and unable of being indexed by search engines, and that break back and forward navigation, or waiting 10 seconds or more when a new page loads just to be shown the intro animation for that page.
How about starting to put content, rather than mere presentation, on your pages instead? I, for one, would almost be happier to see Flash eradicated from the web than to see Microsoft eradicated from the OS market.
I've never gotten the hang of using the pen tool in illustrator. Lets see...option-click on a point to drag out a BCP...Oops! I've created a duplicate path by mistake! Give me Freehand's interface any day!
-- Boycott Shell
... They'll combine the Adobe and Macromedia software suites one way or another, creating an extremely useful but even more impossibly bloated graphic design and animation program package or packages. Why throw out perfectly good software when you can use the code - which you now own - to make your own products better? That doesn't make sense.
Freehand and Fireworks probably aren't going anywhere, but they won't be known by that name. They'll become components of other pieces of Adobe software, granted that they have definite advantages over Adobe's existing products or are designed to perform tasks that Adobe's products simply can't. (Or should I say, 'Macrodobe'. Damn, that name is stupid.)
However, even if the software suites are combined to make a really dandy graphics and animation package, this will also likely translate into an increase in cost, as though the average Joe could afford it anyway. Huzzah.
Awesome!
Penny - plain text accounting
There are a few corner cases that Preview doesn't do well with, but in the two years I've been using OS X at home, (outside the case of PDF forms and PDFs that have active content) there have been less than a half dozen times where I've had to load Acrobat Reader instead.
I predict that the Macromedia apps will all be allowed to die a slow death, just as the way Adobe has treated Frame Technologies and its product FrameMaker after acquisition. The development will be sent to Bangalore, and the code will rot.
I used Freehand back when it was an Aldus product, through version 4. It was a great drawing program that supported both the Mac and Windows, which was good because we had both platforms where I worked.
I hope Adobe does not discontinue Freehand, I'd hate to see the market shrink down to just Illustrator.
No matter where you go... there you are.
- much less of that favorite format of mine that shall SVG remain nameless (not that Microsoft's XAML and WhatWG's canvas help)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Microsoft still really thinks that they can kill open standards based web browsing if they can make Longhorn and Vista good enough. Given this world view, they loathe Flash because it is largely platform agnostic. It runs on all systems and within all popular web browsers. Microsoft hates that.
Like I said in a previous reply - I use flash to design pop and rock artist websites - very little content, but very, well, flashy ;)
One person's take on it.
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/09/13.html#a48
Once that's possible, you can embed a Flash in a PDF within a Flash within a PDF... and so on. Place the things all around the web and bring the computers of the world (well, the Windows boxes, anyway) to their knees as they all break down in an infinitely recursive downward death spiral of shallow content. Ha ha haaa!
After they completely swallow Macromedia, and the Macradobe engineers get together - especially after Apple's transition to X86 - Software Product names will be irrelevant.
Photoshop will change in the wake of Aperture.
Illustrator will become part of the Flash Suite, which will be drastically reorganized and simplified.
GoLive will shed its skin in favor of Dreamweaver's.
ColdFusion will die a slow quiet death or be spun off into a separate organization. Possibly with an OpenSource component.
--
I, for one, welcome our new Adobromedia/Macrodobe overlords.
As the ol' sayin' goes: If you can't beat them, but them out and then destroy their product so yours is the only one left standing.
Sounds exactly like Microsofts strategy, but except sometimes Microsoft will get the competition's product, slap on a MS logo on it and call it "Microsoft Doo-Hickey YYYY". (YYYY = current year it was SUPPOSED to be released in) Anyone remember Virtual PC??
As someone who's been using Adobe products since 6th grade, to say I'm more comfortable with their interface would be an understatement. My first version of Photoshop was v3 - text layers converted to raster instantly, no multiple undoes, etc, and my first version of Illustrator came on 17 floppy disks. No, really. I'm now in web design, and use both Dreamweaver and GoLive because there are some things each does better. I really prefer GoLive's site management - the ability to update the Live site to reflect whatever you've done locally, even if that means deleting files! But there are some things I can only do in Dreamweaver, so that means using an interface that's (to me) illogical and clunky. I honestly couldn't be happier, as I only see this simplifying my life a few years down the road. I'll get the best features of both programs, in the Adobe interface, and everything will be GOOD. [I haven't used Flash enough to comment on that...I have used Freehand...and screw you Freehand.]
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
Photochop this!
[nudge, nudge]
If I recall well, Aldus also owned Pagemaker, which has been bought by Adobe to make it into InDesign... (InDesign that is now industry standard over QuarkXPress) wow Adobe can also do good things with software they acquire
Instead of Flash having a unified palette column on the right, it'll have palettes littered all over the screen. Awesome.
(The property bar in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign changes [for the most part] with every tool.)
----------
Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?
We can but hope.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
Not much of a prediction, but i hope adobe to replace flash for favor of SVG.
,but not limited, when you are dealing with masks.
-Adobe's SVG plug-in braded as Flash v9. Carring alone flash 8 or a SWF-to-SVG converter for backword compatibility.
-Flash will export to Flash9 format, aka SVG.
Flash (player+authoring tool) is pretty baggy and you have to know a bunch of 'trick' and work-arounds to actually do something. Especially
"Does this mean the end for apps that take less than 2 minutes to boot?"
//WR
Sorry to disappoint your faith in groupthink. Flash has legitimate, appropriate uses, such as creating sites that go beyond simple click-to-the-next-page interfaces. Just because it's frequently misused, or because you don't see any value in rich media and want it banned from the web, doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Fireworks actually competes with ImageReady and NOT Photoshop. But since ImageReady is always installed in conjunction with Photoshop, people assume that it is.
That said, Fireworks is A LOT better than ImageReady and even Photoshop when it comes to creating graphics and text for the web. If they kill it, screw them. I'll keep using my MX 2004 copy.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
This is because you're only being exposed to "Skip-Intro" sites built by incompetent Flash users that don't know how to code in Actionscript and so are left making movieClips and timelines. Problem is that movieClips, especially invisible ones, CONTINUE to play little blinking animations etc in the background and will hog your CPU. It's important to note that this is NOT a problem with Flash or the plugin, you can put that problem squarely on the head of idiot users.
Macromedia's website is built on 80% Flash content, does your CPU run at 30% + to view it? No. Why? Because they have users that *know* how to build proper Flash animations.
Try viewing a page with 7+ animated gifs and see what happens to your cpu.
Damn just used the last point. Somebody else out there Mod Parent Up this app is great and so simple I thought it was a Unix/Linux app.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Some stupid flash advertisement at the top of a PDF document advertising some "new" buzz wordy business solution I.....am.....going.....to.....SCREAM!
It's always funny to hear silly people raging at prevailing trends, like the unimportant little Canutes that they are. Especially when they're wrong.
Truth is that there's a lot of content that can only effectively be displayed and interacted with in Flash, and in areas such as video, Flash is emerging as a clear winner.
Have a quick look at this doldas' website to get an idea of the problem here. Why pretend to be a purist son? What exactly are you trying to prove- that looks and brains are two sides of a coin? Maybe that's the case with you, but you are just voice.
standards will come to you, they will find you...
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
Notepad (or any text aditor), standard compliant (x)html and css and... there you go FEAR THE STANDARDS!!! :-P
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
Personally, I believe that too many of you are not looking forward regarding this aquisition. Perhaps being too computer centric.
I think the crown jewel is flash, not for the web per se with all those annoying flash intros. Rather for the flash platform, coldfusion and the still in development flex. I feel flash will be the delivery vehicle for so called rich internet applications across a broad range of devices. cell phones, hand held, desktop, internet enabled machines etc.
The ability to deliver a graphiclly represented interactive form or video, to devices with various operating systems, screen sizes etc with minimal programing effort will drive the company into the future.
Microsoft may control the desktop, but flash will be the platform-- reachable from desktop, cellphone, pda, even deskphone, tv etc.
pdf will be more and more for print while the flashpaper which will probably be merged as a subset of pdf be used for screen based display of information.
Webdesign will become split between grapic design and template based. With the latter being and interaction of a site manager with a library of templates. Knowledge of html etc will not be required for the masses. Look at how easy networking computers today is compared to 10 years ago. One can go to walmart and come home and have a home network up in no time. Websites including database sites will be the same in the not too distant future. The need for shipping significant copies or dreamweaver or design will die off. Perhaps Adobe will spin them off or sell them to Corel
Convert your image to PNG, trace it with delineate, and open the resulting SVG in Illustrator.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I wonder if flashpaper had a role in Adobe's decision. PDF is Adobe's bread and butter and Macromedia's flashpaper posed a serious threat to it as an alternative vector document format that's just as (and arguably easier) to use.
Also, since Macromedia flash in installed on over 90% of machines surfing the net and PDF is right up there also, Adobe has software running nearly 100% of user's machines, regardless of operating system - this is a powerful position for Adobe to be in! Ever stop to ponder just how many markets Adobe will now dominate with the industries (arguably) best web development, video streaming technology, vector and bitmap media and document formats?
One thing I'd like to see happen to Photoshop as a result of this merger is a context sensitive properties panel. This is what makes Fireworks so intuitive and easy to use--is there any reason not to add this to photoshop?
As for Fireworks and Freehand... It seems to me that Macromedia has even stopped improving this products. For Fireworks, virtually nothing interesting has been added since MX 2004 and freehand doesn't even come with Studio anymore.
Dreamweaver and Flash are really the only hot items to debate about IMHO.
I feel I have to stick up for Dolda2000...
I also thought that most folks here thought that Flash is the single largest scourge on the web. Or to be more precise that its inappropriate use is.
While Flash indeed, as mentioned, has legitimate and appropriate uses, there seems to be far more inappropriate use out there. This seems to grow daily. It's not just the inane moving graphics, it's not just the cpu load from badly designed stuff, it's the damn sound effects that get me. I often browse late at night and sometimes I forget that the volume on my pc is up loud. Nothing more than pop-up windows has made me want to punch my monitor more than Flash pages since I started using the web.
One of the best things for the web is Firefox, because with that you can (and I most surely do) use the Flashblock extension. Nowadays I have to really really need a web page before I turn on the Flash on the page.
Sure, this isn't good news for the few good Flash designers out there but until there is a better alternative or some sort of standards, Flashblock is on, and staying on.
> Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?
Actualy, fireworks eat up photoshop at breakfast.
with fireworks you have amazing fine control "over pixel" when doing graphics for the web.
Not to mention that any program can read the final image as a regular PNG, while with photoshop you have to use some crap that can read PSD's. That makes fireworks much more usefull with file browsers that can show preview for stantard types (like png)
Adobe already has a product that does that - ImageReady, which is included with Photoshop.
My Sysadmin Blog
I think this will be a big plus,
Fireworks has always been a nagging app anyway.
and it will be nice to get better dreamweaver + photoshop + illustrator integration.
Matthew
So how, exactly, is email or even the web (especially with the newer Javascript+DHTML ads) conceptually different? Spam and phishing schemes on email (wasn't there some report saying spam makes up over half of all internet traffic?); poorly designed or IE-only webpages, pages with embedded MIDI or mp3 files; etc.
Which is not to say I give Flash a free pass--there is undoubtedly crappy Flash out there. But like any technology, including the Slashdot-friendly iPod, and P2P apps, it has its good and bad uses.
(No, I'm not a Flash developer, nor do I personally know any who are)
Agreed. I like Macromedia's interfaces far better. It's sad that consolidation is limiting our choices.
http://maps.yahoo.com/
"Play Outside on Sunny Days." - Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto
We're not going to be pushing for a ban on HTML are we? Because HTML *can* be used for
you're out of luck, now they both suck...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
I do the odd bit of low-tech graphics work for my employer, and I too am very saddened by the death of Freehand - the latest version of which will live hopefully forever on my machine. For my own modest needs, I can't see it becoming obsolete anytime soon. Even if I go 100% Linux in future, I'll have it running under Wine (which it does very nicely, along with the other MX '1.1' apps).
Uh... anyway, just wanted to say that Inkscape includes a vector-tracer that compares very nicely with Freehand's. It also saves as SVG, though you can also copy+paste paths into other apps. And although I haven't used Illustrator since v10, I'd say both of these apps take its tracer tool to the cleaners. Hopefully the Freehand trace engine will be adopted into Illustrator in Macrodobe Creative Studio MXP-tilde-starfish(TM).
Maybe Adobe will fix the ass-backwards drawing tools in Flash. Or... maybe they'll keep it crappy to sell more copies of Illustrator...
Homesite remains one of my favorite PHP/HTML editors - not just for its color-coding and nice advanced FIND-REPLACE across directories, but also for its easy UI, file navigation, etc. I used it since it was ColdFusion Studio - and I'm wondering - will Adobe bother to keep advancing it (Macromedia barely did)
I hope that doesn't mean that the free flash download will go the way of the free acrobat reader download that tries to install a bunch of crap on your machine along with what you really want. :P
-Shippy
You can implement full support of nearly every browser's native back/forward buttons within a Flash movie using just a hidden inline frame, a small hidden SWF that is loaded in the frame, a bit of JavaScript and a local connection between that SWF and your main SWF.
Basically every time you go to a new section in the SWF issues a new page-load in the inline frame, the browser history management works as it would with individual files. The hidden SWF tells the main one where to go every time it loads.
To my knowledge this is the same basic principle of how Flex apps fully support the browser back/forward buttons. It works incredibly well and our clients are amazed and dumbfounded when we show this functionality in their Flash sites
The only thing it doesn't really allow for is bookmarking of individual pages.
If you'd like to look at some sample code, the Macromedia Pet Market App Blueprint (download the MX Front End for the sample FLA and HTML files) has this exact method implemented in it.
A couple of notes about using this method:
Have fun!
This acquisition is good for stockholders because Adobe can now stop mollycoddling their fussbudget customers, raise their prices and increase profitability. All that remains in the way of even more plentiful profits is to acquire Quark.
Kudos Adobe!
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Something that I haven't seen mentioned is the fact that RoboHelp will now belong to Adobe. Macromedia allowed the product to languish after they acquired it from eHelp. Not that eHelp did did anything worthwhile with it.
As long a there are applications, there's going to be a need for helptools, no matter what the delivery format. RoboHelp is probably best known for producing help for Windows platform applications, but it also produces help in Oracle Help, Flashhelp, Javahelp, and XML.
I'm not saying that it does this particularly well, nor am I saying it's a good product (it's slow, buggy as hell, designed for a single user, and support has sucked for many years), but it's been just about the only game in town for many years. Many a technical writer has spent an inordinate number of days trying to solve the Robohelp java search app problem, force the poorly coded javascript to work the way they needed, or to overcome the idiocy of the MS-centric style sheets.
It has the potential to be a decent product if Adobe would unleash some development dollars into fixing its limitations and making it a true enterprise application.
Beginning of the year those of us unfortunate enough to support Jrun apps were told MM was actively supporting it. Yeah, we said, we can move to something else after browbeating our masters. Then a couple months ago we here there IS a development team asking what improvements people would like to see in Jrun... Adobe! We know you hate fringe products; KILL JRUN NOW. DIE DIE DIE JRUN DIE.
p.s. I don't like Jrun.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I know Illustrator has an SVG export function, but i wouldn't be suprised to see Flash MX style SVG editor/creator come out of that workshop
You 're absolutely right, alot of people never see the awesome potential within Flash and actionscript. Once for fun i created a sit that used a windows interfaced and then used MySQL as an backend and I created a pretty sweet flash site that mimic a desktop (not windows lol)
I believe that the search function is a plugin to allow Adobe Reader to be offered without it to cut the size of the download - search functionality is what you lose if you say you're on a dial-up connection when downloading Adobe Reader.
The first reply to post a photoshopped flashing acrobat riding a shockwave coming from loudspeakers playing Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver" gets a gold star.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
The only thing it doesn't really allow for is bookmarking of individual pages.
Hmm... that kind of kills off the whole idea, then, but this is because of using frames.
In fact, the only reason FreeHand didn't go to Adobe at that time was because of contractural obligations not to compete with Illustrator. Freehand's (independent of Aldus) developers (Altsys) were bought by Macromedia. But since then FreeHand's been killed. If it weren't dead already, it would be now, because of Illustrator.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
This from a guy with an anti-Microsoft site?
GOLIVE WILL STAY - and SVG will be integrated into FLASH
It also breaks a lot of standards: Flash content isn't human-readable, hardly machine-readable (it is a more or less closed format, after all) and it is more or less non-indexable. It's not too easy to write a new web browser if Flash is required to browse the web.
Where did you get this weird idea that it would be OK to put 7+ animated GIFs (or even so much as a single one) on a web page?Adobe GoLive started out life in 1996 as a Mac-only product called GoLive Pro made a German company called Gonet, predating Dreamweaver by about 18 months. I happened to be working for their UK distributor at the time I got my hands on an early copy. It had a rather quirky Tag mode where you could drop graphic tag icons into the page together with images, IIRC.
:)
4 /26/golive_history.html
For me, the main selling point was that it was the first graphical HTML editor that didn't mess about seriously with your code if you tried to step outside the bounds of the stuff it already knew about. Remember this was at a time when the HTML standard was in considerable flux, with Netscape and Microsoft in particular introducing new tags with every revision of their browsers. For its time, it was an excellent piece of software, Version 2.0 in in the summer of 1997 brought a more extensible architecture; it was way ahead of the pack in terms of functionality, speed and minimal machine-generated HTML code bloat, particularly when you compared it to clunky behemoths like NetObjects Fusion that were its main competitors. Fusion, like so many other products that were around at the time, stored the site in a proprietary format file and merely published to HTML; as soon as you needed to tweak something, you were on your own and couldn't roll the changes back into the source file.
Macromedia didn't ship Dreamweaver 1.0 until December 1997 and IMHO it wasn't really until v1.2 that it became useful.
Adobe bought the product in 1999, took it over to Windows and made some changes, but Macromedia steadily improved Dreamweaver until version 3.0 was vastly superior. I gave up on GoLive around that point, especially as Dreamweaver worked so much better with my usual weapon of choice, hand-coding with BBEdit.
I can't really comment on GoLive as a 'ripoff of Dreamweaver' nowadays, I've not used it since version 5.0, but in some respects you could argue that it's the other way round.
There's a potted history of GoLive on the O'Reilly site: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/0
been using flash and dreamweaver for years. i like them the way they are. i don't want them to become as difficult to use as photoshop. will the prices jump really high since one company controls all of the most popular image/web development apps?
Not really. Flash is deliberately propagated like malware and requires jumping thru hoops to prevent the automatic download and installation. I had one of their customer service morons telling me that "Active X IS Flash". What part of "do not install" does Macromedia not understand. Fuck 'em all.
To really have fun with flashpaper. Great stuff. Wrap a little flash powder inside and you're really in business!
I hate the co-opting names of already cool stuff because of a lack of imagination.
"Flash has legitimate, appropriate uses, such as creating sites that go beyond simple click-to-the-next-page interfaces."
That is what AJAX is for nowadays.
will bring us more:
- more PDFs on web pages
*coff, sputter*
- more Flash on webpages
*choke, gag*
- more Flash in PDFs
*shudder, twitch*
- more PDFs in Flash
*wretch, double over, curl up into a little ball and head explodes*
It's as if a billion web users suddenly cried out in pain and terror.
(heavy sarcasm mode =on, tounge glued to cheek)
On the bright side, we can re-use a few simple acronym and fsck with everyone's heads:
PDF = portable document flash/format
PDA = portable document animation
PSA = photoshop animation
USA = unsual sh*t of adobe....errr....ummm...yeah, that's a good place to stop.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Because flash popups circumvent most (if not all) popup blockers. Which is fucking annoying.
The Farewell Tour II
You 're absolutely right, alot of people never see the awesome potential within Flash and actionscript. Once for fun i created a sit that used a windows interfaced and then used MySQL as an backend and I created a pretty sweet flash site that mimic a desktop (not windows lol)
The above comment was obviously written in Flash, because it's not human readable (at least, not by anybody who speaks English).
No, it doesn't kill the "whole idea" but a long shot.
The "whole idea" was about making Flash sites more usable by enabling back/forward and history navigation in a Flash site using the browser's built in history management.
Considering that you can't bookmark pages within a Flash site regardless, you're not loosing anything (and actually gaining a significant usability enhancement) by using a hidden inline frame to activate automatic, cross-browser, cross-platform back/forward/history navigation within a Flash site.
And technically speaking, there are ways to get around the problem of deep bookmarking in a Flash file, but my original post was meant to be focused on the parent pointing out that there was no back/forward/history support for Flash sites.
Content Schmontent, text isn't the sole source of content in this world !
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Now I can have resource wasting, distracting animations fluttering around inside my PDFs, as well as in my browser window...
I agree completely with you about the Macromedia site. What really bugs me is the Macromedia Exchange section. It is a pain to use specifically because it is based on Flash. You can't open links in a new tab or window, and the back button doesn't work properly.
It doesn't do anything useful that couldn't be done adaquately in HTML, or done better in AJAX.
I fail to see how a pissed off user can be considered a Troll. I have a legitimate beef with the use of Flash and a beef with the requirement to FORCE an upgrade of a plugin. Can't you flash programmers customize the plugin upgrade message that pops up when I see your site? Let me know what I gain by upgrading a player. Let me know why you didn't build an app that degrades gracefully rather than requiring a different plugin.
I can understand advertisers and marketroids wanting to use flash for ads. It keeps the user from being able to close or end the blinking, flashing ad, unless of course you use Flashblocker like I do. If I actually want to view something that is in Flash, it requires an extra click. No problem.
In my corporate environment, there is a Flash plugin installed to IE and the box requires local admin rights to upgrade stuff like this or install new stuff like Firefox. If you are in a support position like I am, this is easy. If you are not, you must wait in line and may not get the upgrade. All of a sudden the thing I want to watch on my break must be viewed from home or I may forget about it.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.