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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.
Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?" ...it means the end of flash, but I know its just a dream.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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/
No, it's because of the three thousand plugins that are loading while you watch that splash screen. Move them from the plugins dir to a backup one, restart Acrobat and see it fail, read what plugin is missing, restore it, repeat 3-4 times and notice how it now takes less than 1 sec to show up.
I tried it and the loading time went from like 10 to 1 second.
Then of course when you're doing something that requires a plugin, restore it and leave it there (for example, the search function *is* a plugin... WTF?) but anyway 90% of them won't be needed.
HTH
Global warming is a cube.
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'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.
There's a lot you can to optimize PNGs, for example with pngcrush. See Wikipedia's detail on PNG filesizes. For more info on PS's bad handling of PNG, see Photoshop & PNG about halfway down that page.
This is the kind of thinking that makes me want kill people.
FreeHand has been dead for a year now. The entire development team in Richardson. TX was disbanded in March 2003. Everyone was laid off (including me), Development was moved to Bangalore, but that effort was axed after 10 months or so without any results. No wonder, our codebase was exceedingly convoluted.
A shame really. The FH development process was a fine example of how things were supposed to be done. Proper bug tracking, competent managers (no, I was just a grunt developer), plenty of testers, proper specs. One can argue with the actual features and the archaic nature of the multitude of settings but the process was good. The latest release has unfortunately not held up well on OS X though.
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/
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.