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Adobe Intends To Move All of Its Applications Online
E1ven writes "Adobe has announced their intention to transition their entire suite of software to web-based applications This includes their popular offerings Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. '[Adobe Chief Executive Bruce] Chizen answered a question about whether a complete shift to Web delivery would take five or 10 years and he indicated it would be closer to a decade. Like many traditional software makers including Microsoft Corp., Adobe must fend off rivals delivering competing applications over the Web and it also needs to adopt a new business model after years of selling software in boxes. Chizen expects professional customers of products like Acrobat document-sharing or Photoshop for editing images would opt to pay for subscriptions versus facing a steady stream of advertising to use tools critical to their jobs.'"
This is a good one. I use it regularly.
Foxit. Many Windows users here on Slashdot are praising it.
Foxit is terrific. It's a small download, it loads about 200x faster than the bloated Adobe Reader, and it's free!
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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I tried Sumatra for about 3 months and found it nice and quick, but had issues opening some files and had printing problems where it would cut off the right side of the page. YMMV.
I switched to Foxit Reader and have not had the same issues since.
Maybe he's talking about a service like Steam. You know, online *delivery* of *applications*, which then run locally on your PC, complete with pretty-good copy protection systems and a subscription-based approach to "ownership". Makes sense to me... what's so special about retail boxes for software anyway?
Yeah, Foxit is awesome. It handles printing large documents (C size & up) much better than Acrobat ever thought of. It also has a much smaller memory footprint.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I've been using Foxit for probably 2 years now. It does more than just read PDFs. You can type directly into the PDF (look for "typewriter mode") and draw and mark it up with lines, squares, circles, and whatnot. It's great for PDF forms that must be downloaded and normally handwritten on, like the forms most company HRs post.
Portability.
The developer only needs one set of skills: Flash or Flex, or XHTML/Javascript.
Speed?
I don't know the specifics of the architecture. That said, the Flash runtime has steadily been getting faster. They demo'd a 3-D Polygon at the 2006 MAX that you spin in real time. No lag. And if the one Sneak-Peek from this year's MAX in Chicago on Photoshop in AIR is any indication, The features demo'd ran as if it was running from a "native" coded Photoshop, saturation levels in realtime, a tray image thumbnails of history, roll-backs, changing the color of a car in the image! All worked as if you were running a full version of Photoshop.