Apple CEO Steve Jobs basically said this when he announced Lion a year ago, so the fact that this financial analysis firm is predicting it a year later strikes me as worse than a non-story -- it's a moldy story that anyone who's been following the industry already knows. And both Lion and iOS 5 show this slow but deliberate merger in action. The real news is that Microsoft has decided to follow suit with Windows 8: http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/the-end-both-the-desktop-os-and-mobile-os-upon-us-168915
I wholeheartedly agree that Adobe's too-frequent release schedule and backward compatibility issues is a real pain. I keep three versions on my Mac to deal with that silliness. But the story was wrong in one respect. The author said that they saved an InDesign CS3 file in CS4 and then couldn't send it back to the original designer. There is a standard way in all Adobe apps to this, and it's been there for all of InDeisgn's versions at least. It's not intuitive though: You have to export the layout (not save as) to a file format first called InDesign Interchange and later IDML. That file is readable by the previous version of InDesign, so you can share between any two levels (CS2 and CS3, or CS3 and CS4, or CS4 and CS5). But you can't do this across more than immediately adjacent levels, such as between CS3 and CS5 or CS2 and CS5. The lack of intuitiveness is probably mean to encourage upgrades.
There is a negative for Adobe in all of this. At work, a license snafu meant I lost my license to InDesign CS3 (it was transferred to another user accidentally). IT said they could buy me the current version (CS5) but that would mean I couldn't exchange files with my colleagues. Adobe had no way to get the older version. So, my choice was to live without InDesign or to have my company upgrade several other users at a cost of more than $2,000 (since we're talking Creative Suite upgrades). At that price, I'm living without InDesign at my office,
Stallman has become a parody of himself. This guy only will talk to the press if he can control the published story, and he complains about cellphones being Stalinesque? He's about control, not freedom. Pot, meet kettle.
I too think there's way too much white space and the text is designed for 10-year-olds' vision, not adults'. The other reported issues on the AJAX stuff is also true: the submission text boxes are too small, and there's weird behavior such as when i tried to zoom using Command-+ this window simply went away. And they often load slowly on my three-year-old MacBook Pro.
But more than the poor design and problematic technology, Slashdot has lost its sense of dynamism and community -- its soul. The color rankings are sorely missed, as they gave a sense of what the community thought of submissions (regardless of what the editors thought). Now all submissions are undifferentiated. And submissions disappear very fast, and who knows how to find them without the old ability to filter by color/popularity. So anyone who wants to explore stories had better check fast and often, because they disappear really fast and who knows why. (Maybe that was the goal: force more camping on the Recent page?) Also, lots of stories can't be voted on -- why?
Basically, the new Slashdot feels like a cold place in which to make a submission in and then leave, not to actually explore or use as a reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple CEO Steve Jobs basically said this when he announced Lion a year ago, so the fact that this financial analysis firm is predicting it a year later strikes me as worse than a non-story -- it's a moldy story that anyone who's been following the industry already knows. And both Lion and iOS 5 show this slow but deliberate merger in action. The real news is that Microsoft has decided to follow suit with Windows 8: http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/the-end-both-the-desktop-os-and-mobile-os-upon-us-168915
I wholeheartedly agree that Adobe's too-frequent release schedule and backward compatibility issues is a real pain. I keep three versions on my Mac to deal with that silliness. But the story was wrong in one respect. The author said that they saved an InDesign CS3 file in CS4 and then couldn't send it back to the original designer. There is a standard way in all Adobe apps to this, and it's been there for all of InDeisgn's versions at least. It's not intuitive though: You have to export the layout (not save as) to a file format first called InDesign Interchange and later IDML. That file is readable by the previous version of InDesign, so you can share between any two levels (CS2 and CS3, or CS3 and CS4, or CS4 and CS5). But you can't do this across more than immediately adjacent levels, such as between CS3 and CS5 or CS2 and CS5. The lack of intuitiveness is probably mean to encourage upgrades.
There is a negative for Adobe in all of this. At work, a license snafu meant I lost my license to InDesign CS3 (it was transferred to another user accidentally). IT said they could buy me the current version (CS5) but that would mean I couldn't exchange files with my colleagues. Adobe had no way to get the older version. So, my choice was to live without InDesign or to have my company upgrade several other users at a cost of more than $2,000 (since we're talking Creative Suite upgrades). At that price, I'm living without InDesign at my office,
Stallman has become a parody of himself. This guy only will talk to the press if he can control the published story, and he complains about cellphones being Stalinesque? He's about control, not freedom. Pot, meet kettle.
I too think there's way too much white space and the text is designed for 10-year-olds' vision, not adults'. The other reported issues on the AJAX stuff is also true: the submission text boxes are too small, and there's weird behavior such as when i tried to zoom using Command-+ this window simply went away. And they often load slowly on my three-year-old MacBook Pro.
But more than the poor design and problematic technology, Slashdot has lost its sense of dynamism and community -- its soul. The color rankings are sorely missed, as they gave a sense of what the community thought of submissions (regardless of what the editors thought). Now all submissions are undifferentiated. And submissions disappear very fast, and who knows how to find them without the old ability to filter by color/popularity. So anyone who wants to explore stories had better check fast and often, because they disappear really fast and who knows why. (Maybe that was the goal: force more camping on the Recent page?) Also, lots of stories can't be voted on -- why?
Basically, the new Slashdot feels like a cold place in which to make a submission in and then leave, not to actually explore or use as a reader.
FYI that this is not the original story. The original is at http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/infoworld-review-microsoft-silverlight-4-vs-adobe-flash-101-260
http://www.infoworld.com/offshore/. We looked at 12 cities and 6 regions.
FYI that this post was actually written and published elsewhere, at the InfoWorld site (where I work). The story linked here is not the original. Here's the original: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/18/Study_predicts_IT_staff_reductions_in_09_1.html