Nope. FreeHand was developed by Altsys (a company in Dallas, TX) and only published by Aldus. When Adobe bought Aldus, the rights to FreeHand were reacquired by Altsys (after a bit of a legal battle); Macromedia then acquired the entire company of Altsys, including FreeHand, and most of the original developers.
So yeah, it's fair to say Macromedia made FreeHand, in the same sense as many other products-resulting-from-multiple-corporate-mergers .
I don't think the original MacDraw had Bezier curves, actually, at least not as we're used to today.
I think you could draw a polygon and then "smooth" it, which would convert it into quadratic beziers, but editing in that environment was pretty unpleasant IIRC.
I'll second that.... I find the touchpads nearly unusable. Though, to be fair, trackpoints are also in the just-barely-usable range IMHO, so I end up carrying a mouse around most of the time...
I guess it's time for someone to invent a better laptop-oriented-mouse-substitute.
You had me up till that point... I also want such a beast, but c'mon, a full numeric keypad on a *laptop*? (It's rare enough that I use the keypad on my full desktop keyboard.)
I've seen a few such beasts, and they're freakin' huge!
Now, I'd definitely go for a laptop that had full-size, rationally-placed arrow keys, pageup/pagedown, etc.... or even ones that are tucked away in odd places or reduced to half-size status (yes, I'm talking to YOU, Mr. Apple Powerbook Keyboard Designer Guy)... but a numeric keypad? Feh.
who the hell modded this "interesting"? if you want to give an informed, reasoned response as to somethings junkitude, fair enough. but no way should this get modded up.
I mean, I presume we're talking about the same "church" that considers single-cell fetii, and half-her-brain-missing Terri Schiavo to also have souls.
As soon as the Church provides scientific evidence (not even proof mind you... just plausible *evidence*) of a "soul", then maybe I'll be interested in what they have to say.
Absolutely. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented on this thread. Patents are getting a bad rap on/. and the like lately... and while it's certainly true that there are patent abuses (especially in the software area), this doesn't look like one to me.
And I'll agree with the earlier posters: let's at least *try* to keep the editorializing out of the original posting, m'kay?
Hear hear. There's plenty of patent abuse around (especially in software patents), but this doesn't appear to be one of 'em... one company patents the idea, the other company cries foul, because, well, they want to use the patented idea.
Sure sounds like it. I haven't seen the demo, but "bringing together pixel-based painting and vector graphics features" sounds exactly like good old Fireworks.
The Tapwave Zodiac was (is) a PalmOS machine with an analog game control stick: http://www.tapwave.com/
I say "was" because, though it's still in production, it also seems clearly to have a limited lifespan with the PSP out...
Re:A game developer's response...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
An excellent response, wish I could mod you beyond 5. I worked with Mr. daVinci on that very same game, so let me amplify a few points:
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
It's not merely that people are buying the same-old-stuff, but also that it costs so freakin' much to make an "A"-list title these days... if you are fronting the millions of dollars it takes to produce a title, I guarantee that you want assurance you'll see a return on your investment. As with Hollywood, most publishers (large and small) would rather take the shitty-but-safe route of Yet Another Pile Of Adam Sandler Horseshit than risk their money on an indie. It would be nice if the industry was about making "art", but to exercise one of the best movie quotes ever: "It ain't about art! It's about percentage!"
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
Um, "dating simulation"?
Clearly, I've been married and out of the "dating" scene waaaaaay too long if that's what constitutes dating these days...:-)
On the other hand, the exclusive deals that EA has inked with football is utterly deplorable and should be called what it is: a monopoly tactic
If I were an EA investor, I might call it a savvy business deal; certainly, the NFL has the right to license their property as they see fit. But as a former EA employee who has sworn to never purchase or play another EA game as long as I live -- and also an avid fan of videogame-football (Sega 2k5 was awesome) -- I have to say that I hope Mr. Probst & Co roast in hell for this deal. (That said, hopefully Midway's upcoming non-NFL-related football game will live up to the hype...)
So for example, you might have a game with 10 2-hour long episodes, each of which sells for $10-20. Wouldn't this really be preferable if they were released every 3 months or so?
Absolutely! Personally, most games are too freakin' long for me to finish these days anyway... I have other stuff going on in my life. I'd much rather have 10 hours of *solid* gameplay,(with a nice beginning, middle, and end) than 40 hours that have been padded out with Yet Another Level Of Shooting Grunts And Dodging Critters... I'm too old (and slow) for all the reflexes to hold my interest for that long! Give me a *story*, dammit... at least of comic-book quality. (And no, "Demons have invaded the earth and you must kill them" is not a story. It's an excuse.) Can't some enterprising company hire someone like, say, Brian Azzarello / Warren Ellis / Alan Moore to put a storyline worth a damn into a game?
I'll take this one step further and argue that jumping puzzles aren't fun *anywhere*.
Amen! It's time for "jumping puzzles" to join crates as "sign the game designer ran out of ideas or time and is just trying to pad out his level requirements..."
Keep in mind this is a _scripting_ language, it is not compiled and is interpreted at run-time. Having to declare and type your variables would be a waste of time.
Gah... nothing personal, I am SO FREAKING TIRED OF THIS ARGUMENT. To me, this is equivalent to saying that "scripting language" is a synonym for "language I use when I don't really care if my code is robust or reliable".
I realize this is a highly unfashionable viewpoint on/. these days, but I am just not interested in wasting hours tracking down runtime errors that end up being due to a typo I made somewhere, especially when any reasonable strongly-typed language could (and would) have prevented the code in question from ever compiling.
Yeah, yeah, I know, dynamic languages give you soooo much flexibility to do cool things. I happen to agree. But IMHO that flexibility is outweighed by the pain in the ass factor of stupid mistakes that aren't caught until runtime.
In other words: if there are obvious mistakes that I can have the computer find for me... well, that sounds like a Good Thing to me. (After all, the less time I have to spend debugging, the more time I can spend arguing language features on Slashdot....)
(And yes, I know about various strongly-typed languages with smart type inference, eg OCaml and Haskell. Unfortunately they aren't options at my workplace, and I haven't had the time to learn them on my own yet. I like the concept, though.)
OK, so "destruction of property" is a subjective term. In practice, though, I think it's clear that while obviously destruction-of-property does not equal terrorism, terrorism can consist of nothing but destruction-of-property.
Imagine that the 9/11 attacks had been carefully orchestrated so that the buildings were completely empty. Now further imagine that (miraculously!) there was no loss of life by firefighters, police, bystanders, etc. And, just for grins, that the planes were empty of passengers and crew -- just those dang terrorists (err, "dissidents").
Yeah, it's a contrived example. But I don't know how you'd call it anything but terrorism.
The implication I got from the statement is that Flash is intrinsically bad, and more to the point, incapable of producing anything worthwhile.
This is, really, a stupid thing to say about *any* medium, be it Flash, PDF, HTML, AJAX, or cuneiform.
Yeah, there are lots of annoying Flash bits out there. There are also lots of annoying bits of all the other forms up above. (Well, I'm not so sure about the cuneiform bit, but you get the point.)
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. FreeHand was developed by Altsys (a company in Dallas, TX) and only published by Aldus. When Adobe bought Aldus, the rights to FreeHand were reacquired by Altsys (after a bit of a legal battle); Macromedia then acquired the entire company of Altsys, including FreeHand, and most of the original developers.
s .
So yeah, it's fair to say Macromedia made FreeHand, in the same sense as many other products-resulting-from-multiple-corporate-merger
I don't think the original MacDraw had Bezier curves, actually, at least not as we're used to today.
I think you could draw a polygon and then "smooth" it, which would convert it into quadratic beziers, but editing in that environment was pretty unpleasant IIRC.
Damn... we need a "Best-of-Slashdot" section (like best-of-craigslist) to archive posts like this one :-)
Trackpoint controller
I'll second that.... I find the touchpads nearly unusable. Though, to be fair, trackpoints are also in the just-barely-usable range IMHO, so I end up carrying a mouse around most of the time...
I guess it's time for someone to invent a better laptop-oriented-mouse-substitute.
full numeric keypad
You had me up till that point... I also want such a beast, but c'mon, a full numeric keypad on a *laptop*? (It's rare enough that I use the keypad on my full desktop keyboard.)
I've seen a few such beasts, and they're freakin' huge!
Now, I'd definitely go for a laptop that had full-size, rationally-placed arrow keys, pageup/pagedown, etc.... or even ones that are tucked away in odd places or reduced to half-size status (yes, I'm talking to YOU, Mr. Apple Powerbook Keyboard Designer Guy)... but a numeric keypad? Feh.
who the hell modded this "interesting"? if you want to give an informed, reasoned response as to somethings junkitude, fair enough. but no way should this get modded up.
To be blunt in my reply:
who gives a shit?
I mean, I presume we're talking about the same "church" that considers single-cell fetii, and half-her-brain-missing Terri Schiavo to also have souls.
As soon as the Church provides scientific evidence (not even proof mind you... just plausible *evidence*) of a "soul", then maybe I'll be interested in what they have to say.
Absolutely. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented on this thread. Patents are getting a bad rap on /. and the like lately... and while it's certainly true that there are patent abuses (especially in the software area), this doesn't look like one to me.
And I'll agree with the earlier posters: let's at least *try* to keep the editorializing out of the original posting, m'kay?
Hear hear. There's plenty of patent abuse around (especially in software patents), but this doesn't appear to be one of 'em... one company patents the idea, the other company cries foul, because, well, they want to use the patented idea.
I agree 100% with what he just said :-)
Sure sounds like it. I haven't seen the demo, but "bringing together pixel-based painting and vector graphics features" sounds exactly like good old Fireworks.
Microsoft 2005 == Macromedia 1998?
This will sound like a troll, but is an honest question: how many Linux-on-PPC users are there, really?
The point, of course, is that there are lots of niche areas that aren't worth Macromedia's time.
Sadly, I used all my mod points earlier today, but parent is right on the money.
The Tapwave Zodiac was (is) a PalmOS machine with an analog game control stick: http://www.tapwave.com/
I say "was" because, though it's still in production, it also seems clearly to have a limited lifespan with the PSP out...
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
It's not merely that people are buying the same-old-stuff, but also that it costs so freakin' much to make an "A"-list title these days... if you are fronting the millions of dollars it takes to produce a title, I guarantee that you want assurance you'll see a return on your investment. As with Hollywood, most publishers (large and small) would rather take the shitty-but-safe route of Yet Another Pile Of Adam Sandler Horseshit than risk their money on an indie. It would be nice if the industry was about making "art", but to exercise one of the best movie quotes ever: "It ain't about art! It's about percentage!"
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
Um, "dating simulation"?
Clearly, I've been married and out of the "dating" scene waaaaaay too long if that's what constitutes dating these days... :-)
On the other hand, the exclusive deals that EA has inked with football is utterly deplorable and should be called what it is: a monopoly tactic
If I were an EA investor, I might call it a savvy business deal; certainly, the NFL has the right to license their property as they see fit. But as a former EA employee who has sworn to never purchase or play another EA game as long as I live -- and also an avid fan of videogame-football (Sega 2k5 was awesome) -- I have to say that I hope Mr. Probst & Co roast in hell for this deal. (That said, hopefully Midway's upcoming non-NFL-related football game will live up to the hype...)
So for example, you might have a game with 10 2-hour long episodes, each of which sells for $10-20. Wouldn't this really be preferable if they were released every 3 months or so?
Absolutely! Personally, most games are too freakin' long for me to finish these days anyway... I have other stuff going on in my life. I'd much rather have 10 hours of *solid* gameplay,(with a nice beginning, middle, and end) than 40 hours that have been padded out with Yet Another Level Of Shooting Grunts And Dodging Critters... I'm too old (and slow) for all the reflexes to hold my interest for that long! Give me a *story*, dammit... at least of comic-book quality. (And no, "Demons have invaded the earth and you must kill them" is not a story. It's an excuse.) Can't some enterprising company hire someone like, say, Brian Azzarello / Warren Ellis / Alan Moore to put a storyline worth a damn into a game?
I'll take this one step further and argue that jumping puzzles aren't fun *anywhere*.
Amen! It's time for "jumping puzzles" to join crates as "sign the game designer ran out of ideas or time and is just trying to pad out his level requirements..."
Keep in mind this is a _scripting_ language, it is not compiled and is interpreted at run-time. Having to declare and type your variables would be a waste of time.
/. these days, but I am just not interested in wasting hours tracking down runtime errors that end up being due to a typo I made somewhere, especially when any reasonable strongly-typed language could (and would) have prevented the code in question from ever compiling.
Gah... nothing personal, I am SO FREAKING TIRED OF THIS ARGUMENT. To me, this is equivalent to saying that "scripting language" is a synonym for "language I use when I don't really care if my code is robust or reliable".
I realize this is a highly unfashionable viewpoint on
Yeah, yeah, I know, dynamic languages give you soooo much flexibility to do cool things. I happen to agree. But IMHO that flexibility is outweighed by the pain in the ass factor of stupid mistakes that aren't caught until runtime.
In other words: if there are obvious mistakes that I can have the computer find for me... well, that sounds like a Good Thing to me. (After all, the less time I have to spend debugging, the more time I can spend arguing language features on Slashdot....)
(And yes, I know about various strongly-typed languages with smart type inference, eg OCaml and Haskell. Unfortunately they aren't options at my workplace, and I haven't had the time to learn them on my own yet. I like the concept, though.)
...oh, wait.
nevermind.
Yep. I'd say that.
OK, so "destruction of property" is a subjective term. In practice, though, I think it's clear that while obviously destruction-of-property does not equal terrorism, terrorism can consist of nothing but destruction-of-property.
Imagine that the 9/11 attacks had been carefully orchestrated so that the buildings were completely empty. Now further imagine that (miraculously!) there was no loss of life by firefighters, police, bystanders, etc. And, just for grins, that the planes were empty of passengers and crew -- just those dang terrorists (err, "dissidents").
Yeah, it's a contrived example. But I don't know how you'd call it anything but terrorism.
No, not quite.
A dissident (my definition, anyway) expresses dissent by speaking, writing, or other nonviolent activity.
A terrorist expresses dissent by violence, mayhem, murder, or destruction of property.
Obligatory Daily Show quote: "Just because it happens in nature, does not make it natural, buster!"
The implication I got from the statement is that Flash is intrinsically bad, and more to the point, incapable of producing anything worthwhile.
This is, really, a stupid thing to say about *any* medium, be it Flash, PDF, HTML, AJAX, or cuneiform.
Yeah, there are lots of annoying Flash bits out there. There are also lots of annoying bits of all the other forms up above. (Well, I'm not so sure about the cuneiform bit, but you get the point.)
Flash Lite also supports SVG-T, and has for a while.
e s/ msvg_t.html
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/devices/articl
Well, I'd say -1 Troll and -1 Flamebait both.
But sadly, I have no mod points today.
No, really. Has John Dvorak *ever* been right in a meaningful way about *anything* of importance in this industry?
To me, he's always seemed to just strike the most provocative opinion he can, presumably just to draw readership.