Adobe buys Macromedia

[Camp]

Big news: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html

[rustyjaw]

Wow.

 

Wow.

 

That's a lot of money to own Flash, which, IMO is the primary reason they did this. Adobe wants Flash bad. They tried their own Flash authoring app a while back (LiveMotion) which I thought had a vastly superior interface compared to Macromedia's app, but it didn't take off and was killed.

 

Hopefully Adobe can improve the Flash authoring tool, it needs help.

 

Otherwise, they get ColdFusion which is nice, maybe Adobe will lower the price.

 

Freehand is probably a dead product now, since it overlaps with Illustrator. Fireworks will probably be gutted so as not to threated Photoshop. Dreamweaver is interesting, I think many (maybe most) web designers believe that DW is better than Adobe's GoLive, but from what I hear GL has made big strides in the last few releases. I wonder what Adobe will do with these two products?

 

Very interesting news indeed.

[foogledricks]

I'm sure EA will buy Adobe and then Microsoft will buy EA. Etc. Pretty soon all restaurants will be Taco Bell.

 

Don't forget that Macromedia bought HomeSite, which was a significant player in the web publishing realm. Fireworks was pretty cool too. I don't think this is good for competition. But I agree that Flash would benefit from being part of the Adobe Suite.

[Whooter]

Pretty soon all restaurants will be Taco Bell.

 

Mmmmmm.....cheesy gordita crunch.... :drool

[HoolieMan]

Make that cheesy gordita crunch CS.

[ChoiceStriker]

Just as long as Adobe doesn't buy Quark, I'm okay with this. I do 95% of my job at AP with various versions of Quark XPress, but an increasing number of member newspapers are converting to InDesign (which I think is still very unweildy and resource-hungry). When that happens, it means reprogramming ALL the data files we send them - usually 80-100 files per member.

 

Luckily I'm quitting my job in two months anyway, so even if Adobe does buy Quark I'll be spared much of the headache. Still, mega-conglomerates like this one scare me.

[kelley]

Ed,

I hope Adobe does the right thing and merges the developement teams and hopefully takes the best from both worlds. Oh and I much prefer Go Live CS over the Dreamweaver MX series. I think this will only make the Adobe platform stronger and better. So is next up Quark? :lmfao

 

ChoiceStriker - you are the first person I've heard since InDesign 2.0 say that they prefer QuarkXPress.

[ChoiceStriker]

Kelley: Well, InDesign is getting better, but I still think it's a big resource hog that runs much more slowly than Quark (at least on our installations of it at work). I'm admittedly biased toward Quark, though, because I've had years of experience with it - and because of all the extra work and headaches that InDesign conversions have cost me over the past year.

[kelley]

You running Quark on PC, OS 9, or OS X?

[rustyjaw]

I don't know, I've been using Quark almost daily for over 10 years now and I think it's lacking a lot. Quark sat on their asses too long, they let the program stagnate. Does the latest version even have paste-in-place? This is something Illustrator has had for a decade!

 

I have barely touched ID, but everyone I know (10+ people) who has learned it after jumping from Quark thinks ID is better. My company would rather be using ID, but we can't because a lot of our files end up being sent out on CD-ROMs to various parts of the world, so we have to stay with a lowest common denominator, and that is Quark.

[ChoiceStriker]

You running Quark on PC, OS 9, or OS X?

D. All of the above. Performance really varies depending on the version of Quark and OS.

we have to stay with a lowest common denominator, and that is Quark.

This is the reason we've used Quark for so long at AP. Every day I have to paginate, through a semi-automated process, 300 unique stock pages for members to download from our website. We do the pagination in Quark 3.32 on WinXP Pro and Mac OS 9.22 because it is the one version that ALL members, even those still stuck in the stone age, are able to open.

 

But because we also have to do template work for the other 400 or so papers across the country who use our services, we have to have every version of Quark to accommodate whatever a specific member is using when they need our assistance. So I have to run 3.32, 4.1, 5.0, and 6.0 on our WinXP Pro machine, and 3.32, 4.1, and 5.0 on the Mac, as well as 6.1 in OS X.

 

We also run InDesign 2.0 and CS on OS X and the WinXP machine, and on both platforms it takes longer than Quark to load. Granted, both machines are RAM-starved. Anyway, more info than you requested, but there it is.

[AnthonyVolpe]

My 2?:

 

1) QuarkXPress is assware. It's archaic, clumsy, obsolete, and way behind the curve - not one person at the past three places I've worked had anything nice to say about it. InDesign runs fine on my machine and it's far more intuitive - not to mention the fact that it took Quark ages to get their program on OS X. All the output bureaus that I've talked to also like InDesign better than Quark.

2) Flash is in dire need of some fine tuning - it's bugridden to the gills. It can do a lot, especially if you tie it in with XML, but there's still a lot of issues with that program that should have been addressed two versions ago

3) As good as GoLive is, Dreamweaver writes better and more compliant HTML code and is the preferred authoring tool at every place I've worked (with Homesite and handcoding tied for second place)

4) FreeHand is the most underrated program on the planet and blows Illustrator completely and totally off the map - as an illustration program, Illustrator's great - but FreeHand can do a lot more

 

Flame away

[foogledricks]

Yeahhhh! Quark bashing. Quark is why I've been a Mac hater for so long (Mac OS X has helped that a bit). I started using Quark in college to compose our newspaper (Version 4.0). Here I am, 8 years later, working for a major publisher, and we continue to use Version 4.0. I hated it back then and I hate it more now. I've never had so many problems with fonts, images, extensions, PDF-making.... for the love of god I hate this application!

 

Of course, I haven't really used version 6 that much, so maybe it is unfair to hate version 4. But you know what - bullshit - Quark didn't evolve the program for so long, that industry became fused to version 4. Every other major application gets upgraded to much more quickly because of how they do their releases. I actually HOPE Quark gets bought, and all these designers/publishers are forced to switch. The industry would be much better off. Maybe George Bush will declare Quark a terrorist state of something.

[merlot]

I'm a Dreamweaver MX user and found it's ability to quickly put together asp pages a huge advantage, especially since I'm not the programmer type, despite my background.

 

I'm curious as to how GoLive's CSS implementation is. I'm not crazy about Dreamweavers CSS interface. In fact I don't use it at all; I use TopStyle Lite. Anyay, if Dreamweaver remains as is, with a better CSS interface (assuming GoLive has one and they are combined) then I'll upgrade.