Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately US$3.4 billion. The companies plan to meet a wider set of customer needs and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets, particularly in the mobile and enterprise segments.
Adobe to acquire Macromedia
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Eugenia Loli
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it sounds like a bad joke
Hello, Adobe Flash.
This is just…I’m stunned.
I hope the “Integration Team” doesn’t disrupt the development of Flash 8.
What Macromedia products get cut?
This would be very interesting if it occured.
Yes, it does sound like a joke!?
Wow, now we get the owners of the worlds worst Interface, buying up the company with one of the best.
Reminds me of when AOL bought WinAmp.
*Start your backup programs now!*
It’s on the front page of both corp sites.
http://macromedia.com/
http://www.adobe.com/
because the only thing more ridiculously priced than photoshop is director mx.
I was annoyed enough when Adobe bought Syntrillium, the makers of Cool Edit Pro. All they did was slap the ‘Adobe’ brand on everything, added a blah CD burning tool, and renamed it to ‘Audition’. Then, they seemed to forget about it. Obviously, this won’t happen with Flash, but ‘what products get cut?’ is a valid question. I view this as the horrid combination of two otherwise good things (companies), like peanut butter and jelly. In the US (Dunno about anywhere else), they sell a product called ‘Goobers’ – Peanut butter and grape jelly in the same jar. Is Adobe + Macromedia going to make “goobers”?
Adobe Freehand
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Flash
……
we are entering a new parallel universe…
……
Wow, now we get the owners of the worlds worst Interface, buying up the company with one of the best.
e? Adobe has one of the most logical interfaces
Dreamweaver CS. ColdFusion CS. Freehand, dead. Fireworks, dead.
Indeed it is the twilight zone, here.
So, we now know why Adobe stopped pushing svg. Without adobe plugin svg is dead as www technology.
This isn’t a surprising move, and there has been speculation about it for several years. They are very similar and complimentary companies. They both have industry-leading quasi-proprietary content formats (PDF and Flash). And Macromedia has been kicking Adobe’s butt in the Web-based publishing arena, which is a big part of Adobe’s future. Having Photoshop fully integrated with Dreamweaver is enough to give a lot of Web developers wet dreams.
And yes, their products do both cost a lot of money. I’m not a WYSIWYG user, so HomeSite has always been plenty for me. And the only Adobe product I use is Photoshop. Probably will go to the GIMP instead of upgrading to CS though. I’ve been flirting with it for long enough…
I hope the government blocks this. This acquisition would significantly shrink the competition in the graphics market.
Its now a big oportunity for java applets to once more emerge …
Also there are different promission technologies based on java on doing multimedia web content.
But in the end, i think we will have to turn to XAML … so … buh bye flash player (as a platform) …
From the press release:
“By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software — along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash”
Does the idea of Flash being melded together with PDFs sound really, really bad to anyone else?
Also, the collective power here must not make Apple feel all that comfortable.
Not only graphics market, but everything else related to behaveour … Macromedia was just exploding … and Adobe were only a company of rebranding …. What do they do now … they are rebranding .. no inovation … no nothing moder .. just their plain old Photoshop ( which is the best nevertheless ).
But compare Photoshop to easyness of Fireworks. Or Illustrator with FreeHand ….
Or the discontinued LiveMotion to Flash MX IDE …
ITS A BIG LOSS FOR THE WORLD
You only have eyes for money you sh..**** !!!!!
This is so heretic :
“By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software — along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash”
You will end up taking Flash to the lowest usage rate ever, flash player 8 adoption will have i think 10 years …if not discontinued … damnnnnnnnnn
PDF and Flash sounds like “HeadPhones” and “Green” … exactly … no relation …!!!
I am a print based graphic designer and lean very heavily on Adobe products.
I like their stuff a lot and have never been a fan of Freehand – but I don’t think a Adobe/Macromedia merger is good at all.
From what I understand Macromedia lead the pack in the professional Web design arena so I can see why the two corps might want to merge. Two big leaders merging into one almighty market controlling super corp…
Only losers here will be the users – with no competition they will become the MS of the design market
Two good companies competing in the same space drive each other on and gives incentive to create good , clean products. Monopolies create lazy, bloated nasty products (just look at MS Office!)
BAD, BAD, BAD… regardless of which of the two you prefer – at least you had a choice… Looks like that is gonna go down the tubes now…
Deneba Canvas anyone….
I notice alot of you guys criticize Adobe for their “dumb interfaces”, as i recall it Macromedia was taken to court because they “borrowed” too many of the Adobe interface inventions a couple of years ago.
I knew for 2-3 years now that Macromedia was not in a good financial phase and it was laying off a lot (a friend of mine works there). However, Macromedia remained a big and important company. It only made sense that a company like Adobe could have a direct interest in it, so I kinda expected this to happen and for the buyer to be Adobe in specific.
Since MX product familly everything changed ….
They are now the best in user interface design, for their products and not only …. for the products we create using their tools …
DAMN!again! 100000xDAMN!
oh sh*t.. now that i was begining to love freehand… i hope it doesnt just get replaced by adobe illustrator/indesign.. it sucks!
imho, the only thing adobe has of some value is photoshop, for everything else.. there is macromedia.
and yes, i can create nice pdfs without acrobat
i use mainly fireworks and dreamweaver’s html editor (dont know how to use wysiwg), this is definitely bad news, i hate adobe products, because they make everything so complicated and obscure.. crap.. i guess mx will stay for a very long time, need to find another good html editor
maybe with out the adobe vs macromedia competition, that has produced some amazing programs, macradobemedia (or what ever) will stop trying so hard and gimp, inkscape, scribus, and tha gpl video thing can gain some ground.
This is one of most interesting outcome since a couple of years. The strength of Adobe publishing tools combined with Macromedia development tools (consider that those companies own technology for two of the most spread tools like Flash and PDF) is a powerful mix.
The goal of this is to provide a development platform and this is clearly aimed against Microsoft (in primis) and Java. This is all about controlling enterprise market and mobile market.
We now know why Flex (latest, promising Macromedia technology combining Flash with server side development) for .NET systems (Windows+IIS) has been announced but has not been released while you already have Flex for Java containers.
Keep in mind that we now have three major competitors:
Server side (and Enterprise) :
.NET
Java
Flex (Flash)
Client side:
Avalon-enabled systems (Longhorn)
Java
Flash
Mobile:
.NET CE
Java ME
Flash ME
Adobe decided to finally put in place a development platform that has in Flash and PDF its major foundations. This is a very bold outcome. While I use .NET for server development, I have to admit that I love Flash as client technology.
Please, also notice that no-one (but Google, maybe) is caring about HTML anymore. HTML is dead in long terms (AT LAST! :-).
It sound like an warcraft character …
macrodobe, or macradobe …. it sounds like a grunt.
adomedia … anomedia, ana*media, where “* = L”
RIP fireworks, freehand, golive
And only 5 more years to see a new truly integrated package, rather than a group of independent programs that are marketed as a package.
but it reduces the number of programs I have to keep up with
I think people here are getting overly negative about the situation; the fact remains, Microsoft is gradually encrotching onto Adobes turf already – they’re moving forward to creating an PDF replacement using XML, so the most logical step for Adobe was to consolidate the industry – purchase out a rival which has minimal overlap with their existing product line.
There are a number of products I’d say that will stay, such as Flash, Shockwave, Director, heck, even Coldfusion – which coupled with a number of other Adobe products could make quite a compelling case on the server back end.
Adobe is seeing where Microsoft is heading in 5-10 years time, they would rather not be another victim of the Microsoft jugganaut – so watch this space to see new advances being released in the next few years, especially at the server end.
Adobe pays threefold their annual revenue to purchase Macromedia.
The famous pdf and flash player will strengthen the capability of
delivering cutting edge experience in video, graphic and design.
Macrob will not entering the biz of web-portals and browser manufacturers.
Accordingly, the Yahoo Toolbar will not disappear in the download section.
As a leader in web&print production, their designer and developer community
is more valuable than anything else. They gain the power to control
browser, operating system and telecommunication vendors.
What will change in the near future?
The success of Macromedia Studio MX will continue and Flash, Coldfusion along with
the Dreamweaver will be a solid component of the product family. Adobe’s GoLive
will have a short live. Vica versa Fireworks competes with Illustrator, but
Fireworks uses a different workflow process. Definitely in question is FreeHand.
What is the strategy of Macrob?
To enhance Rich Media Application with Flex and Flash, to penetrate the mobile market with the Flash IDE, delivering streaming and synchronous video (Flash Communication Server, Breeze), have
a big toe in the Education market and all shaked up with coldfusion. In short, that was the visionary strategy of Macromedia, since today. Don’t ask me what tomorrow morning 10 am brings.
What’s next? Microsoft buys Apple. This is definately not good news. I an a huge fan of Macromedia’s server and development tools. I surely hope they keep the same people on staff and don’t mess up a good thing. Flex looks promising and we all know Adobe’s record on trying to enter the web market. There tools sucked! This was something I would have never guessed.
macradobemedia (or what ever) will stop trying so hard and gimp, inkscape, scribus, and tha gpl video thing can gain some ground.
Yes, because consumers win when one side keeps going at the same pace, and the other side stops.
As for names, macrodobe sounds best to my ear, but I suspect it’s just going to be “Adobe.”
And: PDFlash. ::shudder::
“Please, also notice that no-one (but Google, maybe) is caring about HTML anymore. HTML is dead in long terms (AT LAST! :-).”
I know I’m going to be reported for abuse, but my God, you are so deluded.
Whoever said Adobe is effectively killing off SVG is way off.
With SVG being integrated into Mozilla Products, KDE, and eventually Safari, not to mention the big push for SVG tiny and the wireless market, if anyone should guess I would suspect Flash will get a revisit and be streamlined into a difference purpose, all together.
Nothing is more annoying than Flash flooded web sites.
Probably related to Goodwins law, maybe this is what happens when it involves companies, not individuals.
I don’t want to forget that Opera is integrating SVG into the browser as well.
I Agree. The sum of products / technologies from Adobe + Macromedia makes that an interesting development platform both on server and client side.
I wouldn’t get too much surprised if an upcoming Flash player version would introduce some PDF handling… that would be very good.
There is a lot choice now for developers. The best thing is they will compete on innovation they can deliver. Which is good for the market.
Fewer software companies. Fewer choices.
Thank god for open source. I don’t care if you use Linux, open office, or not. (I use neither.)
But the lack of choice and competition in the industry is getting scary.
Very scary.
This is bad for all of us. It’s not only adobe buying macromedia – It’s all big firms buying smaller one. Novell buying Suse, Mandrake buying connectiva,
Peugeot buying volvo, Adobe buying macromedia, microsoft buying everything … At the end, we will end up with only two firm, with “ulta-power”, monopoles.
They will have big politic influence in the world.
In fact, they allready have it … only think at EU-patents… patents are good for nobody only for these big firms! But the “little man” is _not_ important, and these big firms _have_ a lot of political power, and they decide about laws.
Firms like Fina-Total are already building roads in small poor countrys – of course, this is something good, but this is only to say _how_important_ the influence of firms is.
Time will come, then they have more money as states.
Time will also come, then they are so big that everybody has to do everything they want. If they say : “Jump on one leg, and sing”, you will have to do it, because there will only be one firm where you can work at – No concurrence at all.
They will certainly abuse of their big influences – not because big firms are bader as smaller one, but because they can do it – and everywhere, and as long I can remember, then someone, or some people have a lot of influence, they abuse from it. E.g. : It’s to attractive to diminish renumeration, to product cheaper as other firms… It’s also to attractive to put someone in the court of justice because of some (invented?) reason. Think at SCO.
There should not be too big firms… They should all be forced to split then they become so big.
(p.s. : My english ist really bad, sorry)
I don’t see why so many are horrified. The odds of things completely falling apart from this are low.
I think their is enough competition out there, it’s probably more of an issue of others making a compelling product. But there will still be MS and Apple out there to compete on a lot of things.
Companies buy companies, it’s just the way it goes, and like anything, it’s cyclic. You start with a few, which burst into many, which then reform back into a few, and then from them things split back out again. Its how the world gets refreshed. It’s just like animal evolution. Things have to merge back in every now and then to keep compatibility at some level.
helloworld82, what are you talking about “Peugeot buying volvo” Volvo Car is owned by Ford, and Volvo truck is Owned by GM. Also a linux company buying a linux company is a total non event, and anyone buying or selling a linux company or pretty much anything linux is a non event. Not like their is a lack of linux companies. Linux would be served very well if all linux companies merged into one, and employed all critical developers in the linux world, only way linux will ever truly get anywheres.
This acquisition is grossly anticompetitive, as have been some other Adobe acquisitions. Remember Aldus? Remember when there used to be a better alternative than PowerPoint? With the Bush administration in power, it’s unlikely that the government will impose any restraints on Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia though.
Macromedia’s user interfaces are far superior to those of Adobe applications, which are very inconsistent–both internally and across applications. I just hope Adobe has the sense to recognize the superior usability of Macromedia applications that compete with Adobe applications– particularly Dreamweaver. I’d give up WYSIWYG completely rather than use GoLive. Dreamweaver doesn’t render CSS layout properly anyway. I hope they remedy that technical deficiency soon. Unfortunately, merging the two companies will probably cause delays in their product cycles.
This will probably mean more layoffs, too, which will be hard on a lot of people. The job market in Silicon Valley will shrink further, too.
All in all, I view this as very bad news.
Of course it’s a very good move from Adobe, and a very bad move competition wise. But if you don’t want to give power to these elndlessly growing corporations (MS, Adobe in this context, etc) then you should:
1. STOP using propriatry formats (i.e. flash, .doc etc)
2. Promote and use standards
3. Use open source tools
4. Try to fight the EU with their horrible patent laws.
Our world is getting so bad :/
Apple’s iWork has gotten good reviews. I’m wondering if Big Steve will get smart and have his developers create iDesign. As much as I’m a big fan of Photoshop, it’s too damned expensive. Dreamweaver would be worth it’s price if Macromedia’s programmers could figure out how to debug it…
Adobe needs to be shut down…I feel the cold evil of MBA’s screwing the end user to protect their salaries.
I just recently got a Mac Mini, but I’m keeping my other 3 boxes primed with Linux, and I’m making sure to keep abreast of Gimp developments. I like the ease of use of the Mac platform, but the ‘great’ software for Mac is so damned expensive…
Why are ‘competitive capitalists’ always doing everything possible to avoid competition? If I had millions of dollars, I’d donate tons to make sure that the GIMP became production ready, and Scribus could compete with Dreamweaver.
If Adobe thinks this move is going to protect their precious PDF format from the XML onslaught they are sadly mistaken. Microsoft is churning out XML based like crazy…
I’m so sick of the business end of software…God bless open source and Godspeed to all open source developers and supporters. Eventually, your work will be all that survives the storm…
You’re on the mark…I spent two years using nothing but Linux. I got tired of waiting for the apps and got a Mac Mini. I couldn’t bring myself to deal with XP.
The waiting and wishing pushed me off of Linux as my primary OS.
I want to get into development, and OS X has free tools for that. I figured I may as well devote my time to Microsoft’s adversaries and try to develop software for the Mac. I’ll never be a good enough programmer to write for the server, so I’m limited to user applications.
If it weren’t for your post, I would not have noticed how dumb my statement actually was…
This is a very bad news.
As a computer technician I love the way Macromedia apps install.
Clean, easy install in their own folders. No scattered files all over the place, no files in system folders.
And uinstall is just as clean.
Besides that, Macromedia software has proven to be of high quality and stable. Never had any problems with them.
In contrast, Adobe turned out to be a Microsoft lackie, puting folders all over the place, using the stupid “common files” misfeature, poluting the registry to no end (ever searched for all occurencies of “Adobe” in the registry?), using the “populer” autoupdate, download manager, and Acrobat Reader now comes with “preload” feature (because it’s turning into such piece of shit bloatware), as if there wasn’t enough crap autostarting already in Windows.
Adobe programs, specially the CS line is becoming way too bloated for no reason at all.
I think last good version of Photoshop was version 6, after that they started producing bloat.
I used have neutral feelings about Adobe, but nowadays I see them together with Symantec as the second most evil software companies after Microsoft.
They stopped caring about quality of their products and the end user and now just care about their balance sheet.
Quick Quiz:
Q: What’s the quickies way to slow down your computer to half it’s designed performance?
A: Install Norton System Works
Q: What’s the best way to trash your digital photos exif info?
A: Save the image with Photoshop and say buhby-buhby to half your exif data.
I realy don’t like where the world is going these days.
Is it going to end like in “Johnny Mnemonic”?
I can see us, Linux users, being like the resistance in that movie, living on the edge of the city in some twisted metal structure, waring rags for clothing, and fighting one mega-corporation.
The brains of Linus, Perens, and Stolman hooked up together, floating in a big tank of water, and providing the computing power for our mainframe.
Gee, the future sure looks strange.
I take it this means that from now on, all Macromedia products will triple in price?
See, I have nothing against OSS but now it’s time to bring facts, instead of hopes and promises.
A lot of developers are on the brink of having to decide how to move (you’re among these, according to what you said) and yet we have big companies delivering new technologies and OSS movement to ask that people wait until they develop that super-magical-ultra-mega free platform they’re developing. Now it’s years that I hear such statements and same old song.
Now, it’s not that big companies don’t wanna compete (as you wrote) it’s just that they wanna win, or at least, get a suitable share of market to allow them to stay in business. The fact that most companies merge it’s not about they don’t wanna compete but it’s just a signal that R&D (i.e. innovation) is getting a matter of billions dollars (or euros 😉 because we’re not in 80s anymore, when anyone could actually deliver an astonishing innovation using his/her small PC…
Just my .02
“I hope the government blocks this. This acquisition would significantly shrink the competition in the graphics market.”
I am not trying to be a smart a##. But I really don’t believe this is going to happen.
Needs only, that Sun buys Adobe or the other way around. Then (nearly) all platformindependent programs are together: Flash, Acrobat Reader, Java and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
Then only Mozilla is missing. But Mozilla can nobody buy.
Macromedia’s user interfaces are far superior to those of Adobe applications, which are very inconsistent–both internally and across applications. I just hope Adobe has the sense to recognize the superior usability of Macromedia applications that compete with Adobe applications–
This is wishful thinking. The winner always enforces its own view. Unless Macromedia effects a reverse takeover and enforces its view of the world. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened.
What about all Adobe and Macromedia apps in one monster app with a file system underneath? A new operating system that looks like a dream
. I’d give money to see that. Mergers like these are meant to eliminate the competition. Sadly, it also means that with the absence of real competition the driving need to continue to improve on the product line also vanishes.
May I refer to Internet Explorer 6, which Microsoft hasn’t done anything on [except bug fixes, but I wouldn’t exactly call that development] ever since Netscape kicked the bucket. After they were gone, IE was ‘good enough’. I know there’s going to be a version 7 to celebrate the arrival of the Cow, but the analogy is that Adobe will not be spending more dollars on developing Macromedia apps than they think is required to keep the key customers happy. And if that sinks below a certain treshold, well, hey…
@Bitland
I can see where you would want to develop on the Mac [it certainly has a lot of potential AND apps
], but did it really have to be a Mac Mini. To do development work on?
I don’t know whether iWork will ever develop into a full office package, but if they did, I’d buy it
.
First: a new pope
Second: Tiger
Third: something for the tiger to eat. Beef sounds good
This is bad, Adobe already has it in for Mac users, now we can say good by to Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and all the other products that Macromedia was providing us. This is just BS.
I think I dispise Adobe more than Microsoft
I am feeling so much anger inside this morning!! THIS SUCKS. The best page layout app is gone. Freehand is gone!!!!! I hope they incorporate most of its features into illustrator or keep it its own entity. I’m a desinger/prepress and freehand just did the job so easily and flawlessly and stayed out the way. Freehand MX got a bit clunky but still better than illustrator for prepress operations. Don’t get me wrong I love illustrator. Infact when a job requires extensive design needs its all done in illustrator but all was imported into freehand for final layout and film or plate separation. THIS SUCKS!!!!! The ability to set guides by the hundreds with keyboard input or the fact that clippings inside of clipping mask are infact clipped and not just visiually hidden etc..
Over the last 6 months I’ve come to really like Flash for Rich Internet Application development. And now this! I have strong concerns about Adobe’s ability to develop Flash. Their PDF plugin is terrible. Their SVG plugin is medicore. Adobe does not care – at all – about the free tools to display content…so if they do the same with flash they’ll either put it to pasture or try to charge for a premium edition. Why did the do this???
The OSS movement isn’t a monolithic entity. You can’t seriously propose that “the OSS movement” says this or that, just like there is no “proprietary software movement”.
Still I consider FreeBSD and Linux to be very worthy and free competitors in the server OS arena. They are field proven and well supported. Considering the facts: most of the world wide web is running on free software. The only serious competitor there is Microsoft with its IIS web server, which as we all know, has had enormous issues in the past.
I personally develop web based applications and they run best on an open source platform. With version 5 PHP has become a mature programming language that lets me do anything my .NET colleagues do just as easily.
As much as I like the syntax highlighting and easy ftp access in Dreamweaver, the whole WYSIWYG side of it is no more than a kid’s toy. It’s not even WYSIWYG so why bother? There is simply no substitute for proper hand crafted HTML/XML. In fact, that’s the only way to have your web based application properly generate HTML/XML: you write it by hand. I don’t need Dreamweaver for that though, the free Screem editor does the job perfectly for me.
I use Linux as my primary OS and I make a very reasonable living doing this. I won’t dispute that R&D takes more resources nowadays than it did in the ’80s. However many large companies are backing Linux with huge resources and yes, plenty of innovation is actually coming from the Linux desktop even though it may still lack in other areas. You won’t hear me say Linux is ready for joe schmoe’s desktop, even though I have set up complete computer novices with it and they’re very happy with it. Yet from the way things are going, I’m sure Linux will be joe-schmoe-resistant in a few years time. That is if we don’t get software patents in the EU, which will effectively kill all real innovation.. which most of the time happens to come from small companies that get bought out by the big players.
This deal will end up being bad for the industry since the 2 biggest companies in Web/Print fields are merging. Worse yet, whichever Macromedia products survive into the Adobe line will be more expensive than they are today. Corel is not big enough anymore to take advantage of reduced competition. If anything Apple will hurt the most as well as be able to take advantage the most. It puts them in a postion to be manpulated by one software company(in their eyes they are supposed to do that, not the otherway around), on the flipside, Apple will try to get the pick of the litter of software programmers that will get laid off by the hundreds.
Worst thing that happened in years in the area in web and graphic development development..
I hate monopolies..
This is actually kinda amusing from my perspective as a Linux zealot.
You see now, don’t you, why I am a linux zealot. I understand how these capitalist things work and I agree with most of you. I DON’T LIKE THEM!!!
So I’m trying to change them in my own little way by support stuff that’s about the stuff, not the money. And when it becomes about the money it gets forked, cuz its open like that.
BSD zealot, same thing. But I hate these dumb corps so much only the GPL can comfort my rage.
Does this mean we will get access to the SWF specification? Currently, the PDF specification is free for download for any purpose, but the SWF specification requires you to agree to a license stating that you will only use it to produce software to output SWF, i.e. no SWF players other than the official one are allowed.
If Freehand goes away I’ll never forgive Adobe. Freehand is light years better than illustrator. They should at least give Freehand away free or give the code to the folks working on Inkscape or Gimp.
Maybe Quark will get Freehand. That wouldn’t be so bad. They could bundle it with Quark Express so the price is actually worth it.
I’m really hating Adobe today.
Half of the products will be eliminated. Half of the employees will be ‘downsized’. This just seems like a way to eliminate competition. There’s no ‘synergy’ here, the two companies’ products go head to head.
It’s a buyout, not a merger.
… big news indeed
First off, Macromedia wasn’t all that great. I’ve been forced to do Flash development for years (since v3), and the UI was getting in my way ALL THE TIME! Jeez, I’ve never had an UI annoy me so much. It improved a little bit over time, but not by much. Their built in actionscript editor was always crap, their “window” handling sucked, even with 2 screens, and the whole thing was fragile as hell. Looking at the program in the wrong way made it crash. And the fla fileformat was undocumented and ever-growing and bloated, and not always portable between Mac and PC (and their font handling could’ve been much better too)
That being said the Flash runtime has always been pretty sweet, even though it’s become a tiny bit bloated lately, but at least it seemed like these guys knew what they were doing, contrary to the Flash Studio guys.
I always wished for a compiler that let me define some assets in text/xml/… files, combine them with some .as files, and voila, I get a nice swf file. I don’t need no stinking UI. I believed Flex was going to give me that, but then I saw the price tag – what the hell was Macromedia thinking?!
The guys at Adobe did some good things and bad things too: PDF is a pretty cool format, if you don’t have to use their crap Acrobat Reader (I don’t know on Windows, but on other systems there are pretty decent alternatives). And I know a lot of people in Print who are happy they’ve got a decent format to use/exchange with print shops, as opposed to “give everything in quark format, including all the linked in objects and fonts, and pray it’s gonna work”.
Adobe CS is a mixed bag. Illustrator became suddenly very resource intensive from 9 onwards if I recall correctly, while Photoshop has been a slow pig since longer (since 5?). On the other hand, their UI consistency is pretty good, and the different apps do interoperate quite well, so it’s not all bad. The price for the whole CS package is very decent too, if you compare with certain other DTP apps (*cough*Quauarghk*cough*).
Additionaly Adobe has been making some very gentle moves in the direction of Linux and Open source (acrobat reader using GTK2, some widget layout libraries BSD licensed, PDF spec very open, etc) So it seems they’re at least more open minded than Macromedia ever was.
Me, I’m using Gimp and Inkscape more and more. I’m using Linux as my primary desktop for several years now, and I don’t really miss any specific app in particular (flash was the only one I had to dual boot or launch my emulator for). In fact, I seem to be able to work quite a bit faster than on other systems, and have such a huge amount of handy tools at my fingertips (I use debian with it’s 16000 packages only an apt-get away) that I even feel that I am at an advantage compared to my heathen co-workers. There’s often times something that would take a lot of manual work that I can do in 3 seconds because of some handy tool.
Yes, Gimp and Inkscape look like shit when you work with them in Windows or MacOSX. But in their native element, they feel very integrated, light and consistent. Now I only need my swf compiler and an opensource flash plugin (no decent flash plugin on Linux/PPC sadly enough), and I’ll be happy.
macromedia bough altsys years ago. The good altsys-qualtiy went down the drain.
No macromedia is bought by adöbie, the shubby macromedia-quality is going down the drain and will end up in the bloat-o-rama adobe UI style.
Altsys (Macromedia) Fontographer 4.1 IMHO has one of the best workflows/UI-Designs I know. It is old and that’s one of its core qualities -> no bloat, effective black/white UI, simply runs, and it runs fast.
for smaller companies. There will be a lot of disillusioned Macromedia users out there.
Volvo Trucks is by no means owned by GM.
This is got to be a joke… I wonder what will happen to Dreamweaver and Flash now. Will Adobe abandon some of Marcomedias apps and instead incorporate Macromedias features into some Adobe app. Or will they just do a name change. Adobe Dreamweaver…
http://bitsofnews.com
1. I am freaken awesome in photoshop
2. photoshop’s gui is: fantastic/good/bad/sucks
most of you knuckle heads chiming in about adobe’s great gui, are probably somewhat skilled in several of adobe’s products.
despite that, number 1 & number 2 are unrelated. people can become quite proficient in the clunkiest of interfaces.
I know lightwave geniuses…and it’s a horrible interface.
I am a photoshop genius…I can photoshop circles around 99% of you.
I am saying, unequivocally, that photoshop’s gui is so 1980’s and sucks.
period.
-using photoshop since 93…on a mac, later on windows and unix.
But compare Photoshop to easyness of Fireworks. Or Illustrator with FreeHand ….
What’s so great about Freehand? My sister and I both studied graphic/media design, the instructors I had preferred Illustrator while her instructors taught them Freehand. I asked her to show me around it a few times – it seems like a perfectly servicible vector drawing app, but I didn’t see anything that made me go “Oh wow, this is amazingly better than Illustrator.” It seemed a bit less quirky than .AI when it came to manipulating beziers (and the Bezagon tool looks nice), but there was nothing wonderfully novel & unique (unless you count having anti-aliased previews off by default).
Photoshop on UNIX? I have it running under Wine, although that’s only as an experiment. It’s unstable as heck in this environment!
The UI got overloaded as Adobe added features to the software. I loved PS 6, after that I see very little in the way of useful improvements for my projects.
By the way, Photoshop is a great tool to make circles around people 😉 Have been using and loving it since version 3.0.. early 90’s too I guess.
…this will just accelerate my adoption of OSS at my Mac-based publishing company.
Dreamweaver? It’s a slow pig on OS X. I’m working on migrating my sites from Dreamweaver to Nvu.
Photoshop? Never used it. I used Corel’s tools discontinued, and now use Gimp and Inkscape.
InDesign? Slowly migrating away from it. I’m running an alpha release of Scribus that is a native Mac build (Aqua), and while it’s buggy, it works. I’m also working on implementing a NeoOffice-J/Scribus toolchain so I can get Word out of the mix as well.
I agree about Dreamweaver. The lack of the MDI interface also makes it feel inferior and clunky compared to the Windows version.
Thats one reason I don’t like the GIMP though and inkscape for that matter.
Where did you get the Mac Scribus version or did you compile from source?
Well, the upshot is that Adobe seems a bit more receptive to linux than macromedia.
But i can’t believe this merge. Macromedia definitely had its own sort of style and brand consciousness. Now Flash and Firefox are going to look exactly like Illustrator and Premiere.
Adobe Flush with .Nuts
Who uses propietary solutions and actually LIKES it? “I use flash, and pdf”. So what, I use so many dang things it’s not even funny.
But I knew there would be a problem when someone showed my how Flash could be used as spyware… So, this business deal, and all the “HTML is dead” punks, it’s totally expected. You know what’s going on. You know who you can’t and can trust now.
I’m so elated that I don’t need to have the manual capability to hand edit code. I could puke.
They won’t let you anyhow.
It would be easy to buy into the doom and gloom theories of how this will play out, but I think in the long run this probably will be a good thing for the web and print software markets.
If Adobe f*cks up the Macromedia products or botches the integration with their own software, they will alienate the customer’s they were trying to pick up in this acquisition. It might suck for a while, but then alternatives will show up, mostly commercial, but probably OSS as well, thanks to the magic of free market economics.
If Adobe gets it right, scrapping Acrobat Reader altogether, moving SVG Tiny and PDF support into Flash, and doesn’t try to force print software on web developers and vice versa, and updates all their interfaces, the user community would have little to complain about.
Either way, users come out OK. Just remember to keep an eye out for innovative new software and vote with your dollars.
And no.. they’re not receptive to linux, or anything else for that matter.
Someone commented on Adobe shying away from SVG?
You KNOW why. You can see the residing backside code, if you want to.
SVGL
By the way, Photoshop is a great tool to make circles around people 😉 Have been using and loving it since version 3.0.. early 90’s too I guess.?
You mean analog to ellipse selection + stroke selection actions in The GIMP?
Yes, I love it too 
There is no reason to think about SVG fading away, really.
SVG is a de-facto standard in mobile market. Corel, Canon and Kodak guys are in Comittee as well. Firefox 1.1 is to be shipped with SVG renderer as well.
Adobe and SVG? So far Illustrator is the only Adobe’s tool to support SVG (even without animation). Does it really count that much?
Competion between these companies has been good. Adobe will probably screw this all up in favor of their own product line.
I learned on Golive in school and when the CS version came out with the UI change…..made it very confusing. So now I use Dreamweaver.
It would be nice if Apple would come out with a web product based on Motion’s technology using particles and expressions to munipulate vector files for the web.
Adobe ate the competion, sounds like MS to me.
*shudder*…ugh. I get queasy when I here remarks like that. What has this generation come to?
Why don’t we let the markets decide naturally instead of having our nanny interfere to make things worse for everyone?
“The companies plan to meet a wider set of customer needs and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets”
Could this also mean having Linux/Unix versions of their software too? I hope so.
Other than that, I suppose that this might indeed be quite good move for the capitalists owning those companies. Adobe will likely become much bigger player in the software business now, and the clear market leader in their target fields of web publishing, multimedia etc.
That totally sucks…I love Fireworks and let me just say that GoLive bites compared to Dreamweaver!
meh….
Im rarely in windows anyway.
Nice to know that coldfusion will be in the hands of a company with a rich history of server side scripting….. NOT…
I can’t possibly think of any reason this merger will be good for any developer anywhere.
I hate Adobe, I honestly think this is going to hurt Macromedia’s product offering.
Well, there isn’t a lot of product overlap – and the offering is a bit uneven in those areas:
Illustrator/Freehand
There are faithful users of Freehand over Illustrator, but really I think Illustrator is more the standard here.
ImageReady/Fireworks
ImageReady and Fireworks – I imagine they’ll just merge the two eventually, probably sticking with the ImageReady name.
LiveMotion/Flash
LiveMotion was really just an answer to Flash, an “easier” point of entry for people looking to animate web graphics, with less focus on Flash’s development side. I could see them keeping both as they have different focus, but who knows. Of the two, Flash isn’t going anywhere – I know that much. They could fold some of LiveMotion into ImageReady and call it a day >shudder<.
GoLive/Dreamweaver
GoLive is tricky. I can’t imagine they’ll dump Dreamweaver or it’s name, but who knows. Possibly GoLive will be a pro-sumer HTML authoring tool and Dreamweaver – perhaps, combined with ColdFusion – a pro web development environment. Either that, or goodbye GoLive I’d say.
This really sucks. I’m a big flash users, and I have to say that this bites the big one.
goodbye competition. so it goes.
HEY PEOPLE it’s about the Talent not the Tools. Anyone here who is reliant on a particular program needs to broaden their horizons a bit and stop relying on Photoshop Filters to make a living. Anyone who can draw should be able to pick up anything from Illustrator and Freehand to Inkscape and MS Paint and be capable of creating a good image. Most of you freaks who argue about features and GUI are just like every other graphic design upstart flooding the market with bad design anyway. SO GET OVER IT.
I for one chose Freehand over Illustrator not because one had more features than the other, but because Illustrator is down right annoying in the way it works. It tries to take over the process for me rather than letting me go truely freehand. Hence the name I guess. Freehand isn’t/wasn’t some automated drawing app that tried to tell me what vector art is the way MS Word tries to tell me how a report should be written. It is/was just a set of tools I can use to accomplish a job. But you know what? I found that other applications like “Inkscape” and “Expression” offer me those same set of tools as well. So I added them to my collection… and now I just work in whatever I feel like drawing in. Truthfully, Illustrator’s brushes can’t even touch Expressions’ and Expression is FREE!
I’m so sick of you photoshop/adobe jockeys parading about like God’s gift to the design community. Why don’t you go take some ceramic classes or learn to draw with charcoal or something. Corporations will continue to buy one another out and programs will be sold and loss, but nobody can buy my talent from me and I can always find a tool to Express myself with.
I can’t believe it is not being blocked!!!
I used Homesite until I switched to Linux. It had already been acquired by Macromedia and all development had stopped. I never purchased Dreamweaver, as I don’t much like the Web loaded with multimedia junk.
Look at it this way. People who purchase Photoshop and Flash are mainly developing advertising. In short, both companies make the tools most responsible for polluting the Web. Output from their products is what keeps my filters busy and my hosts file long.
It’s a tad simplistic to see things this way, but frankly, I wish both Adobe and Macromedia would simply go away.
Well put, Aussiefax.
I think your preference to Freehand over Illustrator echos mine. I’ve used Freehand since it was owned by Aldus (~version 2), and it always just seemed to “stay out of my way”. Compared to Illustrator which just feels really clunky and awkward. I imagine it has a lot to do with what you learn on, but Freehand always seems to do more powerful things a lot easier.
It’s unfortunate, but I imagine Freehand taking a backseat to Adobe’s baby: Illustrator. One can only hope that they have the sense to compare features and fold in what is deemed better from Freehand.
We can all be sure of one thing: that now we’ll end up with just one image editor (Photoshop), one vector graphics app (Illustrator), etc., just one of everything. And then, it’ll just coast… Nothing new except the annual license fee, forever, as we slide into a permissions-based society where creative activity is forbidden unless authorized by corporate fiat.
Dammit, I swore I wasn’t going to drink anything this week…
I still use freehand 5 for mosty classical 2d drawings/logos, it’s so unbeatable responsive and offers the leanest UI in currently know.
Whenever i REALLY need some of the features of newer versions (which is very rare) i switch the app (newer freehand or other app like AI).
Maybe people will wake up to some “quite” overlooked tools.
This is nice stuff.
http://www.stone.com/
hylas
Apple should have done this! They need to merge with a company that makes applications for OSX. In fact, if Apple were run by the MS team they would have already done this during the 80-90’s
You wrote:
Maybe people will wake up to some “quite” overlooked tools.
This is nice stuff.
http://www.stone.com/
hylas
When I worked at NeXT and Apple before I got frustrated with the BS decisions on many areas of OS X(Rhapsody Intel/Rhapsody PPC — the decision for PPC was not the frustrating part it was the massive compromises with Macromedia, Adobe, MS and others who dictated Carbon alongside the demise of Apple Enterprise (NeXT Professional Services)) Andrew was the first to make his Pure Cocoa Apps current whenever there were changes to the development of OS X.
Adobe executives in ’97, 98 and ’99 MacWorld and WWDC did nothing but attempt to rip off many of Create’s innovations as well as TIFFany’s technologies by CaffeineSoft (both devs eventually employed by Apple on Quartz and other technologies).
Users need to realize with Tiger that Adobe, Microsoft and Macromedia either get off their asses and port everything to Cocoa or even Qt on OS X or their Carbon based apps will soon go bye-bye. Go to WWDC 2005. Pay attention to the focus on Cocoa, specifically Objective-C.
One huge price for a cs/studio mx, sad,but, I would buy it. They will dominate together so the price may go lower due to shared profit. I think freehand will be intergrated with photoshop or illustrater. Fireworks inergrated with indesing. Dreamweaver/golive. Oh yeah!
I haven’t used a recent version of Freehand but what I have used seemed to fall between InDesign and Illistrator sort of like Corel Draw does.
Now I am at home with Photoshop and it is not because of the filters. I have played with Gimp but I am still waiting for better CMYK support and some of their tool palets are alien to me but usage would rectify that.
InDesign and Photoshop are the 2 main apps I will use for the majority of my work which is all pree press either digital or offset. I love InDesign as a layout program and the shared features between Photoshop and InDesign make integration a breeze. Many Old School designers are still running around wasting their time and sometimes mine with complex clipping masks and the likes that just makes my head swim. Really gets annoying when it can be done much faster and more simply nowdays thanks to the technology that Adobe has coded into their apps.
Illistrator, I only use when I absolutely have to. I hate it as an app but I realise that for complex Vector Artwork I can’t do it in InDesign although InDesign does have limited Vector capabilities. Adobe needs to rewrite Illistrator from the ground up and integrate the colour engine they share between Photoshop and InDesign. At the moment all we have is feature bloat ontop of old code. Many novice “designers” I’ve come accross try to do all their print artwork in Illistrator and making a real right mess of things. They then wonder why printed work looks like crap and why they have problems trying to achieve decent artwork in a limited time frame.
I also don’t mind Adobes Premier but I have not come to grips with most of Adobes other software. From a Print point of view, PDF is a god send. The day Microsoft can create a portable document format which works for printing I will eat my hat… PDF works, cross platform and from computer to computer you get consistant output on screen and in print and I couldn’t ask for more. I agree that Adobe shouldn’t bog it down with feature wear though.
My 2 cents
“Over the last 6 months I’ve come to really like Flash for Rich Internet Application development.”
http://www.laszlosystems.com/
Maybe we’ll finally get Flashplayer for X86-64 linux…
Of course, it’s wishful thinking, as if most of what is written here, including your comments about a dream operating system. Adobe isn’t the company to deliver such an OS, as the poor user interface design and architecture of their software products shows. What most of our comments show is discontent on the part of product designers, developers, and graphic artists with the status quo.
Other comments reflect the cynicism of business. Of course, this is a good business decision for Adobe short term, but it’s bad for users. Those of us who have the skills need to give users better alternatives. Most of the software that we use today is bloated, unstable, and poorly designed. Those of us who have spoken in support of Macromedia here aren’t saying their products are perfect, just better than many. Dreamweaver has a pretty good user interface, but crashes a lot, and renders CSS horribly. The Adobe products I use–mainly Photoshop, Acrobat Professional, and FrameMaker–are poorly designed, hard to use, and Photoshop is very unstable.
I particularly enjoyed the comments of the self-proclaimed Photoshop genius who agrees with me about the poor quality of its user interface. Most people who are skilled in Photoshop just view that as a competitive advantage. 😉
To Anonymous: McAfee products are even worse than Norton System Works. The sad consequence of another bad acquisition. McAfee products used to be much better. Now, they constantly interrupt my work with irrelevant, center-screen messages that actually take control of input and keep me from typing in other applications. Their software won’t uninstall either.
To Aussiefax: Tools matter, as well as talent. Doing good design requires that one achieve flow, which is hard to do when your software is constantly thwarting your efforts.
you really are good.
http://www.mraf.com/concepts/003.html
It’s funny how ALL the comments above that dislike Adobe’s interface in favor of …Macromedia’s one are by teenagers and spotty young adults with no relation to graphic design whatsoever.
Why’s that? It’s because PROFESSIONAL designers (not lame web-designer-on-sundays kind of hacks) LOVE Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (also InDesign, in DTP land, that went from rags to riches). Freehand users are in the minority. Dreamweaver and Flash, i.e WEB apps are what made Macromedia great (their interface is far from clean, by the way, and they resorted to borrow some elements from Adobe UIs, hence a lawsuit followed).
The only reason the lamers in the postings know adobe is because they do web design (mostly on pirated copies) so they learned to love Dreamweaver and Flash. Simply familliarity, that’s the hidden core of their argument.
Go read some Design mags or websites. Or listen to me, I AM a designer. We love Adobe and it’s UI.