Adobe Acquires Macromedia

User benefits to the acquisition

2005-04-19T12:11:00.000-04:00

This is an even bigger acquisition than when Adobe purchased Aldus almost a decade ago! And Macromedia is currently a healthy company—Brainard had bailed out hopes of maintaining Aldus years before the acquisition.What does this mean to the business community? Well, Microsoft had better’d pay attention here, in its quest to capture the mobile market and the home. Adobe/Macromedia will be a formidable opponent in these arenas, and perhaps this is the reason for the acquisition—to shore up resources.

To the end user, there will, naturally, be less selection and competition. It’s my fervent hope that Adobe doesn’t ignore the responsibilities they have to the folks who helped build them.

No more Freehand? Possibly, or possibly rights and development will revert to AltSys, although I haven’t heard much about AltSys lately. This leaves Deneba Canvas and CorelDraw, both hurting concerns, as true bi-platform competition to Illustrator. I hope XARA goes bi-platform; they gave Corel an ulcer a decade ago as the “Corel Killer”, and although the impact was questionable, I hope XARA can maintain its presence in the market and keep Adobe on its toes.

Basically, Macromedia mothballed Fontographer, and that’s a shame. I hope AltSys gets it back and continues to develop it. Funny thing is, there has never been a true bi-platform font creation program except Fontographer for all these years. I use Fontlab, and believe it’s a better product than Fontographer, although it’s little-known. It can write Mac OpenType, BTW. Adobe is Font City; they license from Monotype, Linotype, and the other biggies, but seems to perceive that there’s no demand for a “simple” font-maker, and that perception might only strengthen as they head for...Adobe Home (?) Suite. But the “indys” still need a flexible and robust (and affordable) solution. Nick Curtis
is a very prolific fontophile, and he uses CorelDraw and then tweaks in Fontographer, he told me. But CorelDraw for the Mac didn’t export to any font format, last I looked.

The late, great Macromedia Extreme 3D needs resurrecting, but I have serious doubts. Yes, I’m an E3D freak, but I’m putting aside my personal preferences in this wish. E3D is an accessible, affordable 3D creation and animation program with a small price tag and footprint, and can do almost everything that the major players can do: particle systems, metablobs, Boolean operations (with a little effort), shadow and texture and bump mapping, and we’re talking a program that stopped development back in 1997. Its nearest competitor is/was trueSpace, and trueSpace doesn’t support a Mac version. I’m probably pipe-dreaming now, though, because the interest in 3D in general is at an ebb—VRML is basically dead, and I can’t seem to sell even an introductory 3D book to a publisher. And as soon as PIXAR went public, they stopped offering software—and their ShowPlace program offered the same technology and rendering engine as the software the company uses to create full-length animated features for Disney! And it was affordable!Nope, 3D probably isn’t a camp Adobe wants to set up and maintain; they’ve discontinued Atmosphere, the VRML-like browser that can display galleries of user images and uses Elements, a Windows-only program, as a generating engine. Eovia had a partnership with Adobe for Carrera (what Ray Dream Designer turned into, after the merger of Fractal Design, MetaCreations, Curious Labs, and Wal-Mart), but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Check out the product page for a list of Adobe’s current offerings.

How about Dreamweaver? I cannot see Adobe shucking it for GoLive. GoLive is a free-form, personal-level HTML compiler, much along the same lines as PageMaker’s DTP prowess. Dreamweaver is industrial-strength, in comparison—enterprises configure sites using Dreamweaver. What I anticipate is a merging of technologies here; sorta GoDreamLive, as it were.

Flash? Flash media, IMFFHO, is annoying; browsers can’t turn it off, designers seem infatuated with creating huge, largely self-serving ads as a testament to their own ingenuity, and the security layer is infuriating! You can’t screen-capture a Flash snippet of media, in case you’ve never tried...this sorta runs against the spirit of the Web, that being (and yes, sadly) that anything’s fair game. I hope Adobe opens the standards to Flash, like they’ve done with Acrobat, and adds some enhancements. Currently, you can write Flash media as vector information, or as a bitmap. And currently, both Adobe ImageReady and XARA can write to the Flash standard, but you can’t export drop-shadows and other graphics information. Again, IMFFHO, why bother, then, with a bitmap export—just use animated GIFs instead. The whole purpose of Flash, I thought, was compactness (and interactivity, okay, GIFs can’t do that, but rollovers can).

I’m all for Adobe growth, don’t get me wrong. They’re earned every penny they make from unparalleled programs, although they could do with offering cheaper, “junior” versions, for folks who dig digital media, but don’t sport the wallet. Perhaps they can be persuaded to offer past versions of their software at reduced prices; trueSpace 3.2 is free, you know, as soon as Caligari cobbled version 5—and Elements is actually a watered-down version of Photoshop.As a designer, I’m always looking for innovative tools. It’s my hope that Adobe will continue to provide them, and I don’t mean just authoring tools for the Web. Alien Skin Software, Creature House (who sold Expression to Microsoft), and Curious Labs, to name but a few, all offer cuting-edge stuff from a low-overhead setting at a moderate price.

The Register comments that the merger is bad for online tools.

PostScript :) : Impressionist, the child of Alvy Smith, a Microsoft Fellow and one of the founders of PIXAR, created a rich suite of paint filters; check here for more info--you sort of have to buy Front Page to get the plug-in suite, but it’s a lot richer in effects and options than Adobe’s Gallery Effects, late of Aldus, and currently free with a better preview window in Photoshop.

Wish List, Part 2

2005-04-19T11:59:00.000-04:00

Oh, yeah...scripting language, and larger-than life application footprints.As far as a scripting language goes, I'd love to see a shakedown in the industry. Adobe will now have Photoshop's Actions feature and MM Director's lingo. Why should the average designer have to learnseveral languages to access some truly neat app features? I suggest that Python is adopted by Adobe Systems. It's platform independent, freely distributable, highly-intuitive, object-based, English scripting. Books have been written on it to ease the learning curve, Curious Labs have adopted it for Poser, and adopting it would alleviate the dirth of coding requirements get one's needed to work done.

I'm also running out of room on my laptop! I've got an 80GB drive, and between MS and Adobe suites, all my hard drive is full; no room for user files! How about we continue coding in assembly? XARA,Ltd. has fewer than 50 employees, yet they manage to roll out new product regularly. Illustrator has very few features that XARA does not, and yet Illustrator's almost 200MB installed on HD. XARA is about 12MB, in comparison.

"Smallware" does not have to be "LimitedWare"...it just usually runs faster when it's coded tightly.

My 2¢ again,
Gare

2005-04-18T13:51:00.000-04:00

Adobe Systems has almost closed a $3.4 billion acquisition software maker Macromedia. Macromedia’s Flash technology is used to present anything from enhanced fonts to web movies on web sites. Macromedia Flash is installed in 98% of all desktop PCs. The acquisition also makes Adobe, a partner of Yahoo, a stronger competitor to Microsoft - which is expanding its web offerings.

With the acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe is also bringing DreamWeaver into its various web tool offerings already including Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and the ever so popular Adobe Reader. “Customers are calling for integrated software solutions that enable them to create, manage and deliver a wide range of compelling content and applications - from documents and images to audio and video,” said Bruce Chizen, Adobe’s CEO.

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2005-04-18T12:09:00.000-04:00

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