Adobe Unveils Open Source Library 406
anamexis writes "Adobe premiered (no pun intended) opensource.adobe.com recently. The first two libraries available, titled Adam and Eve, respectively, take on complex GUI issues in applications. They are written in C++ and have been released under the MIT License, an OSI-Approved Open Source License."
Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not discounting any problems you've had, I'm just curious as to what they are.
Dmitry Sklyarov (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, I am still too afraid to use any Adobe products after DmitryGate.
I think it's going to take alot more from Adobe to win the trust and respect of this community, or at least this member.
I should mention that I am also a former Adobe customer.
Just what the world needs... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The GIMP (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software"? I think most (all?) "open source" licenses have a similar requirement. Don't confuse your dislike for Adobe with reality.
MIT License (Score:3, Insightful)
Flame? (was: Re:Acrobat Reader) (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I do not agree with you on many points... seriously, the Hotmail signup process requires a LOT more unchecking of boxes than the 3 unchecks you need when downloading Acrobat... it's a very common practice, and even Joe Shmoe who is able to find out he needs Acrobat is aware to not check everything... besides, at least Adobe doesn't sell your email addy to dozens of third parties...
Secondly, what's wrong with a business paying for creating PDF's ? There's nothing really wrong with Adobe Acrobat's business model: create a portable document format, make readers available for free on any OS, guarantee that it looks the same everywhere, and let people who want to create PDF documents using Acrobat pay...
Now, there already are pdf writers other than acrobat, so what's the problem...
IMHO, you're highly overreacting.
Something easy and useful (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:5, Insightful)
they see Linux as a tier-2, unimportant platform
In my experience Adobe views everything that isn't Windows as a tier-2 platform, and would like nothing more than for them to go away. They have killed or frozen many products for Linux, Mac OS, and Solaris in the last few years. One particularly galling example is Framemaker. It is the single most popular application for writing manuals and technical publications, due to it's unique feature-set (developed before adobe bought it). Adobe killed the Linux version completely, and never released an OS X native version. Mac OS 9 users made up 65% of their customers, but for some reason when OS X came out, everyone stopped buying the Mac version. (everyone was waiting for an OS X version). It never came. Now it is a Window's only product. I know a number of people who run it in the Classic OS 9 emulation environment and a number who have switched to alternate products. Other users just switched to Windows. This is typical Adobe's attitude in recent years. Even with their flagship, Photoshop, Mac versions have sometimes lagged behind, or been missing features of the windows release. It is all just symptomatic of a company that has bought into Windows development, and only supports other platforms when there is just too much money coming in. Adobe has lost my trust, and I think lost it's way. I'm just waiting for a real competitor to appear.
Let me make sure this is what I think.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Apparently (from TFA) most of their bugs are from UI problems.
So, they had the brillaint idea of writing up skeleton code for UI parsing and sending it out to the open source community so they don't actually have to debug it themselves, or pay people to do so.
In the meantime, they're not releasing anything meaningful or useful at all. Is that about right?
What about their UI Patent? (Score:2, Insightful)
Has this been removed from their library? If not, doesn't it conflict with the whole concept of opensource?
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PRe:Acrobat Reader (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here. (Score:5, Insightful)
ASL is being developed in C++, and relies heavily on the Boost libraries http://www.boost.org/ which are required for building ASL.
Aside from the obvious stupidity of the grandparent, I'd like to add that I'm really impressed a big player like Adobe would be using Boost and not some internally cooked up library that they try to shove on everyone else.
Re:Adobe is starting to worry about GIMP (Score:3, Insightful)
There may be a day when The GIMP is comparible to Photoshop Elements 3 which is now "48bit". But PSE only costs $99 retail and is frequently single or dual rebated to $69 or even $49.
So compare free to $49, it's a lot more fair and a lot less FUD like. And frankly, PSE still wins hands down, and it wouldn't take even the poorsest student more than three pizzas to afford it. PSE is The GIMP's real goal, and it's pretty stiff competition, even given the price difference.
Re:Python Photoshop plugin for Mac? (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe never took the open source Python scripting extension their own employee developed seriously enough, nor did they continue to develop and support it, and now they've white-washed it from their open source web site. But they certainly should have given it more consideration: It was a brilliant idea.
Photoshop and AfterEffects would have been vastly more useful if they had well designed built-in scripting languages supporting binary plug-in interfaces, the way 3D Studio Max has MaxScript, Gimp has Scheme, or Poser and Paint Shop Pro have Python.
Profound Effects [profoundeffects.com], a third party AfterEffects plug-in developer, has created an amazing plug-in called "Useful Things [profoundeffects.com]", which true to its name enables you to easily script AfterEffects in Python to do all kinds of useful things.
Adobe has always left the scripting languages to third party developers, but they should have been doing it themselves to achieve a much deeper intergration than is possible through third-party plug-in interfaces.
3D Studio Max originally didn't have its own scripting language, but then Lyric [lyric.com], a third party 3D Studio Max plug-in developer, implemented a plug-in called "MaxScript", which enabled developers to easily script 3D Studio Max. The important thing about MaxScript is that it had its own plug-in interface, which enabled developers to plug their own primitives into the scripting language! MaxScript was so powerful that Kinetix (now known as Discrete) bought MaxScript and built it into Max, integrating it as deeply as it should have been in the first place.
The ability to plug external binary code into an application's scripting language is vitally important. On Windows, that's traditionally achieved through ActiveX/OLE, which you can use in any of the Windows scripting languages like JScript and VBScript. And you can plug the scripting language into your application and expose your application's API to it throught ActiveX/OLE.
But cross platform applications like Photoshop can't use ActiveX/OLE (or decided not to -- OLE and ActiveX were ported to the Mac and Unix years ago, but weren't widely used or supported).
Python is an excellent choice for a cross platform extensible scripting language. It's a much more serious language and it's much easier to extend that JavaScript, and there is a huge library of existing modules to draw from.
-Don
Re:Just what the world needs... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Works
2) Is clean
3) Is usable verbatim on Linux, Windows and Mac
4) Is not supidly licensed
Then yes, we need another GUI library!
So far there is not a single library that fits all 4 of those definitions.
Re:That's cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, if they did release it, it wouldn't help anybody. Acrobat does some important things, but it does them very badly. For PDF rendering alone, you can do much better. Compare Acrobat to Apple's entirely home-grown PDF rendering code, for instance.
Re:Adobe is starting to worry about GIMP (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between Photoshop and Gimp is more than high-resolution color support. It's the tool set. Does Gimp offer layer comps? Does it offer actions? How are its antialiasing facilities? Can you create image slices? How can you automate it? Where's the third-party filter support? Can Gimp run DFT, for instance? For many users, if it can't, that's an absolute show-stopper, end of discussion. Does Gimp have pixel aspect ratio correction? How are its compositing tools? Does it have adjustment layers? How about layer effects? How are its matting tools?
These aren't bells and whistles. These are key features that I use every single day, and I'm not even pushing the program very hard.
It's not about file-format support. Hell, it's not even about color management. It's about the tools. Until the tools are there, no, Gimp will never even be on the same planet as Photoshop.
Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're a professional who uses InDesign, FrameMaker or Photoshop, that's unlikely to happen anytime in the near future. I've posted similar comments to GIMP threads, because the fact remains that Photoshop is so many man-years ahead of the competition and such an excellent program that a viable competitor with anywhere near Photoshop's combination of (relative) speed, ease of use and features seems highly unlikely. Commercial competitors will probably never appear because Photoshop eats the high end, Photoshop Elements now offers a low-mid end and the GIMP, for all its problems, probably gets the rest of the market. The GIMP suffers a variety of ills, including the problem of difficult OS X support [gimp.org] and an unfortunate name, but it still gets some love for simple uses. Finally, even if the GIMP managed to threaten Photoshop, I'll bet on 1:50 odds that Adobe comes out with their patent canons firing, and today's patent situation makes them all too likely to triumph in the United States.
FrameMaker, meanwhile, is simply too much a niche and too well entrenched to see any serious competitor take it out, and InDesign probably falls into the same category. Quark, meanwhile, has become a non-entity and continues to survive solely through cruising; it makes Sun look like a vibrant, growing company by comparison.
I'm also disenchanted with Adobe as a company, but logically I can't see anyone else arising to challenge Adobe, because their products are too good, too complex and too much of a niche. Hell, the FOSS community can't even get close to OO.org parity with MSO, and a whole lot more people use office suites than Photoshop, InDesign and Framemaker combined.
Good post overall, though -- I agree with most of your points.
Re:Another Widget Set? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's pretty good.