Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005

dennison_uy writes "Adobe Systems Incorporated and Macromedia, Inc. today announced they have either received or been notified they will receive all regulatory clearances necessary to complete Adobe's pending acquisition of Macromedia. The companies expect to close the transaction on December 3, 2005. Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?"

Background info

[JonN]

Here are a few links for background information for anyone who needs:

How the Adobe-Macromedia Merger Could Impact PDF [pdfzone.com]
Interview of both CEOs [businessweek.com]
Staff's comments [kottke.org]
Article with a bit more bulk on the subject [theregister.co.uk] (The article linked about is quite small)

Re:Speed

[Jearil]

Have you tried version 7 of the Adobe Acrobat Reader? I was shocked as I figured when I downloaded it it would just add more garbage that slowed it down to even further hights of unusability... and yet when I opened a PDF with it, the whole thing came up in like 3 seconds.

They definately were going for "teh snappy" with the 7 release. Try it out, it's quite a bit better.

I still prefer Preview though ;)
(and damnit.. xpdf can suck sometimes.. why do half of my documents show only pics and no text?)

Re:Speed

[giorgiofr]

No, it's because of the three thousand plugins that are loading while you watch that splash screen. Move them from the plugins dir to a backup one, restart Acrobat and see it fail, read what plugin is missing, restore it, repeat 3-4 times and notice how it now takes less than 1 sec to show up.
I tried it and the loading time went from like 10 to 1 second.
Then of course when you're doing something that requires a plugin, restore it and leave it there (for example, the search function *is* a plugin... WTF?) but anyway 90% of them won't be needed.
HTH

PDF SpeedUp -- Just use it.

[eddy]

PDF SpeedUp 1.42 [acropdf.com] (win32)

Not only a fancy way to disable the plugins, it actually removes the splash screen, removes crappy GUI elements (advertisments), etc.

64-bit plug-in

[dusik]

Does this mean that Adobe will speed up the development of a 64-bit Flash plug-in? IMO, that's long overdue.

Re:PNG better quality?

[illtud]

That's odd... short of saving at 16bits/channel (which maybe Photoshop can't do - I don't touch that thing), I don't think there are any quality settings with PNG per se; it is a lossless format, after all.

There's a lot you can to optimize PNGs, for example with pngcrush [sourceforge.net]. See Wikipedia's detail on PNG filesizes [wikipedia.org]. For more info on PS's bad handling of PNG, see Photoshop & PNG [fundy.net] about halfway down that page.