Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005 262
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?"
Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:2, Insightful)
Macromedia used to be cool (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, making a "professional" version of the Flash tool - I'm sure pretty much everyone who buys Flash is a professional, the "professional" version is just an excuse to charge extra for things that should be in the main product.
And they are trying to push developers in the direction they want them to go, rather than providing what developers want. For instance, they have a heavy focus now on using Flash for on-line forms and applications, but when was the last time you actually used a Flash application online? And yet many developers use PHP and are now interested in Ruby and AJAX but Macromedia have very poor support for those technologies.
I would like to think something positive will come out of this merger, but I'm afraid the new Adobe will just use their new powers to try to force developers in the direction they want them to go and find new ways to squeeze more money out of them.
Fireworks (Score:5, Insightful)
PNG support is also much better, it produces smaller, better quality files than Photoshop manages to.
I do agree with your comment on freehand however, it is indeed doodooo.
Macromedia should school Adobe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:obviously... (Score:2, Insightful)
Back in the day, FreeHand was at least competitive with -- and in several respects, superior to -- Illustrator. FreeHand still does multi-page documents (Illustrator doesn't as Adobe wants you to buy InDesign for that), offered better text formatting for largeish blocks of text (or did through Illustrator CS1) and has a much better trace tool, among other things. Its lens fills were pretty spiffy when they were introduced (v8?) too -- Illustrator had to wait another rev before getting transparency.
Of course, MM let Illustrator catch up with -- and surpass -- FreeHand while they futzed about with Flash, and that new UI (sparkle? spackle? dazzle? drizzle? whatever it's called...) is abominable. FreeHand has long since lost its place in my toolbox. But it's not a 'companion to Flash'.
What history has taught us ... (Score:4, Insightful)
But how did they deal with Freehand, when they already had Illustrator? Why, they sold it off to someone else, and conveniently enough, they're getting it back again.
So, if they feel that there's a legitimate reason to maintain two seperate programs that do similar things, they'll be likely to slowly change the two until you get to the point where it's easy to jump ship to the one they prefer (basically, make sure that any outstanding features have been migrated to the other product line), and then kill off the old one.
In the case where they're no significant differentiation in capabilities between the two, they may see the benefit in getting some money back by flipping it to some other company.
By the time we're done, Freehand will have seen more company trades than WordPerfect.
Livemotion & Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, Adobe already tried this with Flash competitor called Live Motion [adobe.com]. It was a tool that had great potential, but it couldn't make inroads into the market that Flash totally dominated. Adobe admitted defeat and pulled it from market in 2003.
Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:obviously... (Score:2, Insightful)
As much as Fireworks compliments Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I don't think there's really much of a necessity for it if you already have a program that is technically capable of doing everything.
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
But consumers should benefit from integrated products nonetheless. Let us remember the big interface lawsuits of just a few years ago between these companies. Adobe sued MM over the fact you could configure your interface with floating palettes to look like just like their products, and MM was forced to come up with the whole dockable palettes thing.
what I imagine is going to occur, and what I have held off purchasing the latest MM studio for, is this:
1) Freehand goes away completely, it's already too much like Illustrator to survive.
2) Fireworks gets rebranded as an Illustrator lite, and some of it's rasterization features are taken away. It's made into a lightweight production tool for Flash and Web graphics and given all sorts of hooks into Illustrator.
3) Dimensions returns as a 3D solution for Flash.
M
Re:Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:2, Insightful)
I am sick and tired on websites that use 30% of my CPU just to show a useless, animated logo, or using Flash menus that can't be searched in or for, and unable of being indexed by search engines, and that break back and forward navigation, or waiting 10 seconds or more when a new page loads just to be shown the intro animation for that page.
How about starting to put content, rather than mere presentation, on your pages instead? I, for one, would almost be happier to see Flash eradicated from the web than to see Microsoft eradicated from the OS market.
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:3, Insightful)
The Kottke summary linked in the writeup cites Tim Bray as saying that he thinks Flash will be phased out, since it hasn't been a signficant source of revenue for MM. Personally, I think that's unlikely: at the worst, it will be folded into another product. But when people think of MM, they think of Flash and Dreamweaver first, and dropping one or the other couldn't be viewed as anything but admission of defeat, in my opinion.
Back in the late 90s, when I was learning PHP, I shot a message off to an MM newsgroup asking if anyone had developed any Dreamweaver extensions supporting PHP. At the time, PHP's user base was small, but growing rapidly - I'd say that in terms of size and growth, it occupied about the same point that Ruby on Rails does now (only PHP wasn't as hyped). I received a note back from a Macromedia staffer who asked if I was interested in signing on to help develop those extensions. I was a little shocked, and sent him a polite response thanking him, but had to demur since their domain model for handling stuff like PHP was internally represented in Javascript, and I didn't yet have the chops for it.
I'm not entirely sure it's fair to say that their support for PHP is bad. It's actually a very open ended language, and one which doesn't impose much in the way of structure on developers, so it's presentation in Dreamweaver had to be equally open-ended. That left it feeling... kinda limp, for lack of a better term. If they wanted to, I'm reasonably certain that they could make DW into the Best Damn Rails Environment Ever, but we'll see.
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Macromedia should school Adobe (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you seen Macromedia LiveDocs? I remember they sent out a survey about what users wanted for an online help system - and LiveDocs is somehow what they came up with. Why are docs javascript driven? Why do they take 45 seconds to load? Why do all the pages have stupid urls like http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/mx2004/main_
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to disappoint your faith in groupthink. Flash has legitimate, appropriate uses, such as creating sites that go beyond simple click-to-the-next-page interfaces. Just because it's frequently misused, or because you don't see any value in rich media and want it banned from the web, doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you.
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:4, Insightful)
This is because you're only being exposed to "Skip-Intro" sites built by incompetent Flash users that don't know how to code in Actionscript and so are left making movieClips and timelines. Problem is that movieClips, especially invisible ones, CONTINUE to play little blinking animations etc in the background and will hog your CPU. It's important to note that this is NOT a problem with Flash or the plugin, you can put that problem squarely on the head of idiot users.
Macromedia's website is built on 80% Flash content, does your CPU run at 30% + to view it? No. Why? Because they have users that *know* how to build proper Flash animations.
Try viewing a page with 7+ animated gifs and see what happens to your cpu.
Re:ColdFusion shoutout (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been developing since V2 and the MX range has revitalised it as a dev environment. It gets a bad name because it's easy to write crap code, but if it's properly written and servers are properly managed there's not much you can't do with it.
I could go on, but I won't, cos you'll all get very, very bored if I start ranting.
FYI (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:2, Insightful)
I also thought that most folks here thought that Flash is the single largest scourge on the web. Or to be more precise that its inappropriate use is.
While Flash indeed, as mentioned, has legitimate and appropriate uses, there seems to be far more inappropriate use out there. This seems to grow daily. It's not just the inane moving graphics, it's not just the cpu load from badly designed stuff, it's the damn sound effects that get me. I often browse late at night and sometimes I forget that the volume on my pc is up loud. Nothing more than pop-up windows has made me want to punch my monitor more than Flash pages since I started using the web.
One of the best things for the web is Firefox, because with that you can (and I most surely do) use the Flashblock extension. Nowadays I have to really really need a web page before I turn on the Flash on the page.
Sure, this isn't good news for the few good Flash designers out there but until there is a better alternative or some sort of standards, Flashblock is on, and staying on.
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is not to say I give Flash a free pass--there is undoubtedly crappy Flash out there. But like any technology, including the Slashdot-friendly iPod, and P2P apps, it has its good and bad uses.
(No, I'm not a Flash developer, nor do I personally know any who are)