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Graphics Software

Adobe Unveils Open Source Library 406

Posted by CmdrTaco from the catching-up-to-the-little-old-gimp dept.
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."
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Adobe Unveils Open Source Library More

Adobe Unveils Open Source Library

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  • Acrobat Reader (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jamesshuang ( 598784 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:40AM (#11823616) Homepage
    If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...

    • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 )
      What's wrong with it? It works well with firefox. It's a lot less bloated than version 6 for windows. Loads faster than the bloated one for windows. I prefer that they haven't filled it to the brim with crap. Every once in a while I'll get a warning telling me it might not display the pdf correctly, but it always seems to work fine.

      I'm not discounting any problems you've had, I'm just curious as to what they are.
      • My experience:

        1 - The interface/widgets suck badly
        2 - The find function crashes the app consistently (for me anyway)
        3 - I have to set LANG=C in my /etc/profile or it won't run at all, not sure what this breaks as it is supposed to be iso-8859 or something

        This is under RHEL3.

        • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:5, Informative)

          by OldMiner ( 589872 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @12:53PM (#11825163) Journal

          I troubleshot this problem before, but I don't have the links handy. The short version is that it's a bug in the program itself, where it asks for too-general of a font, which causes buffer overflows. When requesting a font in X there's a whole bunch of dashes and asterisks such as -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-iso8859-1 [purdue.edu]. Each of these asterisks is an "I don't care" value. "I don't care what foundry it's from." "I don't care about its resolution." Or say -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-* which also says "I don't care about its encoding."

          The encoding part is what you're getting around. When you have a proper LANG setting, like "en_US" the libraries you're using will recognize this and provide you with a nice beefy font. You'll often get a font which is not a nice, normal 8-bit font. It could be all wacky with like thousands of freaking characters, for, like, doing stuff outside of the Latin language set. Crazy.

          When proper international fonts were being developed and the developers started to test applications, they realized that there were a ton of applications with this problem. They simply requested a font where they didn't specify encoding, and they couldn't deal with certain encodings that were returned, and they'd segfault. Therefore, making international-capable fonts standard was put off for many months while developers were encouraged to fix their applications. Unfortunately, Acrobat Reader is one of the stragglers. The recommended solution I've seen is to rename acroread and add a script in its place which sets the LANG variable and then runs the renamed executable.

      • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:5, Interesting)

        by PoprocksCk ( 756380 ) <poprocks@gmail.org> on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:56AM (#11823773) Homepage Journal
        You're right, it is less bloated. But the point is that they're still using some ugly, closed-source GUI library, and that they fully neglected Linux users for one whole major version.

        Sure, they announced a 'beta' of version 7 for Linux, but has anyone ever *seen* it? They cancelled the public beta after a few days. So it's not so much that the product is a poor one (version 5.0.10 is pretty decent, really) but that they see Linux as a tier-2, unimportant platform. I truly hope that that changes in the near future as Adobe begins to embrace OSS.

        • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:5, Informative)

          by uss_valiant ( 760602 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:19AM (#11824034) Homepage
          A friend uses acroread 7 (beta) on his solaris (or was it linux) machine and it's really good. I'm also very pleased with the reader in version 7 on windows. It's so much better, faster, more responsive, ... than version 6. It's probably as fast as version 5 with more features than version 6.
          After the disastrous version 6, Adobe fixed the issues with version 7 and I can honestly recommend using the most recent Acrobat Reader version again.

        • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:5, Insightful)

          by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:23AM (#11824087)

          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.

          • I'm just waiting for a real competitor to appear.

            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 nev

            • professionals (Score:4, Interesting)

              by guet ( 525509 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:46PM (#11826341)
              Actually, I'd say the quality of Adobe products has declined over the last few years - they've reached that stage where they try to milk the current line for as long as possible, while adding more and more mis-features rather than listening to their customers and splitting out features into different products. Quark in its time was also an innovate company, and look what happened to them...

              Personally I find the Photoshop CS menu bar over-crowded, and the Layer Style dialog byzantine (quite apart from the fact it takes an age to open). Double clicking on stuff in the layers palette is also a bit hit and miss - click on the text and you get to edit the layer name, just off the text and it opens the layers dialog. They are suffering a little from featuritis. Compared to The GIMP of course, it's a dream to use.

              The File menu in Illustrator CS on OS X now includes the gem 'Save for Microsoft Office' which isn't in the Export menu where it belongs but at the top level - a sure sign that the marketing department has taken over, quite apart from that Online Services... stuff and the recent emphasis on copy protection.

              I don't agree that there will be no competition to them - Apple for one have the incentive and resources to create a competitor if Adobe continues their slide towards windows. Already the CS suite are pretty slow on anything but the high end hardware under OS X, because they obviously haven't optimised for UI performance on OS X. A competitor doesn't have to produce a category killer all at once; they can start small and cheap, and build up, as Adobe did with InDesign when competing with Quark. In fact on OS X 10.4, with core image, it wouldn't be too hard to produce a competing product to Photoshop Elements, and build from there.

              Having said that, yes Adobe will dominate the professional market for years to come, due to inertia if nothing else - I'm still stuck working in quark under classic for quite a few design clients, who would love to switch to InDesign but haven't yet for legacy/cost reasons : )

        • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:2, Informative)

          by Hmmble ( 829603 )
          Acoording to this article (Dutch) [vnunet.nl] the Linux version of Adobe Reader 7.0 will be available somewhere this month (March)
        • Oh, please. At 2 or 3% of desktops, Linux _is_ an unimportant, third-tier platform. That they even bother to release for Linux is a declaration of commitment; expecting them to invest the same resources they invest into the Windows version is just being way too spoiled.
        • they're still using some ugly, closed-source GUI library

          A Linux user accuses somebody else's program of being ugly? That's rich.
      • Well, for starters the Windows version is up to 7, and it fixes a lot of the issues from v 6.
        • If by "fixes a lot of the issues" you mean "loads the entire application and its plugins at startup rather than on demand," then yeah, they sure fixed those problems.

          RealPlayer tried that crap once too, right around the time of the G2 player and straight through v8 at least. I don't know about since then, because I won't touch the software.

          Adobe is basically saying "we can't write the reader without it being a piece of shit that's bloated and slow, so we'll just load it all into memory and hope for th
      • It doesn't crash firefox for everyone else? On both my computers, closing a tab with adobe open (or using the back button to go from a pdf to html) has about a 50% chance of crashing the browser. The newest release of firefox seemed to drop this percentage to about 25%, but that is still way too high.
      • I'm not sure of what the term for this is, but I know of one big problem in particular. A while back I needed to fill out some forms online, print them out, and then send them in through the postal system. What the online form was supposed to do was take the information, and send the data along with a pdf of the form over to acrobat reader. What happened in Linux was that the pdf would be loaded without the overlayed data. Kghostview didn't have any luck with it either, and the windows version of reader cra
      • What's wrong with it? It works well with firefox.

        You obviously haven't tried filling out forms...
      • The problem is it's coded with the creaky, ancient widget library "motif". I cannot speak for its internals, but motif is older than linux, it's pure C, until fairly recently was commercial closed-source, and I've never seen a motif program that wasn't brittle and flaky. Not to mention unaesthetic, user hostile, non-integrated, and prone to ignoring the scroll wheel. None of which is acceptable anymore, not after using modern apps.
    • If they'd only fix it for Windows, that would at least be something. You'd think after as many revisions that it's gone through you'd be able to easily save your place in a long document. The full version has bookmarks, but you have to go out of your way to define them, and their little drag & drop editor to move the bookmarks around is atrocious. Besides that, it requires you to modify and resave the document. You'd think that a simple leftOffPageNumber entry in a state file or the registry would be si

    • Re:Acrobat Reader (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dsginter ( 104154 )
      If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...

      We don't want Adobe Reader on Linux. For that matter, we don't want it on any platform.

      Adobe, like a page from the Evil Corporation book, has taken it upon themselves to cash in on the success of Acrobat Reader. Currently, if you're a Windows Joe User who wants to download it, you'll wind up with all sorts of stuff [adobe.com]. You'll get the Adobe Download Manager, the Yahoo Toolbar, Adobe Photoshop SE, and some mysterious Adobe Internet Printing that just appears i

      • 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 Acro

        • 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

          You know,

          Crime is also a very common practice. Just because it is common doesn't mean that it is right. Someone needs to start making examples of this garbage and I think that Adobe is a good place to start.

      • Didja ever wonder why SO MANY people have the Yahoo toolbar even though they don't use Yahoo?

        I just installed Acrobat Reader 7 on one of our test machines yesterday. There was a rather obvious checkbox to select whether you want this or not.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...


      What's in need of fixing? The latest version, 5.0.10, WORKSFORME.

      Oh, and you *did* report your problems/bugs to adobe at
      http://www.adobe.com/misc/bugreport.html [adobe.com]
      right?

      Now, it would be nice to get an update for new features, like those in version 7 for Windows.

  • The GIMP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:41AM (#11823620)
    Not being familiar with the MIT License (too lazy to RTFL), just wondering what use these libraries could be to projects like the GIMP.

    • Re:The GIMP (Score:5, Informative)

      by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:43AM (#11823644) Homepage
      Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:


      The MIT License

      Copyright (c)

      Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

      The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

      THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.


      So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".
      • Hehehe...That's what I get for not bothering to click the link. Thanks for pointing out just how lazy i was being. (Although, I was actually busy checking out the adobe site to see what these two libraries are capable of doing).

      • Re:The GIMP (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:49AM (#11823716) Homepage
        So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".

        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.

        • The obnoxious advertising clause" is not a requirement of "most" open source licenses, because it is explicitly incompatible with the GPL.

          That said, I'm not entirely certain that the MIT license requirements are really the same as the "obnoxious advertising clause."

          • Re:The GIMP (Score:4, Informative)

            by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:35AM (#11824225)
            Theres no Advertising Clause in the MIT license - what the grandparent is calling the OAC is simply the bog standard copyright acknowledgement that goes in each sourcecode file. See the post a few posts down about the OpenBSD license - that certainly has no OAC and has pretty much the same wording.
          • So what? The FSF says it's officially an Open Source License. Not everyone "Open Source" likes the GPL, and the GPL is NOT the only "open source" license. Get a grip. Just because an Open Sourced application uses an Open Source License that is NOT GPL does not make the application developers heretics. Small closed minds...

      • Re:The GIMP (Score:3, Informative)

        by lordpixel ( 22352 )
        That's not the obnoxious advertising clause.

        The OAC was a part of the BSD license which used to say you had to print out a message when your program started up giving props to the Regents of the University of Berkley, CA or some such.

        This was probably the only real difference between the MIT and BSD licenses, but since the BSD license dropped this clause, they're the same for all intents and purposes.
        • Heh. Thanks for explaining this.
          When you boot OSX in verbose mode, you get that regents of Whatever message. i always wondered what kind of sect that was ;)

      • Re:The GIMP (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Homology ( 639438 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:54AM (#11823761)
        Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:

        The OpenBSD license [openbsd.org] is even shorter :

        Below is an example license to be used for new code in OpenBSD,
        modeled after the ISC license.

        It is important to specify the year of the copyright. Additional years
        should be separated by a comma, e.g.
        Copyright (c) 2003, 2004

        If you add extra text to the body of the license, be careful not to
        add further restrictions.

        /*
        * Copyright (c) CCYY YOUR NAME HERE <user@your.dom.ain>
        *
        * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
        * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
        * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
        *
        * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
        * WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
        * MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
        * ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
        * WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
        * ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
        * OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
        */

      • Re:The GIMP (Score:5, Funny)

        by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:09AM (#11823931) Homepage Journal
        shortest license I ever saw was the "Beerware" license. Went something like this:

        Copyright (c) xxxx Joe Q Programmer. Permission granted to use this thing however you want, subject to the condition that if you see me on the street, you buy me a beer.

        • Re:The GIMP (Score:5, Interesting)

          by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnarNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @12:16PM (#11824724) Homepage Journal
          Some folks misundertand parts of the reason some developers use the BSD licence: it is not just more altruistic or something, it can be more practical. I remember an outburst from an mplayer developer saying that he sees no point in the gpl, for they have no means to prevent misuse anyway. Also, once you use the GPL, you have to keep on eye on violations, you have to keep vigilant, otherwise, what's the point of using it? So, some devs think that they don't want to be concerned with possible violations, they don't recurrent themes of whether or not it is okay to write binary only drivers for the kernel because of the GPL, and so on. They want to program and that's it. This might be the spirit some refer to as "academic".

          Some developers go farther than this, and think that even the two clause BSD licence is too much legalese. Hence, code written by Poul-Henning Kamp is distributed under the beerware licence :))) (hence my reply to your post) - this is how it look like:

          * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
          * phkATFreeBSD.ORG wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
          * can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
          * this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
          */</blockquote>
          Whether or not you agree one agrees with him (I understand the point and usefulness of the GPL very well btw) - one has to admit that sometimes this kinda licence might give more freedom not only to the user, but to the developer(s) as well in the sense that a 3rd party vendor writing a binary driver or piece of code won't cause a shitstorm on the BSD kernel mailing list (as Brandybuck put it in one of his posts:))))

        • Re:The GIMP (Score:3, Interesting)

          by pavon ( 30274 )
          <anal>
          This is not a free license, or indeed a copyright license at all. Licenses can only grant the users rights which they did not already have. They cannot require service in exchange for the license - that requires a contract. Suggest modifying license to request a beer, not demand one.
          </anal> :)

  • If is looks like the acroreader for linux... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jsheedy ( 772604 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:41AM (#11823621) Homepage
    We are in for treat.
    • While acroread 5 is horrible (and the parent therefore deserves the Funny mod), the beta version of acroread 7 is a nice enough GTK app. I still have complaints & it isn't enough to switch me off of xpdf [foolabs.com], I no longer cringe when I need some peculiar features from acroread.

  • Adam & Eve? (Score:4, Funny)

    by carninja ( 792514 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:41AM (#11823624)
    Insert Cain & Abel joke here...

  • Nothing to see here (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was expecting some amazing graphics library but it is just a bunch of fairly trivial C++ templates. Nothing Boost cannot already do.
    • Uh, no. If you actually read up on Adam and Eve it seems to be some kind of widget library abstraction with a generic data engine behind it - a bit like what XUL/RDF Templates were supposed to be back in the early days of Mozilla.
    • From the documentation: Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond w

      • Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Gorath99 ( 746654 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:21AM (#11824068)
        From the documentation:

        Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.

        Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.

        I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.

        • Re:Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pVoid ( 607584 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:59AM (#11824518)
          Yeah, to quote the grandparent post nothing Boost couldn't do, rtfa:

          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.

    • You should read the overview, then. This is some *serious* and hairy shit.

      It's like Apple's cocoa bindings, but... well... more so. I guess you'd say it's like automatic data/event bindings with semantic layout for HI.

      I repeat: Serious shit.

  • That's cool... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PoprocksCk ( 756380 ) <poprocks@gmail.org> on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:43AM (#11823652) Homepage Journal
    ...But please, release something worthwhile under an open source license, like the backend stuff for Acrobat or something...

    And for the love of God, release Reader 7.0 for Linux, and do it soon!

    • Re:That's cool... (Score:3, Informative)

      by TuringTest ( 533084 )
      release something worthwhile under an open source license, like the backend stuff for Acrobat or something...

      So what about the backend stuff for Photoshop? 'cos that's what they've released:


      Eve (the name is derived from Express View Engine) is a layout engine and declarative language for constructing a human interface (HI) layout. Eve was developed originally for Photoshop (a prototype version was used in Photoshop 5) and has since seen gradual evolution and integration into other Adobe applications.

    • Re:That's cool... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Leo McGarry ( 843676 )
      PDF is an entirely open format. There's zero need for Adobe to release any of their Acrobat code.

      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.

  • Dmitry Sklyarov (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitaltraveller ( 167469 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:45AM (#11823686) Homepage
    I welcome Adobe's efforts to work with the open source community.

    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.
    • 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.

      In contrast to other companies (say, SUN), Adobe choosed a license that is free and well understood.


      • Open sourcing UNIX is a tad more difficult than what Adobe is doing. Sun had to untangle 30 years of UNIX copyright and patents, for starters. Solaris 10 is now free of charge (UNIX was really really expensive, once), and Open Solaris will be open source, and people still complain.

        Or is it that everyone on Slashdot is still living on daddy's penny and doesn't know the value in all this?

    • Re:Dmitry Sklyarov (Score:5, Informative)

      by alwsn ( 593349 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:08AM (#11823913)
      To those wondering what the parent is talking about... ElcomSoft verdict: Not guilty [com.com]

  • uhoh (Score:5, Funny)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:47AM (#11823694)
    Combine these with an Apple and you have the downfall of mankind...

  • Just what the world needs... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...another GUI library.
    • If we get one that:

      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.

  • FWIW... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PoprocksCk ( 756380 ) <poprocks@gmail.org> on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:48AM (#11823713) Homepage Journal
    ...Searching for "Linux" using the site-only Google search on the opensource.adobe.com website, yields one result: http://opensource.adobe.com/pipermail/pythonphotos hop/2004-January.txt

    And that one result no longer exists (you get a 404 when trying to access it). So if any of you folks are preparing to post "Oh boy, that means Photoshop for Linux is just around the corner!" -- you'd better think again.

    • Adobe ported Photoshop to Sun years ago (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SimHacker ( 180785 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:28AM (#11824135) Homepage Journal
      I still have my original copy of Photoshop 2.5 for Sun Sparcstation (from around 1993, registration number PUW250S7100427-380), which uses the ever-popular Flex license manager.

      Adobe used the Quorum Latitude [mactech.com] Macintosh application porting libraries to port Photoshop to Unix and X-Windows.

      The result of using a complex Mac emulation library that mapped quirky Mac toolbox calls onto the byzantine X-Windows graphics model and shoddy Motif/X Toolkit API was an absolutely horrible, ugly, buggy, unusable version of Photoshop. I could quickly cause it to core dump with three clicks of the magnifying glass tool.

      Here is a case study of porting Adobe Photoshop [66.102.7.104] to Windows and Unix. It describes some of the reasons Adobe decided to use the Macapp emulation approach for Unix, instead of properly rewriting their code to be platform independent.

      Quorum had been around for a while. When I started porting SimCity to Unix in 1991, I evaluated Quarum Latitude, and decided that it was not worth using because my goal was to make a better version of SimCity than the one that ran on the Mac, not a crippled one. For example, I implemented multi-player support via multiple X11 connections to different servers at once, which would have been impossible if the program though it was running on a Macintosh.

      -Don

      • Actually, Photoshop on IRIX was spectacular. It worked exactly like Photoshop on the Mac, and was very, very stable. And far from being ugly, it looked precisely like the Mac version. As opposed to every other Motif program, all of which were physically painful to behold.

        Maybe the Sun version was different.

        The only problem was it was more expensive and ran slower than the Mac version, and it only ran on computers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It just didn't make any sense from a commercial stand

  • It looks like the x11 license to me. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:49AM (#11823714)
    X11 License
    This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

    This license is sometimes called the "MIT" license, but that term is misleading, since MIT has used many licenses for software.

    source [gnu.org]

  • adam - overambitious? (Score:4, Funny)

    by dhbiker ( 863466 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:51AM (#11823726) Homepage
    from the webpage:

    The most ambitious library, Adam, stems from the intuition that the logic behind a simple human interface can be distilled to a function:

    f(x) -> x'

    Is it just me but does this not sound a little to broad a definition of a library? I mean I can write anything like this:

    My most ambitious library (The_Meaning), stems from the intuition that the logic behind the entire universe can be distilled to a function:

    f(x) -> x'

    obviously there is much work to be done on "The_Meaning" but when it is finished it will do everything (and the answer will turn out to be a disappointing 42 ;-) )

  • MIT License (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:55AM (#11823769)
    Haven't looked at what they've actually released, but kudos to Adobe for not creating yet another "Open Source" license like so many other companies seem to do in this situation.
  • This article was featrued on MacSlash [macslash.org] since yesterday !

  • Where are the previous open source projects? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SimHacker ( 180785 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @10:57AM (#11823785) Homepage Journal
    For several years, Adobe used to have several other open source projects on their old web site [archive.org], that have now been removed [adobe.com] from their current web site, http://www.opensource.adobe.com [adobe.com]. The missing projects include:

    Simulated Partial Specialization for non-compliant C++ compilers. [archive.org] Allows a user to obtain many of the benefits of partial specialization of C++ templates without direct compiler support.

    Python action plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. [archive.org] Allows a user to write Photoshop action plug-ins using Python. Has Python interfaces to all the actions APIs.

    Python plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. [archive.org] An Illustrator plug-in adapter that allows users to access the C level API from Python

    Python plug-in for Adobe After Effects. [archive.org] An After Effects plug-in that allows users to access the C level API from Python.

    Python module for Perforce SCM. [archive.org] A C coded Python module that provides access to all the calls in the Perforce source code management system SDK.

    -Don

    • I'm sure AppleScript could do a lot of the same things, but still--do you know if there is anything like this for the Mac version of Photoshop? Python is much more intuitive for me than AppleScript. The fact that AppleScript is so English-like can be pretty confusing sometimes, because you tend to fall back to writing code like English speaking patterns. That tends to break programs.
      • Funny you should ask. Adobe always had a problem with scripting languages, which has held them far back from their potential. They've finally adopted JavaScript after all these years, but they should have been pioneering scripting languages years before that, not catching up to the rest of the industry years later.

        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

  • Help me out... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BlueThunderArmy ( 751258 )
    For the less code-literate among us, what exactly do these files do? Adobe's site doesn't make it clear at all, so R'ing TFL doesn't help...

    • Re:Help me out... (Score:2, Informative)

      by dauthur ( 828910 )
      These files can be used to make newer "user-released" projects, just as how Linux works, as well as E-mule, Mozilla, Soulseek and other opensource projects. Anyone can update the program to tailour their needs.
      Say I needed to fix a compatability issue in Photoshop so I could run PSP/JFR files from Paint Shop Pro. The problem is getting Adobe to read PSP files, and getting PSP to read Adobe files. If I needed to do this, I wouldn't have to wait for Adobe to come out with a fix.

    • Re:Help me out... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Swamii ( 594522 )
      For the less code-literate among us, what exactly do these files do?

      In layman's terms, it's a collection of pieces of code (Application Programming Interface) for building a user interface. This aides developers in writing applications that have user interfaces (i.e. most desktop applications).

  • Something easy and useful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:04AM (#11823873) Homepage Journal
    How about "open sourcing" (or just making freely available) the damn Photoshop plugin SDK?

  • Sounds like an ambitious undertaking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TeeJS ( 618313 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:07AM (#11823904) Homepage
    From the article: (referring to Adam) "The code providing this functionality accounts for a third of Adobe's code base and nearly half of the bugs found during development."

    combined with: "The Eve layout engine has already saved Adobe millions of dollars in localization costs."

    Means this contibution (mainly UI work based on Boost [boost.org]) is a very decent contibution.

  • ... isnt that Adobe (tm) Opensource (c)?

  • Would you Adam & Eve it?!?

  • There seems to be a fair bot of documentation on the code itself, and a set of language references, but I don't see any examples of code which actually uses these. How soon could we expect things like, say, a tutorial?

    Don't get me wrong; these concepts are both very intriguing. However, without working examples, I don't see any real 'push' to examine them much further.

  • 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=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5546528.WKU.&OS=PN/5546528&RS=PN/ 5546528 [uspto.gov]

  • Adobe is starting to worry about GIMP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @11:48AM (#11824377) Homepage
    Once GIMP people implement 48bit color and color management, they'll have a potential to take away a large portion of Adobe clientele - web designers and photographers (i.e. people in no way related to prepress and CMYK). When two products have equal capabilities in relation to your tasks, but one is $650 and one is free, the choice becomes really simple.

    Right now GIMP is not yet there, but this doesn't mean it'll never be.
    • Well since you said it yourself, "CMYK". The GIMP will not be comparible to the full $700 Photoshop product, without CMYK or the host of other press features PS has.

      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
    • Sigh. It sounds like you've never actually used Photoshop.

      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 ar

  • The Book of Photoshop 1:1-4 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adamfranco ( 600246 ) <(moc.ocnarfmada) (ta) (mada)> on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @12:32PM (#11824927) Homepage
    From the modules description...

    "In the beginning the programmer created the language and the code. And the code was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the screen of the computer. And the programmer moved upon the keyboard of the computer. And the programmer said, let there be Photoshop: and there was Photoshop. And the programmer saw Photoshop, that it was good: and the programmer divided the Command Parameter Modeling Code from the Underlying Framework." - The Book of Photoshop 1:1-4

    After reading the full module overview I must say that this looks pretty nice. Note that releasing Adam and Eve won't let every program just take over Photoshop's look and feel (thank god!). You still need to provide all of your own widgets, all of your own event generation code, all your own application back end, as well as write the event handling and layout descriptions. The advantage of this system though, is that the event handling is described cleaning in Adam Expression language which can parsed to execute in any environment. Likewise, the layout can be simplified by describing it in an environment-neutral way that can then be bound to Adam values.

    It doesn't seem revolutionary, but it is a nicely worked out evolution in interface building.

  • Looks like an interesting pair of libraries (Score:4, Informative)

    by podperson ( 592944 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:08PM (#11825961) Homepage
    Adam and Eve are two separate but related libraries.

    Adam allows you to express a bunch of things in terms of other things (e.g. this button's right edge needs to be 10 pixels left of that button's left edge OR this HSV setting is related to that RGB setting) and then have them automagically be kept updated. Neat.

    Eve is a UI library. It seems to allow for automated layouts (as well as manual?) and depends on Adam for some of its functionality.

    Both depend on the boost C++ libraries.

  • An on-topic post (Score:4, Informative)

    by arekusu ( 159916 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @06:18PM (#11828952) Homepage
    Disclaimer: I used to work for Adobe. I left a few years ago.

    I have experience with EVE that may be more interesting to read that a bunch of anti-Adobe slurs: For a while it was my job to localize Illustrator, and part of that involved converting the old DITL and .rc UI resources into expressviews (the precursor to EVE.)

    At the time, Illustrator had somewhere around six or seven hundred dialogs. Times fourteen languages. Times a few platforms (OS 9, OS X, 95/98/ME/NT, XP). That's a LOT of UI to program, translate, and test.

    EVE lets you describe a dialog with one XML-ish text file, and have that layout work for all languages on all platforms. That is a significant potential reduction in UI programming (and hopefully bugs.)

    It looks good, too. Take a look at Photoshop or Illustrator's UI. I don't mean the wacky custom controls-- I mean look at the widget layouts. Can you tell which ones were painstakingly created by a human, and which ones are being generated on the fly?

    When I was working with this technology, there were a class of problems that couldn't be easily handled (such as alignment across separate view hierarchies) but it looks like EVE2 is fixing most of those areas.

    I can't really comment on ADAM since that wasn't at a usable stage when I was at Adobe. Some people have commented that the static binding dates it, compared to say 10.3's Cocoa bindings and KVO. Maybe, but any sort of binding that gets rid of huge chunks of UI glue code is a good thing. It's in C++ because that's what Adobe's giant cross-platform codebases are.

    So, this is good stuff. It works. Now you can play with it. What's wrong with that?
    • Sounds interesting. But that is mostly a problem for something like Windows Common Controls which demand pixel acurate coordinates and sizes. You can easily make an app in, for example, GTK+ 2.0 which has none of those problems. The containers and widgets automagically adjust in size and placement or dimensions are relative. Most GNOME apps, for example, are localized and use a single set of UI code.

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