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Software Businesses

Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger 169

Posted by Zonk from the so-happy-together dept.
Steve Nixon wrote to mention a CRN article discussing the shareholder approval of a merger between Adobe and Macromedia. From the article: "The deal, announced in early April, is slated to close this fall pending government approval. On Thursday, the companies said nearly 99 percent of the outstanding Adobe and Macromedia shares voted were cast in favor of the deal. Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."
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Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger More

Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger

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  • Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DrifterX79 ( 824302 ) * on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:33PM (#13423184)
    that one day soon we will have one company to blame for all those god awful, firefox slowing, IE crashing plug-ins. Not to mention on company to blame for the proliferation of flash adverts...

    • Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:50PM (#13423280) Homepage Journal
      As a programmer, its hard to imagine a design that allows a piece of software I launch to assist my program, crash my program, or bring my program to complete uselessness. This was the standard in windows 3.1 days.

      WTF does acrobat bring IE and Firefox both to their knees. And why cant you cancel it? Why is it allowed to lock up the browser, and every instance of it completely?

      What is wrong with that architecture, and why do both IE and Firefox follow the same flawed model? Or is this some windows architectural thing getting involved?
      • I agree completely. One of the big bonuses to using X is that I have some choices for lightweight PDF readers, and I'm not stuck using that horrendous piece of bloatware from Adobe.

        • Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by GileadGreene ( 539584 )
          One of the big bonuses to using X is that I have some choices for lightweight PDF readers...

          See also OS X, and the nifty Preview.app

        • Who says you're stuck using Acrobat on Windows?

          http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

        • Acrobat "light" is ok (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Kristoffer Lunden ( 800757 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:41PM (#13424368) Homepage
          Actually, if you just don't install the plugins package Acrobat is both really snappy and well behaved (this is on Ubuntu). That's why there are tutorials all over the web on how to remove most plugins from Acrobat on Windows. The actual reader is lightweight and nice, it's all those unnecessary extras (including DRM and privacy-invading javascripts that some are so afraid of) that's the bloat.

          It's actually pretty funny that they've designed the application in a good way so things can be removed and added like this, but at the same time seems to want this to be a secret and prefers to tell the users that they need it all. Of course, this is probably just sound marketing strategy from their point of view, and the average user probably rather waits a bit than for something not to work. Not having those plugins installed means that URLs aren't clickable for instance, but I can live with the occassional copy/paste instead - and if I really wanted to, I could manually get that plugin.

          So, Acrobat is really the choice as far as I can tell, even though it's not a good moral or political choice. Sure, there are plenty of other alternatives to choose from under Linux, but so far I've found none that's actually useable unless you only do sequential reading - page by page, from start to end. The few PDF:s I use are usually references and manuals of some sort, or sometimes large design documents. I need the ability to navigate these quickly. Search, bookmarks, ToC, and thumbs all those things are either missing or seriously hobbled in all the alternatives I've tried at least.

          Feel free to inform me of the one I've missed. I can live with crappy rendering, if needs be, but I do need a good UI.
          • Heh. What do you know. I just stumbled upon Evince, which is a part of Gnome, a fork/replacement of GPDF. I'm not sure if it's generally available yet, but it (version 0.4.0) was possible to install in Ubuntu Breezy. This might just be the Acrobat killer I am looking for, it seems very promising at least.

            Being a general document viewer, it shows not only PDF but several other formats with more coming, like ppt and OpenOffice.org formats if I read it right. It's also supposed to preview supported docs in Nau
        • Actually I recently set up my dad's windows laptop to do something similar. Remove the Acrobat plugin from the Mozilla plugin directory, and set Mozilla to launch Acrobat as an external viewer. He likes it much better than having it embed in the browser. On my Linux box I use GV [wisc.edu].

      • Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)

        by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Sunday August 28, 2005 @08:17PM (#13423404) Homepage
        I've got to weigh in on this. I switched to a Mac early this year. The Preview application is FANTASTIC. It does everything I need to view PDFs, it's FAST, and works great. I've loved it. Every time I had to use a PC since then with a PDF file, I've been unable to understand why Acrobat reader is so slow.

        Then I installed Adobe CS 2 on my Mac. It came with... Acrobat!

        Well, to be helpful, it nicely replaced Preview as the default way to view PDFs. That meant that if I was surfing and clicked on a link to a PDF, instead of it popping up almost instantly (like another HTML page) as it did before, the WHOLE COMPUTER SLOWED DOWN and Safari almost locked up for a few seconds as it opened. Then when it was open it was slow. VERY slow.

        I quickly found out how to remove the program from Safari's plugins so that it wouldn't cause that again. Acrobat absolutely sucks performance.

        But things get worse. I have to run Virtual PC on my Mac and occasionally have to open a PDF in it for various reasons. Now Virtual PC says my computer is the equivalent of 300 MHz. Launching Acrobat basically locks Virtual PC up for 2-3 minutes as it launches (I let it have 512MB of ram, so that's not the problem) and then trying to USE the program is like when I found a 386 running Windows 95. Sure it WORKED, but I didn't have that kind of time to spare.

        I can understand why Photoshop takes so long to load (although I think it could delay the loading of all those plugins until I trued to use one). But Acrobat is a performance black-hole for some reason I can't figure out.

        So, my response to your questions: This isn't a Windows thing. It's an Acrobat thing. Find a replacement for Acrobat. I love Preview, but there must be something better for Windows too.

        • Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)

          by hazem ( 472289 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @08:37PM (#13423484) Journal
          This article shows how to do "liposuction" on acrobat and make it load much faster by removing a bunch of the plugins. If you lose functionality you need, find the plugin and put it back in the plugins directory.

          http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041 [theinquirer.net]

          It works for both the reader and the full acrobat.

          The essence of the instructions are:
                  * From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
                  * Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
                  * Create a new folder named plug_ins
                  * Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api

          • Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)

            by panaceaa ( 205396 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @10:07PM (#13423903) Homepage Journal
            Or you can upgrade to Adobe Reader 7.0 [adobe.com], which loads plug-ins only as they're needed. For me it loads about 5 times faster than the old Reader versions (5, and especially 6).
          • But that's not the point. Firefox should load Acrobat in a different thread so you don't loose control over the window!!

            • Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Informative)

              by delus10n0 ( 524126 ) on Monday August 29, 2005 @12:29AM (#13424602)
              FireFox has major threading issues anyhow. Go to any website, and start right clicking->'T' (open in tab) on every link you can find. Behold the slowness!
              • Really? What version? I'm at 0.92 and 0.93 at home and work (so many plugins I don't want to migrate forward), and I use bajillions of tabs. I *love* my "drag a link --> open in a tab" plugin. Yes there is an upper limit to the number of tabs I can open, but it's around 30 or 40 or so - and that's not because firefox gets slow, it's because at some point it stops opening new tabs.

                Once a week I have to exit and re-start firefox because it'll have reached 150 MB in memory size, but that's acceptable an
                • 1.0.6 -- I have around 10 different extensions installed (none that deal with tabs, though) and loading multiple tabs (especially if a tab has Quicktime/Flash/lots of images/etc.) results in the browser "locking up" for a second or so as each tab is loaded. This wouldn't be happening if it was truly multi-threaded.
            • In Firefox, try hitting "Back" while loading a page that uses Java... *boom!* no more browser for you.

              Firefox also leaks memory for every single UI event received on Mac OS X.

              Firefox could use some serious debugging. And no, I'm not going to do it, someone with a clue about the code should look at it.

          • Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Informative)

            by Skuld-Chan ( 302449 )
            Why do people always take the hard way out? Just go into edit > preferences > internet > uncheck display pdf in browser.

            That little feature has been there since at least acrobat 3 when the first browser plugin came about.

            With 6 and 7 there both package components too - so you can do a msiexec /i acropro.msi (or whatever the package is called) REMOVE=AcrobatBrowserIntegration and your done.

            Isn't windows cool?
            • Actually, I use acrobat outside of web-browsing. I scan all my bills/etc, and keep them as PDFs while recycling the paper. It meets my obsessive need to keep copies of everything without having a basement full of 7-year old phone bills.

              So, the techniques I posted make acrobat open quicker, whether it's part of a web-browser or not.

              And actually, I tried everything what you said to get it to load seperately, but it would not. I even removed both mozilla and acrobat and tried installing them in different orde
            • I always try that, but the browser never seems to respect that choice...

        • So, my response to your questions: This isn't a Windows thing. It's an Acrobat thing. Find a replacement for Acrobat. I love Preview, but there must be something better for Windows too.

          Maybe something based on xpdf? I haven't used a UNIX-y PDF viewer in a long time, but I remember from my heavy Linux usage days that xpdf (and I think gpdf) was very fast. Acrobat reader for Linux was fairly efficient too, but clunky even by the Linux GUI standards of the time (this was a couple years ago).

        • ...there must be something better for Windows too.
          You want the GhostScript-related programs. [wisc.edu]
        • It's not just Acrobat. It's ALL Adobe programs. Compared to any of the competition that I've ever tried, Adobe apps are all pigs, and have been since way back. Photoshop has by far the slowest image processing of any app I've ever used. When I use the exact same filters in Corel Photopaint, the same job gets done on average in about 1/4th the time.

          I'm not sure how much of this came in when they acquired Aldus -- Pagemaker has always been slow (and has a horrible file format) even before it was under the Ado
      • I've had no problems with either company's stuff. Then again, I use Opera.

      • WTF does acrobat bring IE and Firefox both to their knees. And why cant you cancel it? Why is it allowed to lock up the browser, and every instance of it completely?

        What is wrong with that architecture, and why do both IE and Firefox follow the same flawed model? Or is this some windows architectural thing getting involved?

        (/dons tinfoil hat)

        Nothing wrong with it besides it being a sinister plot by AMD to make their dual-core chips more valuable when PDF viewing will only run on CPU0 and Flash on CPU1.

        Muaaa

      • To be fair, Adobe Reader has slowly gotten better over time. Slowly. Version 5 had the annoying habit of not killing the application when you exit it. So once you're done reading the PDF and close that browser, it's still running, eating 30MB of memory. Version 6 fixed that, and now Version 7 has some info on the status bar about what % of your PDF is done downloading. Previously, you'd click on a page and you don't know if it's loading or not because Reader is downloading a 5MB document and until it is com

    • obFlashBlockLink (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ... And we will have one extension [mozilla.org] to thank for never seeing a Flash ad.

      (OK, maybe two [mozilla.org])
    • Let's just hope they don't call the new joint company "AdMedia".

      Or "MacrodobeMedia".

      or... nevermind.

    • Or is it Adobomedia? Macrodobedia? AcroMacrobe?

  • One more acquisition... (Score:5, Funny)

    by g051051 ( 71145 ) * on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:34PM (#13423187)
    Now, they just need to buy/merge with Real, and you'd have a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.

    • Re:One more acquisition... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'd rather merge with Google and SuSE if I wanted to be a powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.

    • Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:40PM (#13423232) Journal
      Now we can have a Flash ad with an embedded PDF document which plays a RealMedia clip!

      Besides, "a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft"? Um.... Microsoft makes office software and operating systems. They make almost zippo from Windows Media Player. Two big multimedia-oriented companies and a pain-in-the-ass-that-just-won't-die video tech company have what influence on Microsoft?
      • I'm sure they make almost zippo from all of those multimedia devices that play Windows Media content, too.

        Oh, and Windows Media's pretty laden with advertisements for various companies, I'm sure that brings in a few pennies too.
        • M$ is not into media devices for the money, they're in it for the lock-in. Imagine that you go buy a shiny WMA-only audio player tomorrow. Then OS X comes out for x86 in a few months. Guess what, if you want that player to work you won't be buying an Apple OS. You'll be forced to by Longhorn.

          And again, Microsoft wins by making sure you can never use anything but their products.

          That's why there's Windows media player. The key word is Windows.

      • Re:Hooray! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )
        I don't know about you, but I'm *glad* .pdf came along and countered the then-growing trend of posting links to .doc documents. I'm glad flash came along and nipped that atrocity ActiveX in the bud. I'm glad when I find websites using Real rather than Windows Media, because Real files play on my linux desktop and most Windows Media links don't work at all.

        I guess you don't see any links there, but I do.

      • Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ozmanjusri ( 601766 )
        Two big multimedia-oriented companies and a pain-in-the-ass-that-just-won't-die video tech company have what influence on Microsoft?

        Take a closer look at what Flash is rapidly becoming. It's a platform-independant development environment which is easily capable of being used to develop productivity apps. It has the capacity (with Flash Remoting and Cold Fusion) of becoming the core of a decentralised Office replacement. No dependance on Windows, no need for MS.
    • ...REAL? I hope this is a troll or just a really bad attempt at a joke. Real has been irrelevant for quite a while now.

      Now, a real merger would be with *brace yourselves*. Apple.

      Adobe has long been an Apple shop, and the acquisition of Macromedia gives them penetration into the Internet realm. Add in Apple's marketing, and you've got a powerhouse that it'd be hard for even Microsoft to compete with. Of course, Slashdot would hate it, and people would cry monopoly and Apple would be split into a hardwa

    • Re:One more acquisition... (Score:5, Funny)

      by iamwoodyjones ( 562550 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:49PM (#13423271) Journal
      I looked at Real's web site for the merger and it says

      Merger is......buffering......

      Once they do acquire real we can see our pdf's......buffering......

      which might actually be better than that big duff with his arms outstretched and a bazillion plugins loading below him for 1/2 an hour

    • Bite your tongue! Two companies with fair-to-excellent software combining with a company that produces crap. Plus they rely too much on ethically questionable marketing.

      Besides, competing with Microsoft isn't a matter of size. It's a matter of getting past Microsoft's control of the basic desktop.

    • Now, they just need to buy/merge with Real, and you'd have a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.

      You can't be serious. Whether good or not, Microsoft still dominates the OS, browser, and office application markets... markets that no merger you describe can touch. Plus, with the continous push for more open standards, a lasting future for PDF and Flash is questionable. This merger was more out necessity than an attempt to compete with Microsoft.
    • They should merge with Autodesk/Discreet and get Autocad and 3D studio into their portfolio...

  • Yes,... just like Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FinestLittleSpace ( 719663 ) * on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:34PM (#13423191)
    Apart from the money making obligatory installation of an OS on every machine....

    THAT'S why M$ are huge.

    Adobe and Macromedia already have huge penetration with Acrobat and Flash respectively on 90% of machines, but that doesn't make them close to the behemoth that M$ is.
    • how can you say that when acrobat and flash extend much further then microsoft... they are on machines of all platforms!
    • You're missing the point. Being a behemoth is not the issue. Microsoft motto used to be "A Microsoft on every desktop," but they conveniently changed it because it didn't sound very unmonopolistic during the trial. Penetration is exactly what they need to make more money. No, you don't HAVE to use their products to surf the web, but it sure is much more interesting and flexible if you do use Flash, Shockwave, or Acrobat, isn't it? How much content out there requires one of those products? How much do

  • With as little information as we've got? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lostchicken ( 226656 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:35PM (#13423195)
    At this point, there's very little information available about which products will and will not survive the merger. Why would any shareholder approve a merger when all he/she knew was that the two companies were to merge?

  • Graphic Designers are all wondering what it means (Score:5, Insightful)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:35PM (#13423197) Homepage
    As a designer that uses both companies programs extensively....photoshop and dreamweaver the top 2 right now, I am very curious as to how this will play out.

    My biggest hope is that this will create some real cross program compatibility between all of their native formats. Adobe is very good about making the jump with a file between all of their programs, and I'll look forward to doing that to MM stuff too.

    My biggest fear is the monopoly of programs angle, and losing the magic that made these companies what they are.... the innovation and usability being key.

    I hope they take the best from both and do something great.

  • competition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brianopp ( 862935 ) <brianopp@aol.com> on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:36PM (#13423202) Homepage
    what competition will there be in the market after this?? theyll have the leading animation, photo editing, and web developing suites all in one company!
    • The competition will be much like this. If you want to do anything fancy graphically on the web you will choose MacroAdobe. If you want to have the defacto standard in visual media you will choose AdobeMedia. If you want the number one company for browser plugins required to view half the web...

    • Simple (Score:4, Interesting)

      by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @08:09PM (#13423369) Homepage
      Adobe vs. Microsoft.

      AFAIK Microsoft is getting their PDF and Flash replacements ready as we speak.

      http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000587.html [actionscript.com]
      http://www.pdfzone.com/category2/0,1874,1836049,00 .asp [pdfzone.com]

    • Re:competition (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MBCook ( 132727 )
      None, really.

      Dreamweaver could argue MS's bastard step-child Frontpage (which they don't even seem to promote anymore). But for the most part, there are no real competitors.

      Photoshop? What is really up there with Photoshop? Next to nothing. Same with Illustrator. The closest things were Macromedia's products. The only ones that will have some competition left are Adobe's video products that Apple competes against (which exist, as I remember, because Adobe wouldn't port them so Apple made their own).

      There

      • Thing is, Adobe's not buying up competitive products. They aren't attempting to corner the photo editing market, or the html editing market - those are both already more or less monopolized. Adobe's just putting these products under one roof.

        I don't see why this shouldn't get legislative approval, it's not creating a monopoly, just combining two companies that have products that control their market segments. AFAIK, nothing illegal in that.
      • The only products that realistically compete between Microsoft and Adobe are GoLive vs Dreamweaver and Illustrator vs Freehand. There are a million other HTML editors, even if none have the market share of Dreamweaver.

        Illustrator vs Freehand might be a more compelling argument.

      • Re:competition (Score:2, Interesting)

        by FLEB ( 312391 )
        Well, CorelDRAW is still left against Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop tromps PhotoPaint outright, but for usability and features, DRAW blows AI away. You've also got the lower-consumer-end contender, PaintShop Pro, which Corel just bought out (I think it was) this last year.

        Of course, it sounds like Corel's going to try targeting Draw more toward corporate users, which will further lower printers' opinions of CorelDRAW designers (as inept hacks), even though DRAW has a suprising array of prepress tools and ver
    • GIMP [gimp.org], Inkscape [inkscape.org], Nvu [nvu.com]. Fine, these products are nowhere near as good as anything Adobe/Macromedia offer, but if they stagnate the competition will eventually come from Free software like this. I doubt they'll stagnate though.

  • I agree (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:37PM (#13423208)
    "Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."
     
    I agree. The .pdf files and flash crud that have been a blight on the internet for years should be a powerful rival to Microsoft, whose operating systems have been a blight on PCs for years, in the competition to see who can fuck the world up more.

  • wise tactical move (Score:5, Interesting)

    by apt_user ( 812814 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:37PM (#13423210)
    This can only be a maneuver to prevent microsoft from buying either one of the two companies. Combined they dont necessarily stand to make more money than they would alone, but it creates a united front to keep microsoft out of their media software niche.
  • I see this as just normal patterns in a maturing industry. As the technology era matures, the number of significant players decreases. This is happening even faster in the modern era where governments are pulling down barriers to this type of integration in the name of "free trade." There are of course downsides to this pattern. The larger the entity the more difficut true innovation is. True innovation will continue on the fringes of the industry in the smaller startups and by individuals.

    I think

  • And We Shall Call It... (Score:5, Funny)

    by WhiteWolf ( 95535 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @07:53PM (#13423291)
    ...Macrobe!
  • ...what are they going to call the new company? AdobeMedia? MacroDobe? Macrobe?

  • Insiders report (Score:5, Funny)

    by hobotron ( 891379 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @08:03PM (#13423337)


    Insiders report they will collaborate on an exciting new standard of interoperability that will lag the complete shit out of your browser.

    • I'm just curious, if this article gets duped(which it most definitley will) does that mean there is going to be Like Macrobe and then like Adomedia... two different companies O_O

  • PDF & flash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28, 2005 @08:26PM (#13423440)
    Honestly, I like PDF. It guarantees the exact replication of how a document is intended to apperar. Almost everywhere.
    That's the main advantage of a typographic file format.

    Oppositely, I utterly dislike flash. I consider it just useless to the user. Only eye-candy here. Not much more.
    Yes, it's interesting from the developer side, with its event controlling script engine and the ability to not be obligated to follow a rigid frame order.
    But still, it's just a waste of resources.

    I'm guessing if Adobe and Macromedia will try to join both or just - as written by someone else - keep 'em separated to prevent the Evil from embrace and extend (to be read as: copy and screw).

    • Re:PDF & flash (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @10:07PM (#13423905)
      I like flash because my kids like to play flash games on sites like miniclip.com. There has to be some alternative to client-side applications other than blindly installing .exe's. I wish Java had won out, but I guess it was too big and heavy, and took too long to implement little web apps.
    • I suppose you like Internet Explorer as well, I mean all websites work well in it, nice to be able to design for just one spec, right?

      PDF isn't portable to all platforms. The typical response to problems with PDFs is "upgrade to latest Acrobat Reader". Guess what, some of us don't use Reader to view PDFs. And there are plenty of folks who can't upgrade Reader for technical or administrative reasons.

      PDF most certainly does NOT guarantee "the exact replication of how a document is intended to apperar". And it

  • Think back... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AdityaG ( 842691 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @08:57PM (#13423568) Homepage
    Before people rant on how much Flash and pdf's suck, please step back and think.

    Go back to about 5-6 years ago, when CSS and "design" weren't really associated with websites. They mainly consisted of lots of tables and a lot of annoying animated gifs with the occasional embedded music. But there were also the "good" sites that were easy to read, helpful and good on the eyes. If you don't get my point yet.. Flash and the PDF format have a bad name mainly because of their abuse. PDF is really not very bad. If you don't like the firefox plugin, DONT INSTALL IT. Let firefox download the pdf and voila, you have a nice, relatively small and fairly cross platform file. Then we have flash. I have seen Flash being used for a lot of very stupid things, like the ads... but I have also seen it used for some very cool things, like educational games, kiosk presentations and such. They are also being used for things like statistics with things like Flex. And with the new versions, its much easier to make Flash a lot more accessible, including language strings.

    So before you start a large flame... please think of how GOOD these pieces of software are. I am personally very excited about the merger. Maybe they will soon have a Addobe + Macromedia Studio where they will just have Dreamweaver + Flash + Photoshop instead of two incomplete studios (CS and Macromedia Studio)

    Cheers
    • There's one important difference between the abuse of PDF and the abuse of Flash: nobody tries to do site navigation entirely in PDF.

      On the other hand, you'll see sites chock full of Flash widgets that form the navigational structure of the entire site. Some use a zillion widgets, each of which has a stupid animation when you mouse over it and which only does one other thing, namely, send you to a particular URL when you click on it. You can do the same thing with an animated GIF and a Javascript functio
    • PDF is a fully open standard, which is why it doesn't suck - just look at how many PDF viewers are out there, many of them OSS. Flash, on the other hand, is a closed proprietary format with no working 3rd-party implementations, and for this alone it deserves to die.
      • BULLSHIT.

        An open standard is not "a standard controlled by one company"

        Yes, you may be able to VIEW the standard, that does NOT make it open.

        I suppose Microsoft is open source by your definition, since under the right conditions and legal filings, their source is viewable.

        Please stop spreading this.
        • An open standard is not "a standard controlled by one company"
          Open standard is the one which is freely available on request and does not require you to pay any royalties or licensing fees for implementation. Whether it's written by a company, a committee, or just by collaboration of several individuals is irrelevant.

          And of course, open standard is not the same as open source. Never said such a thing.

  • SVG (Score:2, Interesting)

    by chri ( 115088 )
    My hope is that this merger does not weaken Adobe's support for SVG.
  • "Greed is good!"
  • ...if only because this means they wont be suing eachother on a quarterly basis.
  • Now Adobe can make a reader in Flash (using new Flash APIs) similar to how Macromedia did Flashpaper... which is surprisingly decent if you don't need to get the data OUT of Flash.

    -M
  • One thing that surprises me is how most people miss the point that flash isn't just about animation any more. It's a platform! Consider this, ActionScript is a full featured OO language. Flash is installed on almost any computer. Wouldn't this begin to suggest that you could use Flash to create truly platform agnostic web-distributable applications?

    Screw web "pages", the future of the web is about web "applications". Cross platform web applications marginalize (actually commoditize) Microsoft's operati
    • Flash is _not_ cross platform. Lots of operating system/hardware ombos without a flash player.

      The point of HTML is that it _is_ cross platform, and standardised (FSVO standardised)
    • Wouldn't this begin to suggest that you could use Flash to create truly platform agnostic web-distributable applications?

      I work for a company that delivers Flash based thick web applications. Unfortunately we have found that there are some pretty severe limitations in using Flash this way. Some of the worst are that Flash is not multi-threaded, and that there are no automated testing tools. Also, if you are approaching Flash from a programming background you will find the IDE is oriented towards animators
    • One thing that surprises me is how most people miss the point that flash isn't just about animation any more. It's a platform! Consider this, ActionScript is a full featured OO language. Flash is installed on almost any computer.

      Yeah, and on how many is it blocked? It is on mine, if I come to an empty website (ie, one written in flash) I assume they are unprofessional amateurs and move on.
      Usually it takes long to long, makes a lot of noise, is slow to navigate (because they have to include a lot of crap an

  • Good! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 )
    Now I only have one corporation to hate on instead of two. This frees up hatred for new and upcoming businesses.

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