Tag Archives: adobe

Adobe Buys Macromedia

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I didn’t expect to see that in the news this morning (hat tip glazou), but I did expect it to happen years ago. The two companies just seem complementary. As proof of that I’ve often heard people confuse the companies and their products. This is big news for the industry as a whole. I can see many things changing:

  • Daniel Glazman mentions that there’s likely only room for 1 html editor. Go Live or DreamWeaver. I’m personally going to suggests DreamWeaver survives. Simply because it’s more robust. It’s advanced features such as editing code, php, etc. are much better than Go Live. It reaches a larger market. As for the impact on NVU? Well I guess that remains to be seen. I guess people will now be looking to see if DreamWeaver will be the only real commercial game in town.
  • SVG. This I think is the largest impact this deal is going to have. The fate of SVG. Adobe has been pushing SVG since very early on. But now with Flash in their hands. How do they feel about an open standard? Will they perhaps decide to open Flash to relax critics and just push their software as the ‘ultimate Flash IDE’? Will they stifle the growth of SVG? Or will they perhaps make the Flash plugin render SVG just like QuickTime or other media plugins support multiple formats?
  • Adobe has made a business of being cross platform (similar to Netscape). Their Acrobat Reader is available for virtually anything (even the Palm OS). Does this mean better Flash support for non-windows computers (which has historically sucked)?
  • PDF + Flash + Shockwave = ?
  • New products? Will Illustrator and Flash converge?
  • How does Photoshop fit in? Will it integrate with Macromedia Products?

Overall this is a groundbreaking event. It’s not unexpected as their products were complementary for ages and it was inevitable for them to come together. It’s finally happened.

Adobe DNG

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Adobe today released the specs for a new image format: DNG.

I’m interested. The ideas behind it seem to make sense. JPEG sucks. That’s about all there is to it. It’s what we have, it’s what we use. But it stinks.

I’m curious if Adobe’s going to be able to get DNG actually out there. It’s going to be an uphill battle for sure. JPEG is such a defacto standard, it’s going to be tough. But I’m welcoming the change.

Composer to continue full steam

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Daniel Glazman apparently is starting a new company!

MozillaZine has it covered.

Composer was never powerful enough to meet my needs as a web developer. But perhaps they can take it to that level. Imagine a Composer product competing with Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

All built on a Gecko Foundation….

And Daniel is all into standards. Even mentions joining W3C. I imagine that means we will be seeing the most standards compliant WYSIWYG web design application ever.

IMHO I would do a few things to composer:

  1. Autocomplete tags like PHPEdit does. In fact, that’s my preferred editor. I use it constantly for HTML. The best auto-complete implementation I’ve ever used. Just enough to speed me up, yet not get in my face. I would love to see Composer adopt that for source editing.
  2. Support for HTML, XHTML, XML, WML, XUL, JS, CSS, PERL, PHP, PYTHON, syntax highlighting, and code-complete where applicable (closing tags, etc.).
  3. Valid code. Keep getting closer to 100% valid code all the time. It’s good, and should keep improving.
  4. A full IDE feeling. Take PHPEdit, MSVC, or any IDE. Get that type of functionality and feel in those menu’s. Perhaps a pro/lite mode. Lite as it is now, Pro takes on a more professional, and more thorough (complex) interface.

Perhaps more later. These are my main idea. I would love to see a real open source based editor that’s thorough enough for me to be using on a daily basis. To me, Composer is a toy with potential. Not quite professional quality.

I think Daniel’s venture may be the ones to give it the emphasis it needs to become that killer app. The new resizing images, among other features added in recent history have been a good step. He’s got the experience. Now he can devote himself to composer as an Application, not a component. Yea!