Still think I'm over reacting?

[texanpenguin]

Photoshop is the world's largest selling cross-platform image-editting program. People value the fact that it is exactly the same on both platforms, and thus, that work made on Macs is wholly compatible with PCs and vice versa.

If Apple created their own program, Adobe users would, inevitably, outlaw it. It would need to be SO far ahead of Photoshop 8 that it was essential for graphic artists. Then you face the problem with it being TOO far ahead, and losing compatibility with Photoshop.

Every revision of Photoshop seems perfect, and it just keeps improving. Apple, as a new contender, couldn't compete against the userbase and experience of Adobe. It's just wasted expense. Stick to what you're good at Apple - making visually striking hardware and software. And leave it at that.

 

[Arden]

Right. The reason Indesign is starting to do well over Quark is that Indesign is a superior, easier-to-use, better-supported application. To beat Photoshop, an already excellent, easy-to-use, well-supported application, Apple's would have to be absolutely phenomenal, and we all know that they don't always make phenomenal software. Often they do, but many times they fall short, and I don't think a Photoshop killer is up their creek.

 

[RacerX]

Originally posted by texanpenguin
Photoshop is the world's largest selling cross-platform image-editting program. People value the fact that it is exactly the same on both platforms, and thus, that work made on Macs is wholly compatible with PCs and vice versa.

Here is the problem with any program having too much power in it's area... if companies start feuding, we are the ones that get hurt.

The whole Premier/Final Cut thing isn't the best example because not only was Final Cut a good alternative, it was in fact just plane better all around. But here are some items that showed how Adobe has dealt with Apple and it's users:

• 
  (1) Adobe crippled Premier 6.5 for Mac. That is a major charge I'm leveling, but here are the facts to back this up. Premier doesn't support multiple processors with the default install on the Mac OS, and Apple has been making multiple processor systems the center of the professional line for quite some time now. In fact Adobe made the first multiple processor aware app (Photoshop) for Apple's first dual processor systems, the Power Macintosh 9500. Adobe posted a page called "PC Preferred" to show how much faster Premier was on a PC than a Mac. As it turns out, Premier comes with a second rendering engine which can be set up to work on the second processor and help out the first while rendering. In tests done with this set up, not only did a dual G4/1.42 out pace a Pentium 4/3.0, Premier almost matched Final Cut Pro's times while doing sum of the same types of functions.
  
  (2) Photoshop for Mac OS X was held from being released. As most of us know, Photoshop has a special place in the Mac platform. Apple's transition to Mac OS X would have been greatly helped by the release of a native version of Photoshop. As it was, Photoshop was one of the last Adobe apps to be ported, instead of the first. Adobe gave a number of excuses as to why Photoshop took so long, but the problem with this is... Adobe demoed a Carbonized version of Photoshop 5 running in a special version of Rhapsody with an early version of the Carbon APIs (see attached image). The port took 9 days. It wasn't even done using the primary Photoshop engineers as they were readying the release of Photoshop 5.5. This was May 12th, 1998. They went on to release 5.5 and then 6.0. We didn't finally see a native version of Photoshop until February of 2002. Almost four years after the demo of a working Carbon Photoshop 5.0 which was running 9 days after Apple released the Carbon APIs to Adobe.
  
  (3) Acrobat for Mac has not had the same feature set as the Windows version since the release of Acrobat 3. Acrobat 4 was missing a number of features (many added with a later update) that the Windows version had. With Acrobat 5, one of the best features, paper capture (a built-in OCR engine) was removed. Fortunately, most of my clients upgraded from 4, so moving the elements that were needed to 5 wasn't too much of a hardship. But the Windows version continued to have the feature (as a scaled down version of their enterprise app Acrobat Capture... which is also Windows only). Also Acrobat 5 was released after Adobe said that every new version of it's software would be Mac OS X nature (with some exceptions, i.e. FrameMaker, PageMaker). Acrobat Reader 5 was native to Mac OS X, Acrobat 5 was not. It wasn't until months later that they released an update (5.0.5) to make Acrobat 5 native... but not Distiller. I use Acrobat 5.0.5, and I don't have Classic on my system for running Distiller, so I use PStill instead. Still, Adobe could have handled it better (though not having Distiller sure did make InDesign look that much better).

The point is, be it Adobe, Microsoft, Quark or Macromedia, any company with a lock on any given area is going to abuse it's position, and we are the ones ultimately hurt by it.

Sorry for the quality of the screen grab attached, one way to tell this is Rhapsody is the small iconized window at the bottom of the screen (if this was running in Blue Box, you would be able to see the Yellow Box area)

 

[RacerX]

Just so you can see a clear picture of iconized windows, here is that feature enabled in Rhapsody on my ThinkPad.

 

[Arden]

BTW: "plain better," not "plane better."[/nitpick]

I think Adobe is toying with us.

RE: ps5 on rhapsody: I'm melting, melting! Oh what a world, what a world...

 

[RacerX]

Originally posted by arden
BTW: "plain better," not "plane better."[/nitpick]

The spellchecker on my system brought up three choices for "plaon", and at 1 AM in the morning I picked the wrong one.

Future reference: proper posting etiquette would have been to over look such mistakes.

Lets just hope that you don't the the IRL equivalent, though it would explain the large numbers of posts.

 

[chevy]

What we need on Mac is a reasonably priced version of FrameMaker. Everything else can be left to Adobe and Microsoft.

 

[Arden]

Yeah, I know I should have skipped the typo, and I typically do, but you usually don't make errors like that and I just wanted to make sure you made it.

Lets just hope that you don't the the IRL equivalent...

The the what? This I didn't understand at all.

My post count would be a lot higher if I were a stickler about misspellings.

 

[Cat]

You don't know IRL? It's a high-resolution real-time environment, with 3-D audio and visuals. You would need a lot of parallel computing though ...
It's comparable to LARPG (Live Action Role Playing Games). It also has a/v chat, a very complex mood system, and instant feedback.

 

[gravy]

I'm a small business owner, and have been using Adobe products for quite some time (AI88 and PSD 2.0). The problem for me really would become workflow. I, as well as others would need to start all over.

The beauty of the Adobe products is that they are cross-platform. Large companies will insist you use Adobe apps which enable them to make minor modifications if necessary. Unless Apple intends on releasing products to both Win/Mac simutaneously for less which are seamless with Adobe products, I don't think they have a snowballs chance. This is a tall order.

Also, unlike video where the workflow is somewhat contained, print apps like AI10 and ID2.0 have the additional print step where things can get quite messy. Adobe is tried and true in this area (although quirky). Service bureaus would be slow to adopt, which hurts. Look how long it has taken InDesign to get traction.

 

[Arden]

Where has anyone actually seen some hard evidence that Apple is even considering entering the desktop publishing arena head-on? In a way, it's a good thing that Photoshop is so ubiquitous because it's a standard. If there were 4 or 5 different, awesome photo manipulation programs, they would have to be fully compatible with each other or everyone would have a headache on their hands. You can see this from the whole Mac/Windows situation.