Photoshop Ninja
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Adobe goes for world domination
Adobe pitches to change the design world forever…
Adobe have gone for world domination…at least in the design world! As no doubt you have already heard, Adobe have put in a bid for Macromedia-well, here’s my opinion…
Its obvious that this is mainly due to Adobes failed attempts to combat Flash with the ill-fated Live Motion. With Flash clearly accepted as the industry standard for web animation and many other applications supporting export to Flash-its status is sealed in the hearts of designers and end users alike. It doesn’t take a business analysist to work out that Flash is the main drive behind this buyout-just be glad its our good friend Adobe and not Microsoft that are the prospective future owners-Microsoft PowerFlash anyone (this sends a little shudder down any creatives spine)!!
As for Director, the (all be it powerful) dinosaur of Multimedia, who knows… I could probably see is disappear into a mega Flash application maybe-something like Flash Pro?
What about the rest of the product portfolio-Macromedia have launched many other lesser known web applications and technologies over the last couple of years, eg Contribute. It would probably be fair to say most of these will be stripped of fuctions and become part of a web development suite, eventually disappearing completely in the not too distant future.
Now-what about Freehand? Many designers (myself included) have grown up with Freehand as their main vector application. I use Illustrator only when I have to (sorry Adobe!). Well, Adobe aren’t going to keep the main industry competition to Illustrator going just to keep us Freehanders happy-because lets face it-we are not anyway! The last couple of releases have not been great, so I have no problems switching to Illustrator, as Freehand is sure to be stripped of any useful code and put to bed once and for all-kinda sad, but hey, at least ill always be able to copy vector paths properly into Photoshop, which is a bit flakey from Freehand!
The only thing to say on the Freehand issue is that Adobe will have the vector market covered-with no viable competition in the professional design studio environment. This is probably not healthy for us designers in the long-run, its good for companies to have competition, it pushes them to provide bigger and better features.
The last main application of interest is Dreamweaver. From my straw-poll it seems both web developers and casual users all quote Dreamweaver as their tool of choice. Adobe Go-Live has always lagged behind in popularity.
I’ve read and heard more favourable things lately though I have to say in its defence. Go-Live seems to be really coming up in quality from a designers point of view. This is a tricky call-Adobe either capitalise on Dreamweavers popularity, or they kill it off too and combine the functionality into Go-Live…only time will tell on that one I think, all bets off!
To sum up-overall this is not bad news really. Apart from the clever move of removing Illustrators competition, and with Quark on the slippery slope too, it looks like its going to be a very Adobe branded future for design…for both print and web!
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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 5 March, 2009 (18:53) | First published: 29 April, 2005
Filed under Design opinions and rumors No Comments »
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