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Tuesday, April 19, 2005
MacroDobia
Posted by Sam at 1:10 PM
 What kind of designer would I be if I didn't post about Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia? This is huge, and very weird, and will directly effect us as designers.
My concerns are these:
1) The possible death of some of my favorite apps.
I'm a Dreamweaver (Macromedia) user and I'm really not a huge fan of Golive (Adobe). If Adobe now owns Macromedia, what's going to happen to the likes of Dreamweaver? Will it simply be killed off? Will it be absorbed into GoLive?
2) Adobe will have a stranglehold on the design industry.
QuarkXpress is still going strong... but it's increasingly losing its momentum. InDesign (Adobe), Quark's direct competition, is arguably a much better page layout app. It seems more in tune with a designers needs while offering so many more features and options (all of which have been discussed to death elsewhere). With the disappearance of Macromedia, Quark will be the only real competitor to Adobe's dominance over the design industry. And, if Quark keeps up its current practices, it's not going to be around for too much longer.
3) Competition makes the products better.
As stated, I am an avid Dreamweaver user, and not much of a fan of GoLive. Still, I like to have GoLive around. It's good to know that if Dreamweaver started to suck I could always make the switch to another application. With only one app (DreamLive? GoWeaver? DreamGoWeaverLive?) and no competition, the product could suck and Adobe would not suffer any losses because there is nowhere else for designers to turn. (As an aside... I feel that this is the exact reason why Quark began it's suckage. PageMaker, once considered Quark's rival, is a page layout app for beginners... not professionals... and was never really much threat to Quark (during my life as a designer, anyway). Without anything driving Quark to innovate and pull ahead, Quark just became stagnant. QuarkXpress 3.3 to 5.01 was essentially the same product. Quark just tacked on a few new options here and there. With the increasing popularity of InDesign however, Quark began to get their act together. Quark 6.5 is a better Quark than previous Quarks... but it's still no InDesign. Yet QuarkXPress still holds the lead in page layout apps. Why? Because we fear change. Really though, I would speculate that it is because Quark has been the leader for so long. These changes take time. Not to mention that much of the output hardware is tied directly into Quark. This is falling at an ever increasing pace though...)
The one thing that I am looking forward to, is the product-wide integration. It's a snap to go from Photoshop to ImageReady (part of Photoshop)... or Illustrator to InDesign. And obviously, Adobe has crafted their products in such a way that this transition is seamless and streamlined. Typically however, my web design workflow is Photoshop>Imageready>Dreamweaver. It will be nice to go directly to AdobeWeaver (or whatever it's going to be called) from ImageReady, with the same ease that exists from one Adobe product to another.
I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't frightened by this acquisition. Ok, frightened is a bit strong... more like apprehensive. It will be interesting to see what happens, but as with anything that has the potential to alter my professional workflow, I will maintain vigilance until the smoke clears.
Comments: 1 | Post a Comment | Permalink
Dude.
Dreamweaver? You're <br>'ing my pure <html> heart.
Dude, you need to learn how to use a straight up text editor to fuck this html shit up.
Seriously. Although at least Dreamweaver is mostly standards compliant. GoLive! is like driving on the wrong side of the road.
Comment By Dr. Kennedy on April 19, 2005 2:55 PM
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Sam is an amazing and humble guy. Once, he rushed into a burning building, up six flights of stairs to save a kitten from certain death. He speaks eight languages, has mastered three varieties of martial arts, is a wine expert, and is a pulitzer prize winning author. Sam is an international heart-throb who prefers a quiet evening at home knitting afghans for the homeless, to the go-go, glitz and glamor of the party scene. I think the day he won the silver medal for ballroom dancing at the 98 olympics was the happiest of his life. Pretty impressive for a guy who never finished the 8th grade. - Carrie, 04