Steve Jobs' death clears way for Adobe CTO defection Long-standing chief technology officer Kevin Lynch has left Adobe, but why? Adobe has just announced first quarter 2013 results that were a little ahead of its target and show strong take-up of Creative Cloud - by which it offers up its cloudy software services for subscription rather than one-off purchase - roughly akin to an …
I think Adobe has more products than Flash. Also "Flash" as the Video Delivery + DRM is quite different stuff to Interactive Animations controlled by Action Script etc encapsulated as Shockwave Flash.
Photo editing (Photo shopping) and PDF viewing/creation are like Hoovers and Kleenex.
Though I use Paint Shop Pro and Foxit.
They do other stuff too.
For one that basically have used every product Adobe has made, one clear exception is InDesign. I would say Adobe died with the Macromedia deal. Adobe used to be the quality guy before then. But after that deal it all went bananas.
But also when they started to focus on the Windows platform it did not help their products. When they bought Macromedia I was hoping for them to kill Flash already then. There where signs of that was the initial plan, but someone from Macromedia made Adobe change their mind, unfortunately.
Apple's issue with flash was that it never ever ran as well on OS X as it did on windows, in some circumstances it was orders of magnitude worse, Adobe's reply was that they had deeper hardware access on windows which Apple wouldn't allow, but given Adobe basically lost all the people that could code cleanly when they bought Macromedia, and that everything they've released since is riddled with spastic bugs and exploits I can't say I was surprised.
Case in point, customer asked for help installing CS6 Design standard the other day, there are lengthy instructions, but the short version is to download and install a 3rd party download manager, which proceeds to load a 3GB DMG in a browser window, be careful, as any inturuption during this download will send you into a broken install loop that seems to be unrecoverable, it then asks you to save it, tries to open it, failed, and repeat.
Adobe even have their own separate software download assistant which you have to sign in to with your account yet then doesn't list the stuff you paid for. Solution for anyone else in the same boat is to download the master collection trial and use the design standard serial with it. Absolute Fucking Cretins.
Flash on mobile never really got off the ground anyway, a lot of the existing content was unsuitable for touch and relied on hover for effects, or just added processing load by being little more than a wrapper around h264 video. If adobe could have solved those issues it would have done so on android and we'd still be seeing those 'includes the whole web' jabs on other manufactures marketing materials.
I can't see this guy lasting long at apple.
Nonsense. Apple's problem with flash is that a) it is poorly optimized, often doing software rendering when accellerated hardware is available, b) it was a giant pile of ... code that used way more resources than it needed to, and c) at the time there was no embedded version for phones, and d) it was a security rats-nest, and still is.
I don't think Apple killed flash at all though - smartphones and tablets in general did, because none of them run flash well, if they run it at all. I laughed out loud when it was used as a marketing tool for one manufacturer (with that horrible 70s flash gordon theme in the commercial). Talk about the worst possible thing to empathize - that you can run a technology that will probably work like absolute shit on your device. My as well say "we have dancing bears".
The sad thing is that there's a lot of great flash content that will never get converted to newer tech. But for every great little game (steambirds, desktop tower defense), there's a thousand crappy apps that nobody will miss.
Use of flash for new applications needs to turn you into a social pariah, like smoking in public.
Don't know how you managed to get downvoted, you're absolutely correct - although I'd also add that part of its problem was its audience: non-programmers faced with a programming task aren't going to think about optimizing, cleaning up resources and the impact on the system over all.
Creative Cloud and CS6 is not very good. It's much slower than previous versions, has bugs and generally is less productive to work with than older versions of Creative Suite. Adobe have been really slack with help and documentation for the new "html 5 and javascript" technologies that not only do not have the performance of flash they take far longer and are far more costly to develop for. Fine if you are a big company, not so good for SME's and small studios as clients won't pay the costs to develop across endless different devices each with various quirks and differences in rendering "standards". Canvas is not as good as flash for rich media, audio features in HTML 5 and javascript are a joke.
In terms of web development there is still no replacement that is as featured or as widely circulated as flash. Maybe Apple have decided to put the baby back in the bath?
In 2006, I was hired by Adobe to do a strategy review of mobile flash. What I said was that there was an opportunity for flash to be the default UI for mobile, but only if they open sourced it as it was clear that some sort of Linux on mobile (aka Android) would emerge as the leader and an ecosystem would form around it.
Kevin was aggressively against the idea, couldn't see where mobile was headed, that flash was in danger of being an also ran and that there was an opportunity for Adobe to lead in a new market of mobile, apps and data.
I hope Apple understands that they are hiring mr status quo. Actually, they probably do since they are coasting on the energy & innovation of Jobs. This is just another sign of a long, slow decline....
Doesn't a strong vision or being massively opinionated stop people getting work? most people try to keep their bias hidden and just go along with the culture of where they are.
People who have left Google and gone to Yahoo aren't going to go on about how great Android or Google search is.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
