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04/20/05
So what does the future hold for Director once Adobe completes its purchase of Macromedia? Let’s speculate:
I doubt they will sell it off. As many have pointed out, that would create a competitor for Flash. Plus, it is a profitable product, so they will most likely keep it.
They could shut it down, slowly. This is a possibility. But is it any different than what Macromedia is doing right now?
I’m betting that they will continue Director’s development. I’ve heard that Adobe uses Director for training projects. So they should be aware of its capabilities and have some fans of Director on the inside. I also remember that Adobe’s long-ago nemesis, Quark, had a Director-competitor in the works. This was before Flash. So no doubt Adobe has at least thought of adding a product like Director before.
It would be called “Adobe Director,” of course. It will probably have native PDF support, rather than 3rd-party Xtras for embedded PDFs. Adobe has a thing for 3D, as seen in their Atmosphere product. So maybe they will see Director as the 3D tool that Atmosphere never was.
Another thing to consider is the Shockwave.com contract. This old agreement is what makes every Shockwave install show a big fat advertisement for Shockwave.com in exchange for a little money. Mabe Adobe will trash that and return Shockwave into a more professional-looking product again. The same for the Yahoo! Toolbar nonsense.
Adobe has deeper pockets than Macromedia ever did. The current market capitalization of Macromedia is under $3 billion. Adobe is up at $14 billion. So maybe Adobe will look at Director, determine what needs to be changed/added to make the product all it can be, and then go ahead and do it.
We can hope…
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04/18/05
I was shocked this morning by the news. I’m a complete outsider to both companies, but I have been using and following Macromedia products for 11 years now. So I can’t help but speculate what this will mean.
Just about every year, a rumor circulates that Microsoft or some other company is buying Macromedia. During the go-go late 90s, these rumors even made the stock jump once or twice. I believe that some of these rumors may have even been started for such a purpose by investors looking to sell.
So “X buys Macromedia” rumors are sort of like tabloid news stories. Nobody who follows Macromedia really believes them.
But this is the real thing. There has probably been high-level negotiations for a while. So it is ironic that when it was for real, there were no rumors at all.
First thing that I see happening, is that Macromedia, as a name, is gone. Everything will become “Adobe.” So this is the end of an era. We can begin to write histories of Macromedia, from beginning to end. I’m sure even the Macromedia offices in San Francisco will close and the employees will move down to Adobe’s building in San Jose.
Second thing that wall happen is there will be a product-by-product elimination. The products that are the most obvious competitors are Illustrator and Freehand. The war there is over. I’m sure the next version of Illustrator will somehow incorporate some features of Freehand so that all the Freehand users migrate over. Then Freehand will be dead.
The next area of interest would the universal document format. Adobe has the ubiquitous PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format and Macromedia has the SWF (Macromedia Flash) format. PDF is very strong for print and static documents, which SWF is much more interactive. Each is so strong now that it is doubtful that anything will happen right away. There will probably be a cross-pollination of features and then even SWF-in-PDF and PDF-in-SWF. But in the long run, there will probably be one format that encompasses both. Or, perhaps Adobe will have SWF focus on Web-based delivery and PDF on print. It is sort of that way now, with either one stretching into the other’s territory.
Server products, like Cold Fusion, will probably not change much. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t last long. Adobe hasn’t shown much interest in products like Cold Fusion. And PHP/MySQL is really dominating and hard to compete with.
Looking at other products, like Director, it is hard to say what will happen. Adobe’s front page reads: “The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better.” How do products like Director fit in there? But then, I don’t expect one sentence to sum up Adobe’s whole true mission.
One question that begs to be asked at this point is WHY? Why did Macromedia sell itself to Adobe for only stock? It appears that Macromedia has been profitable for a while. They definitely have market and mindshare with Flash and it’s related products. So was this simply a cash-out for the major stockholders? Why this deal? Why now?
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Wow. Huge news today. Probably the biggest news in our development world in the last 10 years. There is a Reuters story here and a blog post by Mike Chambers here.
So, where does this leave Flash and Director? No need to mention Flash, as I’m sure that’s what Adobe is after. They will probably kill off the FlashPaper thing or merge it with the PDF format. So maybe some more integration between PDF and SWF? Probably.
As for Director, it is hard to say. It doesn’t really compete with anything in the Adobe world. It is profitable. So odds are they will keep it as is.
I’d say there are three possibilities.
1. Adobe keeps Director as is, maybe with a little more support for new developments (I can’t imagine it having less support, so it must be more).
2. Adobe isn’t interested in Director, so it sells it off to another company. Director is worth something, so if Adobe doesn’t want it, they won’t just throw it away.
3. This is the dangerous one: they take Director in a whole new direction, like as a Flash wrapper tool or only focusing on one aspect like DVD or such.
If I were a betting man, I’d say that the first one is 70%, the second one is 10% and the third one is 20%. But I’ll probably change my opinion by the end of the day.
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04/07/05
So about a month ago I turned on FileVault under OS X 10.3. I was going to be travelling and I read everywhere that you should work to protect the files on your laptop just in case. Since FileVault is specifically for this purpose, and there didn’t seem to be a down side, I turned it on.
Turning it on wasn’t that easy. After thinking for a while my machien told me that I didn’t have enough extra disk space to turn on FileVault. So went though the time-consuming task of clearing stuff off my drive. Then, after chugging for an hour or so, I had FileVault. I didn’t think it was supposed to slow down my machine. I guess since evey file is encrypted, there is a lot of extra work to do. It didn’t really slow it down too much, but enough to make it feel sluggish.
Then the problems started happening. Some programs, liek DreamWeaver, needed preferences changed to reflect the fact that absolute file paths look different with FileVault turned on. That was annoying.
The real problem came when I went to create a DVD of the video of my daughter’s birthday. I launched iMove and began to suck in the video from my camera. But after a few seconds, the import halted. I tried over and over and I couldn’t get the video imported. It was like the drive was suddenly too slow for the speed of the import. I had made dozens of DVDs previously, and this was the first time I had trouble.
But then I decided to create the iMove project file outside of my home directory, in the unencrypted hard disk-level. That worked fine. I just had to shift around some older video clips that I needed for the DVD. I then had “more trouble than usual” in using iDVD. That did it for me FileVault had to go.
But turning FileVault off proved to be an even bigger problem. First I had to clear off even more hard drive space. Then, after chugging for a while, I got an error. The error didn’t specify what file was causing the trouble, so there was no way to fix it. WHat I had to do was to copy all of my home directory files out of my home directory. Then, with my home directory containing basically nothing, I was able to turn off FileVault. Then I moved the files back. In the process I encountered lots of errors. For a while, my machine kept giving me errors on certain files. The permissions checked out OK, and after a reboot, there trouble files behaved correctly. Very odd.
But now I am free of FileVault. Things seem “zippy” again on the machine. I lost my dock preferences during one of the reboots, but I filled in my dock again with apps and folders and such.
So, if you are thinking about using FileVault, think again.
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04/01/05
I’m very concerned about the impact that Dihydrogen Monoxide is having on our environment. Read more at DHMO.org.
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