Adobe grabs Macromedia

Zonkers!

So what will this mean for designers?

I can see as much goon in there as I can see bad in this. The good point, application interaction. It should work now as we need it. The bad part, Adobe now has all control over the market. No competition anymore, they rule the publication market. Adobe now has become a power that Quark cannot withstand. Even that I really despise Quark Xpress, now I pity them since that had a lot of interesting ideas with their publishing systems.

But there are a lot of good guys in the Adobe Ark, I know some of them personally, so I don't see it as the end of the world or something like that, more like a beginning of better, easier times for all of us. Especially for web standards, only one company that needs to be taught and they like to listen (even if they act much later).

Studio 1 - Silence please

Another site where I don't have a choice but to watch a flash animation that supposedly shall suck me in and make me buy the product. But somehow as opposed to Adobe's complete failure which repeatedly crashed all of my browsers, even Firefox (a flash problem) apparently Apple hired the right guys to get the job done. The Flash moves slick and painless, the CPU usage is less than reasonable.

So about the studio suite now. I'm glad that every bunch of apps that belong together are now delivered as a suite, so I can crack my bank account big-time each time. To be fair, the cost is usually a huge chunk less than what you pay for if you'd buy all of the apps separately

$1299 for about $5000 of value if you compare it to other professional products on the market, like the discreet tools for example. And I can now safely compare Final Cut Pro to discreet's Fire with the work that went into Final Cut Pro. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no comparable application in the professional editing field that matches Final Cut's features, ease-of-use and pricing. You usually end up paying a lot more if you want all that editing power than you would when getting FCP and a neat G5.

Soundtrack Pro
Aww yeah! I've so been waiting for this. The previous version of soundtrack was a bit icky at places, but served me well for basic audio editing, cutting stuff together, enhancing the audio track of some footage and doing a podcast (died after the first show - maybe I'll pick up that scheme again). But the new Soundtrack Pro (is everything Pro now? Call me Frank Pro then!) seems to allow be to to my foley with it too, yay!

Motion 2
This one gave me an intellectual boner! There's really not much to say about Motion 2, the best just got better, is a bit shitty to say, but that's how it feels. 32Bit (per color channel) real-time editing and being able to control your actions via a midi instrument made me quiver in sheer pleasure (well, yes I like it) so it's going to be interesting how VJs will use that ability.

DVD Studio Pro 4
The shiznit of DVD creation. Not even Sony's Vegas came close yet. What will they do now? The new HD features are just stunning and to be fair again I should say that creating HD content requires a teeny weenie bit more CPU power, like a dual G5 with about 4 quarter-pounders of RAM should be nice. Along with the mandatory Dolby certified encoder you now can use all your Macs that sit around idle to encode your behemoth HD-DVD! Another slick feature is the ability to use GPRM partitioning and some hell of scripting to make your menu react to everything a user could possibly do with a different type of action, text string or whatever your brain can come up with.

New Blog started

Hello kittens of the ocelot!

So there's one of my new playthings. During my research for my own podcast and the podcasting network that go live later this year I came across some very interesting gear that sure is interesting for more podcasters out there. Microphones, mixers, break-out boxes, field recorders, multi trackers - you have no idea what all that means? You might have soon.

Wake Up, Redmond!

Ah well, here's to the big surprise. Microsoft missed the bus again, just like they did with the Internet. Well, this time it might just be too early for them to get up and they might wind-up get some flakes and caffeine before running of to support open standards. Err OK Miicroosoaft and standards, yep I know, they just don't get it.

So what happened this time? If you're into video, broadcast or webcast stuff you may already know that there's a group called ISMA, the Internet Streaming Media Alliance. And big M? They don't!

The ISMA was founded to make sure we're all on the same page with video and audio broadcasting in the future and today. So for Microsoft employees I'll slow down my writing speed now a little. Tell your bosses to get sane and join in this time, instead of fucking up with a proprietary format that no ass on the planet can play, at least not the people it is intended for, the content creators! What happened last time MS tried out the video swing? Yes I mean their pitiful attempt of an HD video codec that actually works and has good image quality that got rejected by almost every industry professional around.

Yes, now you have a chance to catch up with the times.

Adobe doesn't quite get it.

I don't know if it's got something to do with their tight partnerships with Microsoft in certain areas, but the MS attitude is definitely tinting over to Adobe. The way of 'not getting it'.

So what's up now? A few hours ago all was peace and yum with Adobe and now this?

Well if you make a point in selling software that is supposed to make it easy for designers to do the right thing and use web standards, isn't it embarrassingly stupid to screw up on these things in your own website?

Why does a website for the North American market need a region checking javascript that doesn't even work correctly? Instead, if you use a web browser to access the site it's bound to crash. I don't know if that's the poor understanding of JavaScript or the even worse understanding of Flash movies, but anyway I'm definitely not going back to adobe.com!

Welcome to the Web, Adobe!

Today Adobe put out their latest version of the Creative Suite, version 2 and it seems like they are starting to get it.

GoLive CS now sports some interesting features with predefined CSS block objects, yes I know not each and every element should be described as a block object, but I think this is just naming names here, they need to call it something. Web professional may cringe over the thought that they use Opera again for their CSS rendering, but hey, if you got the money, why not burn it and use one of the less favorable rendering engines? Good take I must say, if it works on ol' Opera, it's gonna work on every browser (Internet Explorer is not considered a browser anymore, rather as a way to share your sensitive corporate data with the masses). Don't get me wrong here, I'm all positive about that, I just have to get my hands on the update, and if anyone from Adobe is reading this, I just need an upgrade license from my previous CS Pro!

Photoshop CS 2, Some nice stuff that I've been doing with workarounds for quite some time are now a snap, perspective cloning stamp and all sorts of nifty little features that my lure some more matte painters to Adobe's products (and what else is out there for us? Eclipse? No thanks!). They updated their fancy file browser to look more sane and added a nifty way that lets you browse your image libraries and lets you buy stock images right from the desktop, called Adobe Bridge. Now if I only would remember where I've seen that before?! And how long had professionals demanded for that... seems to be coming now. And it also lets you get going across Adobe Applications with your profiles, hopefully that'll work better than the last version of CS.

It's definitely going to be interesting how Adobe Bridge will compare to my iPhoto / XHTML solution that I use to index my texture library with about 20.000+ images, I'll keep you on the bleeding edge about that.

Somehow Adobe needs stupid little flash flicks on each product page that I can't even choose NOT to play, they take ages to load and slow the whole process down here, I'm not liking this at all. So I'll call it a day and tell you more later!