Some possible reasons why Adobe is, if not anti-Mac, at least favoring Windows:
1) Hangover from the G4 debacle, combined with the sudden ramp in power of the x86 lines: It'll be a while before the resurgence of the PowerPC really influences a company as large as Adobe, if it does.
2) Interface. This is sort of ironic, but Adobe has their own interface now. Their applications are less and less Mac applications (or Windows applications) by the day. Adobe has, for some time, been pushing the idea that the underlying platform shouldn't matter.
3) Tied in with 2: Apple has made the underlying platform matter, and while this is a boon to small developers it's a pain to Adobe. Look at PS 7: Adobe had written up their own version of Quartz! Now, if OS X were like Windows and OS 9, this would be no problem. But since Apple had added that functionality already, Adobe's was redundant and PS performance suffered. Now, given item 2, what's Adobe going to do? Take that layer out, and degrade the quality of the Windows release? Keep it, and have the Mac version lag? Remove it from the Mac version, and use Quartz, and have the two releases be non-uniform? Photoshop is built on assumptions about what an OS and a windowing system do that are firmly planted in 1992, an assumption which worked for 10 years, and which still works for the majority of computers. OS X sticks out, and that's a bad thing to someone like Adobe.
4) Intel has been pumping millions of dollars into Adobe and contributing dozens of engineers in order to get Adobe applications running well on their platform. As a result, Adobe spent months optimizing PS for Windows, and two weeks optimizing it for the Mac. On the one hand, this represents the sheer power and elegance of AltiVec on the Mac side. On the other hand, it means that one result of Intel's offensive is a certain degree of chumminess.
5) What the "Apple is unpredictable" line means is that Apple now develops applications. They aren't supposed to, see, because they're a systems vendor. This is how big companies think. I remember from the antitrust trial that Bill Gates went apoplectic when he'd heard that Intel was working on libraries to improve Windows performance, and on applications to showcase SSE. He saw that as an intrusion onto Microsoft's turf, as aggression, even though Intel clearly hoped it would be complementary. Adobe is probably in a similar position with Apple, and this is where the "unpredictability" comes from.
6) Given the above, if Adobe doesn't want the platform to matter, and they want their own interface, and Apple keeps getting in the way of that goal, then Windows is a pretty easy sell - and Intel and MS have already thrown millions of dollars at that goal. IT is happy, because they can finally go all Windows. Adobe's happy, because they only have to maintain one codebase, and they can lay off a bunch of people. Photoshop users have been prepared for this by getting acclimated to the "Adobe interface" rather than any system interface, making a switch relatively painless. Apple's share of their market is shrinking anyway, right? And it's much harder, technologically and politically, to use DRM and restrictive licenses on Macs - but MS is headed that way full steam, not least because copy-protected and secure document technologies are exempt from the antitrust agreement.
So that's what I'm thinking. None of it requires a hatred or even a dislike of Apple. Steve Jobs and Bruce Chizen could be best buddies for all anyone knows. But in reality, I can see a lot of reasons why Adobe would be steering itself toward Windows.
Photoshops upgrade cycle is 12-18 months. Meaning Photoshop 10 is at best 3 years away. This gives Apple 3 years to field a comparable product should Adobe do the ultimate and cancel photoshop development.
Now I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but seeing what Apple did with Final Cut Pro in 3 years was nothing short of amazing.
Seeing Apple totally revamp DVD Studio Pro to version 2.0 and it's improvements makes me believe that given a shrewd aquisition(Painter would be sublime), Apple could develop a PS competitor and take marketshare.
The issue is this. Apple wants to be large in Digital Video and you need an image editor/painter for individual frames etc. I imagine an app that is faster, cheaper and more fluid in ways that Photoshop cannot be due to legacy code.
Do I wish ill will to Adobe? No. But I'm interested in breating some life into the stagnant Graphics Arena. At one time we had Xres, Live Picture and a few other apps that challenged PS. Now there are none. This is not good for the industry.
Adobe Politics. Microsoft Politics have hurt our platform. We can only see things "their" way and frankly right now I'm interested in some "new" ideas lest my brain forget how to learn.
Some possible reasons why Adobe is, if not anti-Mac, at least favoring Windows:
1) Hangover from the G4 debacle, combined with the sudden ramp in power of the x86 lines: It'll be a while before the resurgence of the PowerPC really influences a company as large as Adobe, if it does.
2) Interface. This is sort of ironic, but Adobe has their own interface now. Their applications are less and less Mac applications (or Windows applications) by the day. Adobe has, for some time, been pushing the idea that the underlying platform shouldn't matter.
3) Tied in with 2: Apple has made the underlying platform matter, and while this is a boon to small developers it's a pain to Adobe. Look at PS 7: Adobe had written up their own version of Quartz! Now, if OS X were like Windows and OS 9, this would be no problem. But since Apple had added that functionality already, Adobe's was redundant and PS performance suffered. Now, given item 2, what's Adobe going to do? Take that layer out, and degrade the quality of the Windows release? Keep it, and have the Mac version lag? Remove it from the Mac version, and use Quartz, and have the two releases be non-uniform? Photoshop is built on assumptions about what an OS and a windowing system do that are firmly planted in 1992, an assumption which worked for 10 years, and which still works for the majority of computers. OS X sticks out, and that's a bad thing to someone like Adobe.
4) Intel has been pumping millions of dollars into Adobe and contributing dozens of engineers in order to get Adobe applications running well on their platform. As a result, Adobe spent months optimizing PS for Windows, and two weeks optimizing it for the Mac. On the one hand, this represents the sheer power and elegance of AltiVec on the Mac side. On the other hand, it means that one result of Intel's offensive is a certain degree of chumminess.
5) What the "Apple is unpredictable" line means is that Apple now develops applications. They aren't supposed to, see, because they're a systems vendor. This is how big companies think. I remember from the antitrust trial that Bill Gates went apoplectic when he'd heard that Intel was working on libraries to improve Windows performance, and on applications to showcase SSE. He saw that as an intrusion onto Microsoft's turf, as aggression, even though Intel clearly hoped it would be complementary. Adobe is probably in a similar position with Apple, and this is where the "unpredictability" comes from.
6) Given the above, if Adobe doesn't want the platform to matter, and they want their own interface, and Apple keeps getting in the way of that goal, then Windows is a pretty easy sell - and Intel and MS have already thrown millions of dollars at that goal. IT is happy, because they can finally go all Windows. Adobe's happy, because they only have to maintain one codebase, and they can lay off a bunch of people. Photoshop users have been prepared for this by getting acclimated to the "Adobe interface" rather than any system interface, making a switch relatively painless. Apple's share of their market is shrinking anyway, right? And it's much harder, technologically and politically, to use DRM and restrictive licenses on Macs - but MS is headed that way full steam, not least because copy-protected and secure document technologies are exempt from the antitrust agreement.
So that's what I'm thinking. None of it requires a hatred or even a dislike of Apple. Steve Jobs and Bruce Chizen could be best buddies for all anyone knows. But in reality, I can see a lot of reasons why Adobe would be steering itself toward Windows.
I think this largely sound reasoning.
That said, I still come to this final issue. Adobe gets 50% of its revenue from customers on the Mac platform. No company in their right mind will torpedo 50% of their revenue. Though we do need to watch the gradual "creep".
Similarly, Apple has the capacity to:
a) Build a better Photoshop. No doubts on that.
b) Bring their software technology to the Windows platform too.
Apple is changing too. We may just not see exactly HOW yet.
What I would like to see, and what OS X's display layer points the way to, is the resurrection of an idea that's actually as old as PS is - although I forget the app's name.
Basically, why bother with pixels at all until you have to? ACD/Deneba's Canvas is already heading this way, and so is Stone's Create (although from the direction of illustration). A Gaussian blur, for example, can be described in a resolution-independent way and then applied to whatever resolution happens to be underneath. Canvas' Sprite Effects are a step in this direction (filters are independent objects applied to other objects, not recalculations of pixels, although they do have a pixel resolution). Any image can then be sampled at whatever resolution you please. This makes virtual pixels, lately arrived to Photoshop, very easy to implement - really, they're just one more filter. It also means that when Apple gets ready to roll out high-density displays for a resolution independent interface, the view of the canvas will simply be better rendered, instead of everything shrinking far, far away from WYSIWYG - not to mention legibility.
Apple's core graphics engine would lend itself well to this model, and an app like this would be a really good stress tester. Apple could even pull a Safari and make the app a front end over the imaging library they've already started to work on, making it that much easier for anyone else to come up with a PS-like application - as long as they're interested in leveraging OS X technologies to make an OS X application, unlike certain large vendors.
If you are creating images in PS, then fine, but if you are using source material (scans, digital photo) then resolution independence is a crack induced fantasy. How do I get a 3D render into PS? It won't scale w/out jaggies.
I don't understand this "oh well" attitude about the possibility of Adobe leaving Apple. I am studying to be a photographer, the program that I'm trained on is Photoshop, I work in one of the largest studios on the East Coast, the computers they user are G4s with Photoshop. Can you imagine how pissed off a lot of large photo businesses are going to be if they have to reinvest in retraining their veteran photographers on new software, or reinvest in new Window hardware. Plus the time it would take to reformat alot of digitally archived images that are stored as Photoshop files.
Jus tto clarify my attitude: I don't think Adobe is so dumb or impatient as to just drop Mac support anytime in the near future. But they are hoping and helping that such firms as this make the "upgrade" to Windows over the next several years. As more and more companies do this, eventually, there will be a certain "acceptable" point when Adobe can safely abandon Mac development and the hit to Adobe's wallet will be justified by not spending all that money on more Mac development. It's not in the next 2-3 years, but maybe 5 or so years if Adobe has anything to do with it.
My previous comment was admittedly a sort of "good riddance" attitude. If the installer people for the Mac versions of Ill. and PS really were the main target of these cuts, and given the poor state of Adobe's Mac installations, it's a chance for Adobe to improve on this aspect of their products.
Amorph makes very good points too.
[added]
If we're going to talk about Apple's potential PS "replacement" , they already have the two guys from Caffeine Software on the payroll, and Caffeine's old TIFFany app had some huge advantages over Photoshop under the hood -- things like resolution independent actions (filters, effect, masks, etc.), independent color space, geometry and resolution per layer, and so forth. All of it was built on top of Quartz of course. TIFFany obviously had its good share of UI problems -- no full image preview, leftover organization that depended a lot on the OpenStep "shelf" concept, some stubbornness on the part of the developer, some weird action settings that required a mathematics degree, etc. TIFFany had huge potential but it never got a serious chance to live up to it.
In the latest MacWorld tests comparing G5's against P IV and Athlon, one of the most glaring advantages the G5 had was comparing them using Final Cut Pro and Premier(? if I remember correctly). This clearly and quite dramatically showed that as far as Premier??, the effort was NEVER put into optimizing for Mac OS.
If(BIG IF HERE, & assuming I remembered correctly about Premier used in the tests) this same senario plays out with Adobe's other products, ultimately this leaves users with the choice of Windows machines, with Ok performance using Adobe products(or other software vendors), or Apple products, that because of OS optimizations, embarrass the Adobe products.
In any event, what completely baffles me, is why wouldn't Adobe, or whoever developed the software, take advantage of Apple's strengths and optimize for the G4/G5. I mean really, in the tests MacWorld performed, the time comparisons for Windows was abysmal compared to Final Cut Pro.
This begs the question. Which company is more important in getting your work done...Apple or Adobe? Hardware or software?
Although, Apple's OS could be counted as software as well. I would venture to guess many designers who have grown up on Macs, might find it more difficult to switch platforms than to learn a new Photoshop replacement.
Plus almost all the top designers and creative folks, swear by Macs. It's a way of life and an extension of their creativity. They wouldn't even consider PC.
This begs the question. Which company is more important in getting your work done...Apple or Adobe? Hardware or software?
Although, Apple's OS could be counted as software as well. I would venture to guess many designers who have grown up on Macs, might find it more difficult to switch platforms than to learn a new Photoshop replacement.
Plus almost all the top designers and creative folks, swear by Macs. It's a way of life and an extension of their creativity. They wouldn't even consider PC.
If you are creating images in PS, then fine, but if you are using source material (scans, digital photo) then resolution independence is a crack induced fantasy. How do I get a 3D render into PS? It won't scale w/out jaggies.
The idea is not that everything must be resolution independent, but that, fundamentally, the engine is resolution independent. Obviously it would have to cope with things that have a finite or a fixed resolution - a Photoshop that couldn't handle scanned or digital photos would be pretty silly - but it would do so by creating a square object with the photo and an attribute set that said "this object is fixed at 300ppi (or 72ppi, or whatever)" rather than fixing the whole canvas and every effect to the same resolution.
Maybe I'm not getting the idea across well, but there are no huge holes in terms of what it can handle. The main obstacle has been the amount of computational power required to pull it off. As I've pointed out, applications are already getting close to the sort of thing I'm talking about (and as BuonRotto pointed out, TIFFany was already there) so computational power is no longer the problem it was in the late 1980s, and it's no longer a worthwhile optimization to assume that everything is rasterized into pixels.
This begs the question. Which company is more important in getting your work done...Apple or Adobe? Hardware or software?
Although, Apple's OS could be counted as software as well. I would venture to guess many designers who have grown up on Macs, might find it more difficult to switch platforms than to learn a new Photoshop replacement.
Plus almost all the top designers and creative folks, swear by Macs. It's a way of life and an extension of their creativity. They wouldn't even consider PC.
Good question. I'd like to hear from people who would be affected by an Adobe defection.
So, again, I wonder...why doesn't Apple just BUY Adobe?
They'd get the PS/PDF technology.
They'd keep Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign (even for Windows...well...probably). Kill off Premier? Maybe.
It seems this would be a good acquisition for Apple.
Of course there is a dilemma...
What if you buy Adobe and all you get is a bunch of crap (underneath the sheets). Say Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign really suck as applications?
Now you're stuck with them. On the other hand, you develop your own "better" versions and alienate your software partners (like Adobe).
Maybe this starts getting to an assumption that Apple NEEDs to have 3rd party developers (Adobe, MS, etc.) Why is this assumption held? Is it correct? What if it is not? What does that mean for Apple? For its customers?
We have become accustomed to this "horizontal" disintegration (CPU vendor, machine vendor, OS vendor, application vendor). But is this necessary?
Apple combines a couple of these (machine/OS/application) in certain areas. (Arguably also CPU to some extend, though they don't fab them, I'm guessing they strongly influence their design.)
What is the "evil" of a vertically integrated product/vendor? It need not be a totally closed system. In fact it can be an open system.
But here's the thing, doesn't Apple have as much right to try and compete for customers with a Photoshop equivalent? Sure they do. Why not?
Where things get tricky (a la MS) is when they are not really competing...but taking some unfair advantage.
This is an argument MS has made all along (allegations of "private, internal APIs" aside for a moment). They've said, we simply created a better product (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) than anyone else. Now...we can argue the truth of this "better-ness". But that is the argument.
Why did they separate in the first place... if i remember correctly... Apple founded Adobe and then they separated...
This is incorrect. Adobe was one of the Xerox PARC "children". John Warnock (and another guy) invented PostScript at Xerox PARC...then went on to found Adobe.
Now...Adobe's early success in inextricably linked to Apple's Macintosh (think DTP) platform.
I don't know how much apple has already invested (stock wise) into adobe... but i do think now is the time that they should invest even more... but don't do a buyout... if they go buy it out and shred off its windows programmers the windows talent there will fragment off and develop another app just for windows... and then we'll be screwed.
Adobe won't affect Apple at all if they leave within 3-5 years.
It's so blatantly obvious that Apple itself is weaning itself off of Graphics as it's lifeblood.
Digital Video is key as well as branching out with Lifestyle products like the iPod and iTMS. I'm tired of reading about Adobe. I don't own Photoshop and neither do millions of other Mac user like me.
The key to profits is the items that we can all use. I'm willing to bet that Apple could create an app for $399 that gives us %80 of what PS does with some nifty things included. I could see them bundling this app with Final Cut Pro, DVDSP 2.0, etc.
A Software revolution is needed on our platform. Apple needs to be the beacon for all programmmers that want to write software beyond compare.
Raiding Adobe wouldn't be a bad idea or hitting Sun up for a few choice engineers. Apple is bringing the "fun" back into computers. Lets keep this thing going.
hmurchison since you don't need it you don't understand... if apple lost photoshop... I'd literally be screwed.. might as well just buy a shitload of PC's and deal with it I guess. You see just about 75% of all graphic designers out there use apple, and ALL of them probably used/own or have used own photoshop in the past. Think of the numbers before and after photoshop 7 came to mac... for OS X installed units, and when the stock jumped for apple because of this too. I can't stress to you how important Graphics are to the Mac platform... but its me and a whole other lot of people that have been keeping this platform alive, all this time, in business sales, as well as other areas.
Through the OS 9 days when windows was multitasking and our windows counterparts could send a file to a RIP and still be using photoshop and opening files off of network servers back in the day, its been a hard fight to get to keep using mac especially when every other department just gets windows pcs, corporate buyers buy macs for creative departments as thats what they think is the right tool. Without photoshop, it'll just become a platform like linux, or amiga... great to work on, but nothing to work with.
I hope that adobe is just playing some poker and this is all a bluff.
Why did they separate in the first place... if i remember correctly... Apple founded Adobe and then they separated...
Sorry wrong fairy tale.
Why would anyone want to buy Adobe. They have shown an inate ability to fail at everything besides print media (AE aside). They can't even take down Macromedia, which have shown an inability to code decent releases on both Wintel and Mac. Adobe are a huge freaking dinosaur, that is now betting the farm on PDF--which is the proverbial bicycle that became a plane. Can't bolt anymore onto that file format without all heell breaking loose.
The rumor purports that a bunch of people who dealt with the installation/installers for PS and Illustrator were canned. Considering how bad the installation of these apps is, both the installers and where they install things, it might be the right place to streamline the company.
Adobe's clearly moving to abandon Macs in the forseeable future anyway.
Thinking about how this thread balloned into a discussion of Adobe's love/hate relationship with Apple, I'm shocked. If the installer team was fired (for incompetence as exhibited by the Illustrator installer crashing), why are we getting all worked up?
Comments
1) Hangover from the G4 debacle, combined with the sudden ramp in power of the x86 lines: It'll be a while before the resurgence of the PowerPC really influences a company as large as Adobe, if it does.
2) Interface. This is sort of ironic, but Adobe has their own interface now. Their applications are less and less Mac applications (or Windows applications) by the day. Adobe has, for some time, been pushing the idea that the underlying platform shouldn't matter.
3) Tied in with 2: Apple has made the underlying platform matter, and while this is a boon to small developers it's a pain to Adobe. Look at PS 7: Adobe had written up their own version of Quartz! Now, if OS X were like Windows and OS 9, this would be no problem. But since Apple had added that functionality already, Adobe's was redundant and PS performance suffered. Now, given item 2, what's Adobe going to do? Take that layer out, and degrade the quality of the Windows release? Keep it, and have the Mac version lag? Remove it from the Mac version, and use Quartz, and have the two releases be non-uniform? Photoshop is built on assumptions about what an OS and a windowing system do that are firmly planted in 1992, an assumption which worked for 10 years, and which still works for the majority of computers. OS X sticks out, and that's a bad thing to someone like Adobe.
4) Intel has been pumping millions of dollars into Adobe and contributing dozens of engineers in order to get Adobe applications running well on their platform. As a result, Adobe spent months optimizing PS for Windows, and two weeks optimizing it for the Mac. On the one hand, this represents the sheer power and elegance of AltiVec on the Mac side. On the other hand, it means that one result of Intel's offensive is a certain degree of chumminess.
5) What the "Apple is unpredictable" line means is that Apple now develops applications. They aren't supposed to, see, because they're a systems vendor. This is how big companies think. I remember from the antitrust trial that Bill Gates went apoplectic when he'd heard that Intel was working on libraries to improve Windows performance, and on applications to showcase SSE. He saw that as an intrusion onto Microsoft's turf, as aggression, even though Intel clearly hoped it would be complementary. Adobe is probably in a similar position with Apple, and this is where the "unpredictability" comes from.
6) Given the above, if Adobe doesn't want the platform to matter, and they want their own interface, and Apple keeps getting in the way of that goal, then Windows is a pretty easy sell - and Intel and MS have already thrown millions of dollars at that goal. IT is happy, because they can finally go all Windows. Adobe's happy, because they only have to maintain one codebase, and they can lay off a bunch of people. Photoshop users have been prepared for this by getting acclimated to the "Adobe interface" rather than any system interface, making a switch relatively painless. Apple's share of their market is shrinking anyway, right? And it's much harder, technologically and politically, to use DRM and restrictive licenses on Macs - but MS is headed that way full steam, not least because copy-protected and secure document technologies are exempt from the antitrust agreement.
So that's what I'm thinking. None of it requires a hatred or even a dislike of Apple. Steve Jobs and Bruce Chizen could be best buddies for all anyone knows. But in reality, I can see a lot of reasons why Adobe would be steering itself toward Windows.
Originally posted by Barto
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/creativesuite.html
Thank god they changed the defult background of that site... my eyes still hurt.
Photoshops upgrade cycle is 12-18 months. Meaning Photoshop 10 is at best 3 years away. This gives Apple 3 years to field a comparable product should Adobe do the ultimate and cancel photoshop development.
Now I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but seeing what Apple did with Final Cut Pro in 3 years was nothing short of amazing.
Seeing Apple totally revamp DVD Studio Pro to version 2.0 and it's improvements makes me believe that given a shrewd aquisition(Painter would be sublime), Apple could develop a PS competitor and take marketshare.
The issue is this. Apple wants to be large in Digital Video and you need an image editor/painter for individual frames etc. I imagine an app that is faster, cheaper and more fluid in ways that Photoshop cannot be due to legacy code.
Do I wish ill will to Adobe? No. But I'm interested in breating some life into the stagnant Graphics Arena. At one time we had Xres, Live Picture and a few other apps that challenged PS. Now there are none. This is not good for the industry.
Adobe Politics. Microsoft Politics have hurt our platform. We can only see things "their" way and frankly right now I'm interested in some "new" ideas lest my brain forget how to learn.
Originally posted by Amorph
Some possible reasons why Adobe is, if not anti-Mac, at least favoring Windows:
1) Hangover from the G4 debacle, combined with the sudden ramp in power of the x86 lines: It'll be a while before the resurgence of the PowerPC really influences a company as large as Adobe, if it does.
2) Interface. This is sort of ironic, but Adobe has their own interface now. Their applications are less and less Mac applications (or Windows applications) by the day. Adobe has, for some time, been pushing the idea that the underlying platform shouldn't matter.
3) Tied in with 2: Apple has made the underlying platform matter, and while this is a boon to small developers it's a pain to Adobe. Look at PS 7: Adobe had written up their own version of Quartz! Now, if OS X were like Windows and OS 9, this would be no problem. But since Apple had added that functionality already, Adobe's was redundant and PS performance suffered. Now, given item 2, what's Adobe going to do? Take that layer out, and degrade the quality of the Windows release? Keep it, and have the Mac version lag? Remove it from the Mac version, and use Quartz, and have the two releases be non-uniform? Photoshop is built on assumptions about what an OS and a windowing system do that are firmly planted in 1992, an assumption which worked for 10 years, and which still works for the majority of computers. OS X sticks out, and that's a bad thing to someone like Adobe.
4) Intel has been pumping millions of dollars into Adobe and contributing dozens of engineers in order to get Adobe applications running well on their platform. As a result, Adobe spent months optimizing PS for Windows, and two weeks optimizing it for the Mac. On the one hand, this represents the sheer power and elegance of AltiVec on the Mac side. On the other hand, it means that one result of Intel's offensive is a certain degree of chumminess.
5) What the "Apple is unpredictable" line means is that Apple now develops applications. They aren't supposed to, see, because they're a systems vendor. This is how big companies think. I remember from the antitrust trial that Bill Gates went apoplectic when he'd heard that Intel was working on libraries to improve Windows performance, and on applications to showcase SSE. He saw that as an intrusion onto Microsoft's turf, as aggression, even though Intel clearly hoped it would be complementary. Adobe is probably in a similar position with Apple, and this is where the "unpredictability" comes from.
6) Given the above, if Adobe doesn't want the platform to matter, and they want their own interface, and Apple keeps getting in the way of that goal, then Windows is a pretty easy sell - and Intel and MS have already thrown millions of dollars at that goal. IT is happy, because they can finally go all Windows. Adobe's happy, because they only have to maintain one codebase, and they can lay off a bunch of people. Photoshop users have been prepared for this by getting acclimated to the "Adobe interface" rather than any system interface, making a switch relatively painless. Apple's share of their market is shrinking anyway, right? And it's much harder, technologically and politically, to use DRM and restrictive licenses on Macs - but MS is headed that way full steam, not least because copy-protected and secure document technologies are exempt from the antitrust agreement.
So that's what I'm thinking. None of it requires a hatred or even a dislike of Apple. Steve Jobs and Bruce Chizen could be best buddies for all anyone knows. But in reality, I can see a lot of reasons why Adobe would be steering itself toward Windows.
I think this largely sound reasoning.
That said, I still come to this final issue. Adobe gets 50% of its revenue from customers on the Mac platform. No company in their right mind will torpedo 50% of their revenue. Though we do need to watch the gradual "creep".
Similarly, Apple has the capacity to:
a) Build a better Photoshop. No doubts on that.
b) Bring their software technology to the Windows platform too.
Apple is changing too. We may just not see exactly HOW yet.
Basically, why bother with pixels at all until you have to? ACD/Deneba's Canvas is already heading this way, and so is Stone's Create (although from the direction of illustration). A Gaussian blur, for example, can be described in a resolution-independent way and then applied to whatever resolution happens to be underneath. Canvas' Sprite Effects are a step in this direction (filters are independent objects applied to other objects, not recalculations of pixels, although they do have a pixel resolution). Any image can then be sampled at whatever resolution you please. This makes virtual pixels, lately arrived to Photoshop, very easy to implement - really, they're just one more filter. It also means that when Apple gets ready to roll out high-density displays for a resolution independent interface, the view of the canvas will simply be better rendered, instead of everything shrinking far, far away from WYSIWYG - not to mention legibility.
Apple's core graphics engine would lend itself well to this model, and an app like this would be a really good stress tester. Apple could even pull a Safari and make the app a front end over the imaging library they've already started to work on, making it that much easier for anyone else to come up with a PS-like application - as long as they're interested in leveraging OS X technologies to make an OS X application, unlike certain large vendors.
I mean, witch 3D app would be the easiest to learn if your an experienced illustrator user?
Originally posted by LiquidR
I don't understand this "oh well" attitude about the possibility of Adobe leaving Apple. I am studying to be a photographer, the program that I'm trained on is Photoshop, I work in one of the largest studios on the East Coast, the computers they user are G4s with Photoshop. Can you imagine how pissed off a lot of large photo businesses are going to be if they have to reinvest in retraining their veteran photographers on new software, or reinvest in new Window hardware. Plus the time it would take to reformat alot of digitally archived images that are stored as Photoshop files.
Jus tto clarify my attitude: I don't think Adobe is so dumb or impatient as to just drop Mac support anytime in the near future. But they are hoping and helping that such firms as this make the "upgrade" to Windows over the next several years. As more and more companies do this, eventually, there will be a certain "acceptable" point when Adobe can safely abandon Mac development and the hit to Adobe's wallet will be justified by not spending all that money on more Mac development. It's not in the next 2-3 years, but maybe 5 or so years if Adobe has anything to do with it.
My previous comment was admittedly a sort of "good riddance" attitude. If the installer people for the Mac versions of Ill. and PS really were the main target of these cuts, and given the poor state of Adobe's Mac installations, it's a chance for Adobe to improve on this aspect of their products.
Amorph makes very good points too.
[added]
If we're going to talk about Apple's potential PS "replacement" , they already have the two guys from Caffeine Software on the payroll, and Caffeine's old TIFFany app had some huge advantages over Photoshop under the hood -- things like resolution independent actions (filters, effect, masks, etc.), independent color space, geometry and resolution per layer, and so forth. All of it was built on top of Quartz of course. TIFFany obviously had its good share of UI problems -- no full image preview, leftover organization that depended a lot on the OpenStep "shelf" concept, some stubbornness on the part of the developer, some weird action settings that required a mathematics degree, etc. TIFFany had huge potential but it never got a serious chance to live up to it.
In the latest MacWorld tests comparing G5's against P IV and Athlon, one of the most glaring advantages the G5 had was comparing them using Final Cut Pro and Premier(? if I remember correctly). This clearly and quite dramatically showed that as far as Premier??, the effort was NEVER put into optimizing for Mac OS.
If(BIG IF HERE, & assuming I remembered correctly about Premier used in the tests) this same senario plays out with Adobe's other products, ultimately this leaves users with the choice of Windows machines, with Ok performance using Adobe products(or other software vendors), or Apple products, that because of OS optimizations, embarrass the Adobe products.
In any event, what completely baffles me, is why wouldn't Adobe, or whoever developed the software, take advantage of Apple's strengths and optimize for the G4/G5. I mean really, in the tests MacWorld performed, the time comparisons for Windows was abysmal compared to Final Cut Pro.
Although, Apple's OS could be counted as software as well. I would venture to guess many designers who have grown up on Macs, might find it more difficult to switch platforms than to learn a new Photoshop replacement.
Plus almost all the top designers and creative folks, swear by Macs. It's a way of life and an extension of their creativity. They wouldn't even consider PC.
Originally posted by satchmo
This begs the question. Which company is more important in getting your work done...Apple or Adobe? Hardware or software?
Although, Apple's OS could be counted as software as well. I would venture to guess many designers who have grown up on Macs, might find it more difficult to switch platforms than to learn a new Photoshop replacement.
Plus almost all the top designers and creative folks, swear by Macs. It's a way of life and an extension of their creativity. They wouldn't even consider PC.
Let's hope so.
Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R
If you are creating images in PS, then fine, but if you are using source material (scans, digital photo) then resolution independence is a crack induced fantasy. How do I get a 3D render into PS? It won't scale w/out jaggies.
The idea is not that everything must be resolution independent, but that, fundamentally, the engine is resolution independent. Obviously it would have to cope with things that have a finite or a fixed resolution - a Photoshop that couldn't handle scanned or digital photos would be pretty silly - but it would do so by creating a square object with the photo and an attribute set that said "this object is fixed at 300ppi (or 72ppi, or whatever)" rather than fixing the whole canvas and every effect to the same resolution.
Maybe I'm not getting the idea across well, but there are no huge holes in terms of what it can handle. The main obstacle has been the amount of computational power required to pull it off. As I've pointed out, applications are already getting close to the sort of thing I'm talking about (and as BuonRotto pointed out, TIFFany was already there) so computational power is no longer the problem it was in the late 1980s, and it's no longer a worthwhile optimization to assume that everything is rasterized into pixels.
Originally posted by satchmo
This begs the question. Which company is more important in getting your work done...Apple or Adobe? Hardware or software?
Although, Apple's OS could be counted as software as well. I would venture to guess many designers who have grown up on Macs, might find it more difficult to switch platforms than to learn a new Photoshop replacement.
Plus almost all the top designers and creative folks, swear by Macs. It's a way of life and an extension of their creativity. They wouldn't even consider PC.
Good question. I'd like to hear from people who would be affected by an Adobe defection.
They'd get the PS/PDF technology.
They'd keep Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign (even for Windows...well...probably). Kill off Premier? Maybe.
It seems this would be a good acquisition for Apple.
Of course there is a dilemma...
What if you buy Adobe and all you get is a bunch of crap (underneath the sheets). Say Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign really suck as applications?
Now you're stuck with them. On the other hand, you develop your own "better" versions and alienate your software partners (like Adobe).
Maybe this starts getting to an assumption that Apple NEEDs to have 3rd party developers (Adobe, MS, etc.) Why is this assumption held? Is it correct? What if it is not? What does that mean for Apple? For its customers?
We have become accustomed to this "horizontal" disintegration (CPU vendor, machine vendor, OS vendor, application vendor). But is this necessary?
Apple combines a couple of these (machine/OS/application) in certain areas. (Arguably also CPU to some extend, though they don't fab them, I'm guessing they strongly influence their design.)
What is the "evil" of a vertically integrated product/vendor? It need not be a totally closed system. In fact it can be an open system.
But here's the thing, doesn't Apple have as much right to try and compete for customers with a Photoshop equivalent? Sure they do. Why not?
Where things get tricky (a la MS) is when they are not really competing...but taking some unfair advantage.
This is an argument MS has made all along (allegations of "private, internal APIs" aside for a moment). They've said, we simply created a better product (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) than anyone else. Now...we can argue the truth of this "better-ness". But that is the argument.
Does this not also hold for Apple too?
Not sure.
Originally posted by MacUsers
Why did they separate in the first place... if i remember correctly... Apple founded Adobe and then they separated...
This is incorrect. Adobe was one of the Xerox PARC "children". John Warnock (and another guy) invented PostScript at Xerox PARC...then went on to found Adobe.
Now...Adobe's early success in inextricably linked to Apple's Macintosh (think DTP) platform.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Adobe won't affect Apple at all if they leave within 3-5 years.
It's so blatantly obvious that Apple itself is weaning itself off of Graphics as it's lifeblood.
Digital Video is key as well as branching out with Lifestyle products like the iPod and iTMS. I'm tired of reading about Adobe. I don't own Photoshop and neither do millions of other Mac user like me.
The key to profits is the items that we can all use. I'm willing to bet that Apple could create an app for $399 that gives us %80 of what PS does with some nifty things included. I could see them bundling this app with Final Cut Pro, DVDSP 2.0, etc.
A Software revolution is needed on our platform. Apple needs to be the beacon for all programmmers that want to write software beyond compare.
Raiding Adobe wouldn't be a bad idea or hitting Sun up for a few choice engineers. Apple is bringing the "fun" back into computers. Lets keep this thing going.
hmurchison since you don't need it you don't understand... if apple lost photoshop... I'd literally be screwed.. might as well just buy a shitload of PC's and deal with it I guess. You see just about 75% of all graphic designers out there use apple, and ALL of them probably used/own or have used own photoshop in the past. Think of the numbers before and after photoshop 7 came to mac... for OS X installed units, and when the stock jumped for apple because of this too. I can't stress to you how important Graphics are to the Mac platform... but its me and a whole other lot of people that have been keeping this platform alive, all this time, in business sales, as well as other areas.
Through the OS 9 days when windows was multitasking and our windows counterparts could send a file to a RIP and still be using photoshop and opening files off of network servers back in the day, its been a hard fight to get to keep using mac especially when every other department just gets windows pcs, corporate buyers buy macs for creative departments as thats what they think is the right tool. Without photoshop, it'll just become a platform like linux, or amiga... great to work on, but nothing to work with.
I hope that adobe is just playing some poker and this is all a bluff.
Why did they separate in the first place... if i remember correctly... Apple founded Adobe and then they separated...
Sorry wrong fairy tale.
Why would anyone want to buy Adobe. They have shown an inate ability to fail at everything besides print media (AE aside). They can't even take down Macromedia, which have shown an inability to code decent releases on both Wintel and Mac. Adobe are a huge freaking dinosaur, that is now betting the farm on PDF--which is the proverbial bicycle that became a plane. Can't bolt anymore onto that file format without all heell breaking loose.
Originally posted by BuonRotto
The rumor purports that a bunch of people who dealt with the installation/installers for PS and Illustrator were canned. Considering how bad the installation of these apps is, both the installers and where they install things, it might be the right place to streamline the company.
Adobe's clearly moving to abandon Macs in the forseeable future anyway.
Thinking about how this thread balloned into a discussion of Adobe's love/hate relationship with Apple, I'm shocked. If the installer team was fired (for incompetence as exhibited by the Illustrator installer crashing), why are we getting all worked up?