Adobe: "Universal? What's That?"

[bofors]

Yes, and it was close to unusable until Xcode 1.5.

 

So I suppose NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, of which ProjectBuilder was key component, was unsable too, and Apple just got suckered into buying it?

 

On February 4, 1997 Apple Computer acquired NeXT, using the OpenStep operating system as the basis for Mac OS X. Mac OS X's OpenStep heritage can be seen in the Cocoa development environment, where the Objective-C library classes have "NS" prefixes. A free software implementation of the OpenStep standard, GNUstep, also exists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

[aphid]

You never had to use ProjectBuilder, did you?

[bofors]

You never had to use ProjectBuilder, did you?

 

No, I started using ProjectBuilder during the summer of 2002 and in my mind it is the same thing as Xcode. My impression of it may be different because it was the first IDE that I used.

 

However, I suspect that the real issue here is that ProjectBuilder/Xcode was specifically designed for Cocoa (and that is what I used it for). If you were doing something else that might explain the problem, but saying ProjectBuilder was "unusable" is absurd.

[Scothiam]

hope this is back to the point, does anyone know if Gimp, and for that matter N-vu and OpenOffice, have been ported to UniBin?

I'm curious as I for one do not want to shell out for adobe when they do eventually come around, and do want to support open source projects.

OpenOffice.org is the bomb in case you didn't know.

word.

Any recomendations on a freeware-opensource Illustrator competetor? cheers,

 

(ps, i just checked and there is an alpha release of OpenOffice for Intel-Mac, yeah!!)

[ajv]

Gimp.app is Universal... been so for months now.

 

http://gimp-app.sf.net

[Haplo]

ProjectBuilder had a lot of bugs. Some really bad ones. The main one that got me is that if you made a single mistake in your code, it would keep multiplying that bug even after you fixed it (and prevented you from building regardless of what you did). They fixed that in some recent version of XCode, however that problem still exists with java (which makes me angry because that's what I'm working with in Comp Sci 2).

 

I don't like GIMP or OpenOffice. Neither of them is a real good alternative to anything, and they're both ugly. I've heard things about problems in OpenOffice opening certain popular file types, and GIMPs GUI is even worse than photoshop's (ew).

[Scothiam]

I don't like GIMP or OpenOffice. Neither of them is a real good alternative to anything, and they're both ugly. I've heard things about problems in OpenOffice opening certain popular file types, and GIMPs GUI is even worse than photoshop's (ew).

 

I've been using OpenOffice for about a year now, and really dig it (for the small amount that I need to work with Office type files, it's perfect, and free). No problems on this front. Beats piracy too. tho, we're talking word files here, nothing more.

 

I haven't been able to make the switch to Nvu for some of the reasons you've mentioned. I'm just way to used to a-mainstream-app's interface (good or bad). While I can settle for less in an office app, I need what I know in web design.

 

Thanks for the tip on Gimp, I'll give it another shot

[Haplo]

Meh. I might be willing to try Nvu, but so far I have been entirely unimpressed by WYSIWYG web authoring software. I prefer a text-based HTML IDE (like CreaTEXT) despite the bugs in that particular software. I like the control and the fact that it's easier to fix your own code than the trash you get with something like dreamweaver. I'm not even getting started on that peice of {censored} (DreamWeaver is not only useless, but the best example of extreme bloatware I have even had the misfortune to attempt to use).

 

Not to mention, I was running a web site in pure HTML (I'm not actually familiar with any of the scripting languages besides javascript, which I don't particularly like) only I had chosen to go without images, opting for a more simple interface. Several idiots complained about this, so I broke down and agreed to update the site. One idiot in particular, however, suggested that I was 'newb' for doing it in a text editor and proceeded to stuff a Dreamweaver produced version (with really horrid images, I might add) in my face. I was using a top frame for navigation, and not only was that frame badly messed up (the images and text were misaligned, and the border was too big) but the alignment on the rest of the site was ugly as hell too. I'm not sure if Dreamweaver is really as useless as I say (although considering it takes like half an hour to load; more than OSX and XP put together, it's unusable from the box), or maybe he was just a first rate idiot.

[UncleP]

Why would Adobe have anything ready for low-end mac and also don't forget that Apple was supposed to release these new Intel Macs in June 06 not January 06. Allot of software companies don't have product ready for UB. Quite frankly why would Adobe spend millions of dollars to push a product out for a low base number of new low end mac users. Are Intel Mac sales staggering? Nope they are not so sorry guys but you will probably not see a UB of Adobe products until Apple puts Intel into the pro-end macs. I think it is unjustified to be flamming Adobe for not having a product ready for the "Yugo" macs because they know most of them pirate it anyway. If you don't know what a Yugo is, look up a pos car of the late 80's. If anyone is to be flammed it should be Apple for sticking it to the developers of major software vedors and telling them June 06, then releasing in January. Come on think about it.

 

Peace

[Haplo]

Uh, maybe your post might not have been spam had you read ANY of the other posts in this 3 page thread. The general consensus was this:

 

1-No, we're not happy, but if adobe gets photoshop out either before or shortly after the intel PowerMacs ship, things will be at least acceptable.

2- Adobe claimed that they would be 'one of the first' companies to have their software as unibins, and so far has proven to be the exact opposite, as at least half of the software actively being developed has already been ported, while adobe hasn't done squat. They ran their mouths and then provided less than nothing to substantiate.

3-From what has been said at least, Adobe has now said that no, they're not even going to meet the powermac deadline, but instead opts to develop Lightroom to compete with aperature (which is unlikely to be too successful given Adobe's history and aperature's quality and speed) and pushed back their creative suite until the end of 2006/beginning of 2007, possibly over 6 months later than apple's announced release date, which says nothing for the 'first company to have unibin apps'.

 

The point, again, has nothing to do with Adobe's logistics or what would be best for them sales wise. It's the fact that they claimed they'd be the first and are now looking to be the last, which is especially annoying since people will want to be able to buy new intel-macs and run their software natively. It's not such a big deal with the iMacs, but Adobe's new date is completely unacceptable by all means.

[dkelley]

(DreamWeaver is not only useless, but the best example of extreme bloatware I have even had the misfortune to attempt to use).

 

Bloatware? have you ever used Ms Word?? talk about bloatware - word is supposed to be the tool everyone uses for letters etc but it's got features only a book publisher or editor would ever use. at least Dreamweaver is a pro app for pro users - it's not meant for entry level web hackers or home users.

 

Dreamweaver is the industry standard web design and web dev backend coding tool. It is widely accepted as the best because it isn't supposed to (more on this later) affect your code and shouldn't do anything other than what you tell it to. I should know - I'm a senior web development engineer by career (going on 10 years of pro web dev work experience here).

 

If the dreamweaver-designed site sucked it was because the designer sucked. The program is excellent and won't negatively affect your code. You should not have been using a frame for your top nav area (search engines will index your nav page as it's own web page and you'll get useless search engine results among other things). If all you know is javascript and you hate it then you're probably not a good candidate for any advanced layout program like dreamweaver (which specializes in css layout coding... css is almost a language of it's own really, and if you don't know css then you won't understand how to take advantage of dreamweaver unless you trust it's visual layout tools which are really good IF you can go in and fix code once in a while on your own... I've had dreamweaver's visual layout tool create lots of junk by accident on very complex pages, but on simple pages it's fine). so dreamweaver's great but you need to know the basics of layout programming in css and html at the VERY least.

 

nothing wrong with text editors, just that they won't catch typos, don't offer coding help by showing you all the methods for a given reserved word, doesn't offer project-wide editing/search and replace/integrated debugging/testing/ftping/so much more...

 

so if you learn dreamweaver it's great, but like most "pro" apps it isn't designed to be obvious how to use every detail - instead they offer a ton of features that professional coders and designers WILL use regularly but most average users won't need or understand without further education.

 

It's good practice for you to edit in a text editor anyway, keeps you abreast of the syntax of your chosen coding language. Then eventually you can move to a visual tool that DOESN'T honestly affect your code... oh wait, I forgot, there isn't one!

 

:-)

 

Cheers

[Haplo]

Meh. As I said, DreamWeaver takes like half an hour just to load, and then runs like a pack of ice cubes in tree sap. It might be wonderful for all I know, but it runs too horribly for me to ever consider using it. About the nav thing, I really don't care since my site would have been mostly privately linked to, but it's good to know I suppose. Also, I have since made a new site (also in a text editor, this one making use of javascript in addition to the CSS I was using before) which you can take a look at here.

 

I don't know about word being bloatware (although I don't doubt it), but you could say the same for any text editor on mac (since the system level text supports full typographical features, amongst other things). However, the thing that sets pages apart from Word is the fact that it has templates, so you can start with a letter template and fill in your own text without worrying about all of the features it has. I am writing my own book, though, so I can appreciate the other features too .

[HiFi]

lol, as I said. Graphics designers don't use iMacs. You're wrong, however. Graphics designers DON'T just look at system specs when they choose a comp. There's a lot of reason GFX designers use macs, not the least of which is colorsync. It's been said enough times, however, GFX professionals don't use iMacs, and if Adobe doesn't want to get it out now, oh well. However, if they don't get it out reasonably quickly after they update the PowerMacs to intels, THEN people are going to be really angry.

 

well, i have to say...i am a graphic designer and i do a lot of my work at home, on a windows xp system...i'm not a huge fan of apple, because i always thought they sell systems which are way slower than a cheap pc (my athlon64, 1024MB, R9600PRO, 450€ blows away our G5 here at the office...) but now that they sell intel-based system i am really interested in buying one. and i don't need a powermac at home, most of the work can easily be done on a computer with the specs of the new imac (unless your job is video-editing...).

if the adobe suite was available right now, i would switch. and i guess there's a few more people, like a lot a freelancers. i know a few, and most of them switched to windows some time ago.

[myzar]

Meh. As I said, DreamWeaver takes like half an hour just to load, and then runs like a pack of ice cubes in tree sap. It might be wonderful for all I know, but it runs too horribly for me to ever consider using it. About the nav thing, I really don't care since my site would have been mostly privately linked to, but it's good to know I suppose. Also, I have since made a new site (also in a text editor, this one making use of javascript in addition to the CSS I was using before) which you can take a look at here.

 

I don't know about word being bloatware (although I don't doubt it), but you could say the same for any text editor on mac (since the system level text supports full typographical features, amongst other things). However, the thing that sets pages apart from Word is the fact that it has templates, so you can start with a letter template and fill in your own text without worrying about all of the features it has. I am writing my own book, though, so I can appreciate the other features too .

 

dw opens in 3secs for me on win2k3 with 1g of ram athlon64 4000+ no idea about its performance on vintage hardware like a g4 or g5

[Scothiam]

Meh. I might be willing to try Nvu, but so far I have been entirely unimpressed by WYSIWYG web authoring software. I prefer a text-based HTML IDE (like CreaTEXT)

 

I started using dreamweaver way back Version 3 or 4, back then I needed all the help (auto code writing) I could get. Now I'm too the point where I've bent the app to my will, I keep close check on what it's doing and rarely let it write or add code (and if I do, I at least know what the new code does and how to edit it manually).

 

If I was looking for my first app, with the knowledge of coding I have at the moment, I'd probably go with something much simpler (maybe like this CreaTEXT you mentioned). But I've grown used to / fond of dreamweavers site organization and of course by this stage in the game I'm pretty much a slave to thier GUI (I know where everything is that i need).

I'd have to agree that the idiot you mentioned was in fact that. Building a site sans graphics is a noble cause, results may vary. But images don't always make the site.

 

Sounds like you have a lot of experience on the "hard coding" side, great to hear your input, though I may not understand it all. My experience is more in scripting languages, HTML, javascript, dhtml, PHP/Mysql, and have only dabled a little in C++ and Java. Nice chatting with all of you

[Dee S. 73]

As dkelley already reported, DW is one of the best web ide around , it only needs u to know what u are doing with it... In the "novice / personal" webdesign market , iWeb is probably the best way to have a nice web/blog/multimedia site without ANY web knowledge.

Being myself a pro in web-app b2b developing since a decade i must say that DW is probably the one that write the less horrorific code when in visual mode and has a nice text mode (wich u can customize to use your preferred text-editing app.,btw).

I develop mainly php/html apps and for fast code correction i prefer small editing apps (like ultraedit or edit32 on win32) but for page/site layout, dw was my 1st choice...I said "was" cause now it has a big issue....its Adobe owned and.... that's probably the worst thing that could have been happened.. with Macromedia buy, there are no more competitors and that simply means .. no more evolution...

I mean, if we hadnt Macromedia "push on" flash like they did, the standard today would probably be SVG, adobe "brilliant" idea ........( NOTE: i personally im not AT ALL a flash fan, i dont like 60% of flash made sites but for some things its really good).

Now,let's face it : Adobe has the oldest inteface style of all the apps floating around....the only program with a worst interface is Gimp (wich is a x11 try of a adobe-like interface , to attract adobe users).

I'm a senior net-engineer/web developer with a strong *nix/win background since the early '90 and the x86 version of osx has really pleased me , as it finally gives us a nice interface , a powerful window rendering system and a nice audio subsystem on a *nix basesystem in a x86 pc.....

I've been using *nix systems 70 % of my time for networking administration, a bit of c,c++,perl,tcl developing and server use and Windoze for Web-developing and my free-time computer use ( im a dj and music producer too), and now OsX could seriously replace both *nix/Win environments for mine "client" everyday use....(the same apply to 40 % of my co-workers) if only Unibin apps of main programs will be out soon....

Now this Adobe p.o.w. on the whole unibin thing just isnt a good move considering that probably will involve all the Macromedia apps too...delaying Apple switch for a while...for sure a longer time than the time needed to enable the boot of any *nix / win on Apple Efi systems

Said that, lets "pros" make comments on "pro" apps..... most of times users are the real problem not programs or Os's.....

Just my "rants" on this..

DS

[aphid]

No, I started using ProjectBuilder during the summer of 2002 and in my mind it is the same thing as Xcode. My impression of it may be different because it was the first IDE that I used.

must...resist...using...one-eyed/king/blind...analogy.

However, I suspect that the real issue here is that ProjectBuilder/Xcode was specifically designed for Cocoa (and that is what I used it for). If you were doing something else that might explain the problem, but saying ProjectBuilder was "unusable" is absurd.

I don't think it has much to do with the language or API used, apart from Code Sense being half-working for Cocoa and pretty much non-working for everything else. It's rather things like that dependency analysis was handled in the main thread until Xcode 2.2 (before that, every small settings change or adding/removing/moving files in the project let you stare at 5 seconds of the spinning beach in complex projects) and before Xcode 2.1 or 2.0 (I don't remember exactly), it build every build style in the same location, so switching back and forth between release and debug builds cost you a recompile of the entire project (which could easily be a several hours before gcc4 and distributed builds). Further, it tries to filter only the meaningful parts out of gcc's output, but often it skips important parts, so sooner or later you're back to having gcc's full output open anyway. Let alone that it took them until 2.2 to finally add a checkbox for ld's -Y option, which before cost you time searching 'man gcc' and 'man ld' just to make the compiler tell you where these undefined symbols were referenced from anway. And these are just annoyances that I remember from the recent Xcode past, I remember ProjectBuilder being even worse, that's why I avoided using it when possible (and apparently, many commercial developers did so too).

[Metrogirl]

My 2 cents on Dreamweaver -

 

I started using it a long time ago in parallel with hand-written HTML produced with Arachnophilia. I liked the ease with which I could quickly lay tables out with Dreamweaver and the built-in javascript functions. But I preferred the split view and would always go back and trim out a lot of stuff it added which I didn't want.

 

Now I use Dreamweaver almost exclusively. It has some really nice features and although I accept it's not totally intuitive, once you take the time to learn its functionality it's not at all difficult. I still frequently go into the code view, not least because I like double and triple spacing between sentences and so I have to plug in lots of   by hand. Also some of the javascript is bloated and I can do a lot better myself. But compared to Golive, which I simply cannot get the hang of, it's great.

 

On my 1.2GHz Sony laptop (XPPro)Dreamweaver takes 17 seconds from click to fully ready. I know - I just timed it. That's with Photoshop open - and two browser windows, this one included, at the same time. I don't think that's unacceptably slow to load.

 

End of my 2 cents...

[dkelley]

ok, so now that adobe owns macromedia, another commenter above made a good point - will the macromedia suite take another year to go universal too?

 

i sure hope not!

 

and for the guy above who works with dreamweaver but is a musician too - kewl, same boat as me my friend! That's why I just bought the edirol fa-66 (which works great with osx86 as far as I can tell so far with almost no native software to try it with). Once adobe's entire family goes unibin I'm set - then I'll start spending money on logic pro 7.2 etc, but for now I have to go back to my sonar setup in my windows dual boot to do pro audio work. I want adobe audition unibin for mac now! I want logic 7.2 but don't want to have to pay for the "crossgrade"! rant rant rant

 

Man - now Adobe's even holding back my music job... can you believe these guys at Adobe? ;-)

 

cheers

[Haplo]

BTW my old site (which is no longer up) just used strategic text coloing/bg coloring and text alignment for the appearance. It was simple, but image free. I mean, for what I was doing images were simply more stuff I didn't need. Oh, well, now I have a javascript site with image flips and all of that good stuff. I really need to update that site, I never did finish it.

 

I can't call myself a 'professional webmaster' or any such thing, since I don't get paid for it, but I'm no newb either. I still prefer text over DW ;P. Although, I admit that DW does have some advantages for seeing your code in action, but you could make an editor to do that easily using webkit o.0. One thing I absolutely HATE about DW though, it tabs your code. Now, I know quite a bit about C/C++/Obj-C and java, and in a programming language, you have distinct blocks of nested code, which will tab a reasonable amount and makes it easier to read. However, HTML has ridiculous amounts of nesting, and since code doesn't come in distinct statements (x += 3; vs anything involving a table) if you tab HTML code it starts to look like you're drawing a zig zag across the page. For all intents and purposes, tabbing HTML is useless.

[UncleP]

Actually I did read the other posts and I still wanted to post my thoughts on it as well. How you get off saying my post is spam?

 

Adobe made that promise based on Apple's bogus release date. Again though I will take the side of Adobe and not waste a cent of capital to get something half baked out the door to please a low number of new intel mac owners and software pirates. There is going to be growing pains with this just like there was everytime Apple transitioned into a new architecture. Even more so now because they are going from RISC to CISC.

[Haplo]

Well, truly I wish that intel had moved to RISC long ago. The RISC architecture is far superior to x86 (and newer), however since intel tailors to windows, they stuck with x86. The fact that intel processors run so fast really has nothing to do with the general architecture, just that intel is really good at making chips (and rich enough to do what they feel like). Point in case, AMD processors are only about as fast as the PPC G5s (although not nearly as good and far more riddled with errors) in mhz speed at least, and those are x86.

 

That beside the point, might I point out that adobe's gloating had nothing to do with apple's release date. They said they would be 'one of the first companies, if not the first' to have unibin apps. Their competition is with other vendors, who have already made unibins while Adobe sits around. I agree that apple hasn't exactly made it a walk in the park since Jobs came back. I mean, first developers had to move from OS9 to OSX. For old applications it wasn't so hard since they had carbon, for newer applications it was extremely easy, however, since they gave us Objective-C.

 

The move to intel from PPC really isn't nearly a big of a deal as people are claiming, however. For people who have been lazy (ex adobe. If they have a whole team of people porting code to mac, then they have enough people to have made it full cocoa long ago) and kept supporting legacy OS9 (from about OSX 10.1 to 10.2 OS9 was still viable, although much less so in 10.2, but now OS9 is obsolete, even though carbon is just now being depreciated.) or were just too lazy to port their code (cough) it's now a bigger pain. For the majority of cocoa programmers, though, even commercial ones, the move is of minor impact at best. A program written within apple's guidelines, even using ALL of the new OS core services (Core Image, Audio, Data, vDSP, vImage), however not implementing altivec code manually (although the ability to do it via compiler option is pretty new, and one of my fav new features), sticking in PPC assembly, or anything like that, have NO work to do to have a fully working unibin. Although I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the transition specs, I don't remember a significant amount of things that a developer who actually did what apple said would have to do.

 

Now, if Adobe was keeping up Windows, OSX, linux, etc versions of Photoshop, then maybe I would cut them a little slack. But no, they're only keeping up two versions. If the devs of Blender3D can do it with a volunteer staff and support for 5 different operating systems over 3 different processor architectures, then why the hell can't Adobe?

[Kevlar]

Why would Adobe have anything ready for low-end mac and also don't forget that Apple was supposed to release these new Intel Macs in June 06 not January 06. Allot of software companies don't have product ready for UB. Quite frankly why would Adobe spend millions of dollars to push a product out for a low base number of new low end mac users. Are Intel Mac sales staggering? Nope they are not so sorry guys but you will probably not see a UB of Adobe products until Apple puts Intel into the pro-end macs. I think it is unjustified to be flamming Adobe for not having a product ready for the "Yugo" macs because they know most of them pirate it anyway. If you don't know what a Yugo is, look up a pos car of the late 80's. If anyone is to be flammed it should be Apple for sticking it to the developers of major software vedors and telling them June 06, then releasing in January. Come on think about it.

 

Peace

 

I completely agree with you, as I posted earlier in this thread.

 

The people that are "unhappy/mad" at Adobe for not having a UB out for the low end macs, the question to you is Do you even own an Intel Mac or just have a hackintosh? The second question is Would you even buy it or just pirate it?

 

Adobe UB will be available for the machines that matter, Intel Powermacs (my opinion).

[R. Bear Helms]

Oh, Adobe. There was this memo floating around last June – you may or may not have seen it, it didn’t get much press – about how this tiny computer company called Apple was going to switch their processor architecture. Not a big deal, I can understand how you could have missed it…

I don't know how I can read this without finding it more like the rantings of a troll than a valid lambasting of a company for not doing their job.

 

The assumption you make is that Adobe actually CARES about keeping up with Apple's hardware changes, or even cares if they sell any more Macintosh versions of their software in the future.

 

I can see a Mac-only software company working hard to keep up to date with the accelerated release of Intel Inside Macs, but Adobe and most all vendors who have plenty of products for PC users know which side of their toast the butter is on.

 

The message is clear, at least to me: "We don't care."

[fourthletter]

I'd say Apature has something to do with Adobe's decsion but probably the biggest (which noone seems to have mentioned) is the fact that Adobe and Macromedia are in the process of merging and id think alot of work on Adobe photoshop is being done to intergrate flash fully and any other macromedia technology worth saving , plus they have to decide Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Freehand ? Im sure the job of intergrating the best features of both will be fun and if they have 5 minutes build the few good parts of golive into Adobe Dreamweaver !

Not to be sniffed at i would have thought , they have to combine their product lines while still fully supporting all of the previous customers of both companies.I doubt they could just rush an intel native mac version with Vista onthe horizon but then will all graphic design companies be rushing to kit out with new Mactels ? probably not till

2007 anyway ;-)