Comments on: Does Adobe hate the Mac?

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:52:32 +0000

Some very astute comments here. I work at Adobe. The fact is there is a special affection for Apple, but Jobs has been a dick. And in reality there are 3 forces, MS, Apple, and Adobe vying for the future of computing. MS and Apple both have OS platforms (agendas) they are pushing. Adobe is trying it’s best to be middle of the road when the vast majority of the industry is just happy to suck Bill Gate’s dick exclusively (Intuit ring a bell?) Give Adobe a break. We live in a capitalist culture and Adobe needs to eat. What other company with their portfolio (Adobe plus Macromedia) would give Apple the time of day much less treat them as equal to MS in spite of Job’s egomania? No Flash on the iPhone, fine.. welcome to Silverlight everywhere, all the time. It’s coming.

By: Justin L

Justin L — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:28:58 +0000

microsoft’s .NET is specifically designed to support multiple languages and concepts, to be as cross-compatible as possible (it’s even designed to work with unix paths). it’s based on multiple standards by the ISO and Ecma. microsoft has agreed in writing not to sue the mono project (the major open source rewrite of .NET) for reimplementing .NET. microsoft has incredibly thorough documentation and samples of the entire framework available for free online with no signup/login.

microsoft’s upgrade policy for .NET is that with each new version of the framework, previous versions are included, being maintained on their original source code, so that older .NET programs will continue to work exactly the way they always did, and you can always continue to develop for an older version of the framework.

also, in terms of the toolkit, .NET allows first-class access to the legacy windows API, .NET still has its original GUI toolkit (windows forms) fully supported, and it also has the new WPF which is infinitely more advanced than cocoa. everything on .NET is inherently cross-platform and cross-language, where one .NET binary works on all archs, without having to contain individual builds for each supported arch, and where there are no second class languages. you can define a .NET class in managed C++, extend it in VB, extend it again in haskell, and instantiate it in C#.

.NET’s pluralist approach is the diametric opposite of apple’s proprietary, platform-bound, one-size-fits-all way of thinking.

as usual, apple fans who claim to be artists and innovative free thinkers are forced to defend their corporate master’s decision to eliminate choices and impose the “one true” design on its obedient masses of silenced would-be artists.

blue and grey are nice, but my favorite color is orange, apple.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:38:31 +0000

@tim: Yes the UK prices are a shocker aren’t they. We don’t get it quite so bad here in Aus (though still not as cheap as the US). It’s always been this way with Adobe I believe.

By: tim

tim — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:36:23 +0000

Very good article and I agree with pretty much all of it. Anyone who uses Macs more than Windows is going to hate the new UI. It looks really shocking and not at all good for workflow.

On a separate note I hate the way we (UK customers) get fleeced on the prices. If you go get the complete suite is about $1500 more. I look at Apple and see FCS 2 for the bargain price of £850 and can’t help but feel some slight hatred toward Adobe.

By: Adam Pescupa

Adam Pescupa — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:22:10 +0000

I don’t think Adobe hates they Mac, they just pander to Windows users due to the significantly higher bottom line. What I do know is that more and more Mac users are beginning to hate Adobe. I’m definitely getting there myself. After wrestling with all sorts of headache inducing BS on both ends of Adobe’s Mac toy store (Designer & Developer), my employer has been diligently weeding out every Adobe solution possible for some time now. It’s the same reason I hope Apple keeps Adobe’s half-assed Mac Flash Player off of the iPhone.

By: Darren

Darren — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:13:51 +0000

I, for one, will not be upgrading to CS4 apps if there is no option to use the traditional interface. I tried using the single-screen idea with fireworks CS4 and it was a disaster. I have a 1920px wide monitor and i make lots of 100 pixel wide banner ads and such. The single window idea makes no sense when one is generating small web graphics.

By: Former PSE Fan

Former PSE Fan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:40:08 +0000

@Peter: There’s a fair amount of software that Adobe makes that is not available on a Mac. Plus, there’s got to be a lot of sales to the Windows behemoth with Flash (ads), InDesign, and Dreamweaver.

@All: Apple really did pull the rug out from under Adobe with Carbon64. I’m sure it was a purely political move to try and lock people into Mac coding just as Microsoft has tried. It also has the HUGE benefit of keeping the apps that run the OS in sync with the OS. Changes to the OS objects automatically are reflected inside the App.

As for the UI, I do Wincrap at work (power user) and Mac at home. I have to make the change at the OS level already. I DO NOT want to have to do a THIRD UI!!! I’m already locked into the UI I’m using and do NOT want to have to shift within that OS. Gack!

Also, presumably Adobe can use some brains and do the Model View Controller dev methodology properly and set the View up to run platform specific and the model platform agnostic. I would think the controller could be divided to support the View and Model appropriately (or more accurately, the view has all the code needed to run itself and the controller has the rest of the code needed to run against the model anywhere. I write database apps so my knowledge of coding native apps is skin deep.

I totally agree about the bug fixes. So many of the fixes wait for the new version. I’m also a PSE user (v3) and reeeeeeeeally don’t want to upgrade to 6, but there’s no other place to find these features. (Enlighten me if so).

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:50:22 +0000

Many thanks for all your insightful comments. So it sounds like Apple might have jumped the gun forcing 64-bit apps to use Cocoa, but maybe Cocoa will be a good thing for Adobe Mac apps in the long run!

@jbelkin – that’s a very interesting piece on the future of Flash. Thanks for posting it.

By: wtfk

wtfk — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:20:35 +0000

Yup. I bought Photoshop Elements 6 because I needed it for compatibility with Leopard–or so I thought. The interface is an effing abomination! It takes over your whole screen, and you can’t even hide it easily because cmd-h doesn’t work the same way it does in every other application. You can’t cmd-option-click on the desktop to make it go away, because they’ve done away with your desktop!

I’m seriously pissed, and you can color me “looking for a replacement for Photoshop Elements.”

By: Roger

Roger — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:10:57 +0000

To me it seems Adobe is now run by marketing folk that do wish they only had to write for one platform. I am sure many of the folk writing Adobe apps do like the Mac, but they don’t run the company. Adobe does a great job with Photoshop and OK with InDesign while turning many of there applications in to bloated crap. They hardly ever fix the bugs in their applications. At one time they hardly ever had bugs. There is a company that needs to pause and clean up their applications as Apple is suppose to be doing.