www.nickhodge.com

Big mer­gers are the way of the IT industry. Small guys get big­ger, and yet are swal­lowed by the lar­ger fish. People make lots of money, and drive their Fer­raris around the twin coasts of the US. Then it goes around again.

Mer­gers of two com­pan­ies, such as Mac­ro­media and Adobe, from the out­side seem a “join­ing of likes”. A mar­riage made in heaven. The per­cep­tion that the com­pan­ies were very alike is external only.  I doubt since the acquis­i­tion that Adobe exec­ut­ives sleep bet­ter at night.

We are see­ing the internal cul­tural dif­fer­ence exposed extern­ally: the smart auntie Adobe of Pho­toshop, InDes­ign, Illustrator’s fame and friendly atti­tude being smashed by the boys-club, leather booted Mac­ro­media cow­boys.

This is prob­ably one major reason why I am no longer at Adobe. For­get­ting who your cus­tom­ers are has to be the first big strategy of big com­pan­ies aim­ing to be smal­ler. As a cus­tomer of Adobe, and with many friends who still work there — I would be saddened to see this strategy work­ing. [edit: I would be, not am]

I am at Microsoft as they recog­nise that for­get­ting your cus­tomer is a sin that must never be committed.

So, as an Adobe user (daily), share­holder: tone it down, talk to cus­tom­ers and don’t for­get cus­tomer base.

Are you are los­ing sleep because:

1. Elvis left the build­ing some 30 years ago in August 1977?
2. Myf War­hust thinks Elvis serves fish and chips some­where in Bendigo, Victoria?
3. Las Vegas MIX07 has been com­pletely booked out?

Don’t lose another minute of sleep!

The MIX exper­i­ence is being trans­por­ted and ReMIX’d at the Crown Prom­en­ade on 25-26^th June 2007.

Remix Aus­tralia will be the first of its kind from Microsoft bring­ing together Web Developers & Design­ers with our key spon­sors. It’s a jam packed two day exper­i­ence – a 48 hour conversation.

The event is only $140 per per­son, and all del­eg­ates will get, exper­i­ence and gen­er­ally, or whatever:

• A Microsoft Expres­sion Web
• New net­work­ing friend­ships without Twitter.com
• A choice of 20 ses­sions to check out from expert lead­ers & case studies
• Hear from Aus­tralian Industry & over­seas experts
• Time out at the Sand­box, espe­cially if you are not play­ing nice with the other kids
• A sight­ing of Elvis
• Action packed even­ing at Galactic Cir­cus on Monday even­ing. (you’ll find me on the Defender game)
• Par­ti­cip­ate in Meet­ing Point – pick the con­ver­sa­tions you want to hear and be part of, or just read the blogs and drool over the Flickrs and wish you were there in person
• Meet with Microsoft Part­ners to under­stand how they can facil­it­ate Web 2.0
• Dis­cover: Inter­net Alley; the enter­tain­ment lounge web jams.
• Go large and become world-famous with “The Geek Stor­ies”

I’ll be there, maybe with a ses­sion or two of my own. I’m think­ing about doing a demo of how I use Pho­toshop, Premiere and Vista with some other cool goodies.

More info as it comes to hand.

For the first time in 8 years, Adobe has a set of major product releases, and I’m not there   Well, I don’t count Acrobat 8 as major. ‘Spose I should. I hardly use it anymore.

As I use Pho­toshop and Premiere Pro in pro­duc­tion and anger daily (more than I ever did whilst work­ing for Adobe!), I feel it even more. The OnLoca­tion will save me another ratio of post-production (video->harddisk).

Get­ting this inter­net video thing down to a fine art.

Cool stuff.  I am buy­ing a Cre­at­ive Suite CS3 Mas­ter Col­lec­tion. Just want to keep up-to-date on my InDes­ign, since I was there from its pub­lic birth, through the troubled tod­dler­hood into teen­age years and now adulthood.

From a John Nack’s post, through to a Business2.0 story.

From what I can see (but obvi­ously not exper­i­ence until it ships!) prepress people mak­ing masks (deep etches in AU magazine speak) are going to drool at this feature.

The Pho­toshop engin­eer­ing team is going to have oper­at­ors fall at their feet as gods: just like the heal­ing brush.

Ship it!

I had com­pletely for­got­ten about the Munge His­tory of video pro­duc­tion.

In the early 1990s, when Adobe Premiere was a new thing, and Quick­time over­shad­owed any­thing Microsoft had until at least 1995 — we cre­ated this video.

Star­ring Uncle Mike, Uncle Paul, Uncle Peter (Peter Har­ris) and myself — the DOSBOX (ori­ginal Munge Car) and Mike’s pas­sion for wind­surf­ing inter­sec­ted my pas­sion for the New­ton PDA. We cre­ated this little advert­is­ment as an advert­ise­ment for Ran­dom Access Con­sult­ing; or the Munge Brothers.

OK, this a little cheeky. I never got the “pro­gram­ming in XML” thing of Cold­fu­sion. Give me PHP any­day. Photo from Barcampsydney

(Link thanks to John Dowdell) Bridging my old world to my new world, this doc­u­ment details the sup­port for cur­rent Adobe applic­a­tions with Microsoft Win­dows Vista. It is well worth a read, espe­cially as Adobe products: Flash Player and the Adobe Reader are very com­mon installs.

Sum­mary: no Acrobat 7 sup­port for Vista, only Acrobat 8: with an update expec­ted first half 2007 for full sup­port. There are known issues with Acrobat 8 on Vista. Sim­il­arly with Office 2007; the update will have sup­port. You can make PDFs dir­ectly from Office 2007 using the Save as PDF and XPS plu­gin.

For Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 2.3: (note that Cre­at­ive Suite Premium 2.0 with Acrobat Pro­fes­sional 7.0 is not a good com­bin­a­tion). For Mac­ro­media Stu­dio 8, the fol­low­ing seems to also apply.

we are not cur­rently aware of major issues that would adversely affect cus­tomer use of
Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 2.3 on Win­dows Vista.

In the doc­u­ment, it is worth not­ing the para­graphs in regards to the forth­com­ing, pre-announce status Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 3.0:

…Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 3 is being designed for and thor­oughly tested on 32-bit ver­sions of four edi­tions of Win­dows Vista—Home Premium, Busi­ness, Enter­prise, and Ultimate.

Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio (video products) seem to install OK, but Vista is not recom­men­ded as an OS. EncoreDVD is repor­ted to not work on Vista. Shame, as I was just about to pur­chase a Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio for some Microsoft video pro­jects. 

Altsys/Aldus/Adobe/Altsys/Macromedia/Adobe Free­hand? Oooh. Maybe not so good:

Adobe does not plan to update Mac­ro­media Free­Hand to install or run on Win­dows Vista

Do go have a read, and look at the sup­port for­ums: Vista in Adobe Sup­port For­ums.

As a Microsoft Vista and an Intel-based Mac­Book Pro user, this year is a key year for Adobe products.

Ran­dom ques­tion popped into my head whilst hav­ing a shower: does Adobe Mars, the new pro­ject to rep­res­ent PDF as a pack­aged XML format, sup­port PDF’s strong print/prepress heritage.

Things like CMYK, col­or­spaces, high-dpi images, Post­script fonts, trap­ping set­tings (overprint/knockout) and the Crop/Bleed boxes. All those high-tech print­ing things.

The short answer is yes.

(test­ing pro­cess: InDes­ign doc­u­ment, export as PDF 1.3, open in Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional, Save as “PDF in XML Format” using Mars plu­gins, re-open, check with Acrobat 8 Advanced>Print Pro­duc­tion tools. Open SVG as text)

Microsoft pre-released their XAML-in-the-browser tech­no­logy, WPF/e earlier this week. XAML inside.

XAML “smells” like the W3C’s Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics (SVG). DOM-inside-a-DOM, Declar­at­ive anim­a­tion, 2D graph­ics. XAML maybe not SVG, but it cer­tainly tips its hat to SVG.

Adobe today pre-released their XML-in-a-PDF tech­no­logy, Mars, for Acrobat 8. Essen­tially, Mars as a tech­no­logy is presently delivered as plu­gins for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional. You can save an exist­ing ‘bin­ary’ PDF out as a .mars file. These .mars files are like .jar or .war files: mani­fes­ted, struc­tured ZIP files. Look­ing inside a descrip­tion of a page, you have an SVG Tiny 1.2+ (as Adobe state, SVG/FSS0 rep­res­ent­a­tion. The spe­cific­a­tion clearly doc­u­ments that .mars takes the cur­rent concept of PDF, a doc­u­ment format, and extends this as XML.These tech­no­lo­gies do not dir­ectly inter­sect: an XML rep­res­ent­a­tion of SWF rather than PDF would be closer to XAML. Hav­ing cross-platform viewer sup­port for Microsoft’s XPS would be closer to PDF.

I was pre­ma­ture in say­ing SVG was deprec­ated.

Hav­ing presen­ted for Adobe over the past 8 years, I get a little touchy when someone attacks tech­nical presenters. It’s like being a part of a fra­tern­ity. Round up the wagons!

Demon­strat­ing soft­ware: the col­lec­tion of skillz are not taught by Toast­mas­ters. Nor most Present­a­tion Train­ers. It is a set of unique tech­niques, that are gen­er­ally nutured and passed on from mas­ter to trainee; gen­er­a­tion to generation.

You need to have your eye and ear on the audi­ence; the setup for the next joke is on your mind; you need to be “on mes­sage”, the soft­ware needs to be work­ing: and most import­antly, what you are show­ing is get­ting through. In these days of instant blog­ging, everything you say is pub­lic property.

So, Eric’s com­ments on the Acrobat 8 road­show in Can­berra are inter­est­ing. Mark, the Adobe presenter has respon­ded.

Some­times to com­mu­nic­ate a story, words and phrases are used that may be a little too com­bat­ive. Yeah, I’ve dissed non-Adobe soft­ware vendors in present­a­tions: usu­ally to sell a point or get an emo­tional response from an audi­ence. This style only works with medium sized audi­ences. My favour­ite was play­fully diss­ing Microsoft whilst present­ing at Microsoft.
Onto the Facts.

1. XML does NOT magic­ally equal a smal­ler file size; in fact the reverse is prob­ably true. In the case of PPT in PDF, the file size bene­fits of PDF accrue from image com­pres­sion (includ­ing gradients/blends and reused ele­ments). Other bene­fits are cross-platform pack­aging (espe­cially typefaces) and secur­ity (ensur­ing people can­not change the presentation)If you were send­ing a doc­u­ment to people expect­ing changes, PDF is not the answer.
2. Out­look PSTs suck in a cross-platform world. And let’s face it; in the future no mat­ter what plat­form you are on, everything is a leg­acy platform.I have 6.5Gb of email locked up in PST files con­tain­ing 6+ years of email his­tory. Search­ing these involves launch­ing Out­look, load­ing the PST and doing a slow search. Thank good­ness for Google Desktop search if you are a Win­dows per­son. You’re stuffed if you spend most of your time out­side the mono-culture. Put­ting emails into a stand­ard pub­lished and open file format, say PDF/A, for future ref­er­ence is some­thing many people care about.
3. Mark covered this Fact in his blog. There is a law of entropy work­ing here. Once data is squeezed out in PDF, get­ting back a fully work­ing, semantic­ally rich doc­u­ment is going to be dif­fi­cult. In the case of Office applic­a­tions, PDF is not an edit­able exchange format. The get­ting data back out of a PDF is best a util­ity; and included in Acrobat 6, 7 and 8.
4. Launch Acrobat 6 and compare/contrast the Acrobat 7 and 8 launch times; even the Reader. There is a world of dif­fer­ence even without Win­dows cach­ing the applic­a­tion in RAM (some­thing you can turn off with a few Registry entries on Win­dows). Adobe has dra­mat­ic­ally improved the launch time from a woe­ful Acrobat 6 (launch times sucked)

I didn’t attend the Can­berra launch; only the morn­ing ses­sion of the Sydney Acrobat 8 launch. Split­ting the group into two “halves” is a recog­ni­tion that Acrobat has two large audi­ences: one cre­at­ive and the other stand­ard office style users. Can­berra has always been a tough demo­graphic to get right audience-wise for Adobe. I agree with Eric: 20 people is not good: the whole tone of the present­a­tion changes with less than 50 people.

Also, in the mod­ern highly con­nec­ted world — it is my opin­ion that “Launch” style present­a­tions with too much sales hype are a thing of the past. People need con­tent, and lots of it. Con­ver­sa­tions such as blog­ging post con­fer­ence are excel­lent mech­an­isms of mak­ing the con­tent more relevant.