So first day at the new job. No computer for most of the day. Bit of a problem in my line of work.
Anyway the day was enlivened by the news that Adobe has bought Macromedia. I’m very glad it was that way round because of the two I much prefer Adobe - I prefer the user interface on their software and they have a web site that actually works. But what does this merger mean?
For developers and designers it means that sooner or later some of the tools they use will be dropped. The clear favourite to be shown the door is Freehand which simply doesn’t have anywhere near the market share of Illustrater. But how will Fireworks and Image Ready be handled? Fireworks is far more popular than Image Ready but Image Ready is fully integrated with Photoshop which is much more popular, and does a lot more, than Fireworks. GoLive and Dreamweaver is another interesting match up. A product that combines the best of both would be ideal. But at the end of the day I’m not sure this merger will make a huge difference to developers.
For users there’s a potential nightmare on the horizon. Can you imagine a Flash movie embedded in an Acrobat document, or vice versa? The two most widely used (and abused) proprietary formats on the web are now controlled by the same company. Let’s see what happens.
Better news is that Opera 8 is officially released tomorrow.
