Interesting Stuff – O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog

Interesting Stuff – O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog:

Are Adobe and Apple at War? [InvBizNews] The article suggests that ex-Adobe Lightroom engineers built Aperture for Apple. Let’s hope that the two companies find peace. We need CS3.

Do we? Do we really?

How many people really need Creative Suite (at $700) on their macs? How many of those people will basically never open any app except photoshop? And how many of those people running photoshop really need Photoshop these days, anyway, instead of Photoshop elements?

Where is the benefit to the USER in creative suite? And let’s not forget that Adobe “neglected” to announce Photoshop Elements 4.0 for the Mac, until enough users called them up and screamed that they sort of remembered and issued one. I notice that Elements 5.0 is simply missing completely… again.

No, what adobe’s done is create a situation where 90% of the people who could use a $100 product — are going to spend $300 on an upgrade and consider it a bargain because they get a lot of stuff they won’t use and don’t need, but heck, it’s a great bargain for the entire suite. And they’re going to do it so late to the game that both Quark and Microsoft will go universal first.

Honestly, what 90-95% of the Adobe Macintosh customers need are a good, solid program like Photoshop Elements. Something called, maybe, iPixel. A few more could really use a vector tool like Illustrator, something called say, iVector. If they were written in Cocoa JUST for the Mac and taking advantage of all of the functionality in OS X, you could build a tool that’d blow away Photoshop.

Unless you spend time in CMYK mode, there’s a really good chance today that you don’t NEED Photoshop, much less the suite; most of the rest all you need is Elements.

I think the market is ripe for these tools; Adobe’s code is huge, bloated and slow, and their disdain for the Mac market is more than evident. Don’t believe it? go ask them when Photoshop Elements 5 will ship.

The reality is — we don’t NEED CS3. A small percentage of the graphic geeks do; you folks know who you are, and I’m not pretending you don’t exist. But most of us — the vast part of Adobe’s market, is spending most of their time doing fairly simple web work and photo retouching, and that Adobe has convinced people and manipulated their product line to convince folks to pony up a few hundred bucks for an upgrade (and think of it as a GOOD thing) is crazy.

What we need is someone to realize this market is ripe for picking. What we need is someone to do the “final cut” of vector and pixel graphics. Photoshop’s been the only player for a long time, long enough that both Adobe and its customers have sort of forgotten that there’s really no need (especially today, especially on the Mac) that it HAS to be, much less it having to be as part of a $700 suite to run on your $400 mac mini….

(and the only reasons I’m not doing this are simple: one, I’m not currently a cocoa programmer, but if I decide to become one, trust me, this is my project; and second, I’d hate to build a tool to go up against Adobe only to find out that iPixel is steve’s January surprise for Leopard — and if Steve finally is sick and tired of trying to cajole Adobe to play fair on the Mac side, I think he just might… It’s been a long time since Adobe was Apple’s friends, mutual protestations notwithstanding. And when was the last release of photoshop something that brought you features you wanted and needed, instead of just a bill for an upgrade and a quick dot release to fix bugs? Adobe’s ripe for some small, smart player to step in and eat their market out from under them, and has been for a while.)

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