Adobe Office: Something I'd want to try.

Remember a few months ago when everyone was going bananas about how we were going to rival MicrosoftWord or something, and we flatly denied it? And then we bought Virtual Ubiquity, creators of Buzzword, a Flash-based -- you guessed it -- Microsoft Word alternative?

Now some guy with crappy Photoshop skills thinks he's found out our master plan. "Adobe Office" will be built with Flash and Flex, will run on AIR, and will have an online version to boot.

I must admit, it's a pretty good plan. I bet it would be great for AIR 1.0 adoption. Hmm. Maybe we'll start working on it... maybe we won't.

Oh and by the way, Leopard people; a compatibility update for Lightroom CS3 will be pushed mid-November. We're working on it.

Here's the deal with Leopard

Since, you know, 2 million people have already bought the operating system in like 5 days, we thought it to be a great idea to give you an update on Adobe software's Leopard compatibility.

All Adobe software should work perfectly fine out of the box with the exception of Premiere Pro CS3, Encore CS3, After Effects CS3 Professional, and Soundbooth CS3. We're working on updates that we'll be sending as fast as we can.

Also, it's worth noting that older versions of Adobe and Macromedia software in CS3 won't be updated for Leopard. They may work, but we unfortunately can't actively support them.

Oh, and CNNMoney published a nice article on how our AIR platform "changes the game in applications." We know :-)

Adobe: Empowering the Future Generation

You know, I get a lot of email and regular mail complaining about Adobe's "high" prices for software. And I understand. Basically. So, every once in a while I'll have someone complain about how we're not helping the next generation learn this stuff due to our prices.

You know, over the past few days, I've taken a look at that area. And you know what? You people who have told me this are 100% correct. So Adobe took a major step about a week ago (sorry for the late entry) in announcing that it is preparing to give Flex Builder (the SDK of which, Flex, is open source) away to students and faculty. All they have to do is prove who they are with the general yada yada.

If you're wondering why we didn't pick Photoshop or Dreamweaver, here's why. Adobe is betting its future on rich Internet applications and AIR, which we encourage are built in Flex rather than in Flash (though Flex is just merely a branch of the Flash overall platform). If we're going after the future generation, why not give them the future tools?

Oh, and also, this gives us an edge over Microsoft. Like they'd ever give anything away. You know kids -- "Oooh! Adobe gave us expensive software for free! We love you Adobe! We don't want Adobe to go away, so we don't like Microsoft." Maybe a bit too deep, but the idea is there at least.

According to this InfoWorld story, it'll be on our website next month (which is, like, two days away).

Silverlight Slower than Flash Running WinForms?

So, Silverlight is Microsoft's whole competitor to Flash... and it's all .NET and everything... so how come WinForms works slower on Silverlight than on Flash?

I think it even looks a little bit better in Flash, though that may just be because of the size difference between the two examples.

Adobe's policy is to keep Windows off of Flash, because that would give Flash a bad reputation -- not like Windows Vista is a memory hog or everything. It seems like Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect) and I will have to sit down about this policy. Windows technology is making the move to Flash and is running more smoothly and with a smaller footprint than on similar (yet admittedly obsolete) Microsoft technology.

Just another example of how great the Flash platform is. Flash can make Windows run better than it's supposed to.

Google uses Flex for version of SearchMash

Adobe has always liked Google. I've always used Google. I think we used to package some Google Toolbar thing inside Reader because Google offered us too much money to deny. Adobe Reader is in the Google Pack of software.

And Google is now showing more love to Adobe. They've always used Flash for Google Finance's charts, but have you seen the Flash version of SearchMash, Google's experimental search engine?

Actually, they created it in Flex, which is really exciting for us to see. It runs smoothly, it runs well, and it's not too resource intensive.

The search results are really accurate as well. I bet it didn't take Google long to make it.

Good morning.

I'm Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, Inc., creator of standards in the world.

PDF? Ours. Flash? Ours. Photoshop? Ours. Dreamweaver? Ours. The term 'rich Internet application' or RIA? We created it.

And I haven't even gotten started.

At Adobe, we're building up our warchest to take on Microsoft because, honestly, we hate them. They tried to squash us like 20 years ago. Our stock collapsed. Then the whole anti-trust stuff started. We bounced back up. They failed. We want revenge. Silverlight? I've made it clear that we at Adobe think Silverlight is just an imitator of what Flash used to be.

And it's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even like Silverlight. You know, the website for Halo 3 runs Flash? Didn't they make a big deal about how it runs Silverlight? Well, there is a Halo 3 website running on Silverlight. It's so hidden, I could barely find it! You have to go to the Silverlight.net Showcase, find the little Halo 3 icon towards the bottom, click on it, and then click on the View Now button. (by the way, the box that pops up and blurs the screen behind it? totally a copy of our Flex/Flash alert box)

Now, I must get back to Buzzword. Shantanu and I are collaboratively working with some of our engineers on our OS X Leopard FAQ. Apparently some people are upset because our products don't work on Leopard. It's not our fault that Apple doesn't like us because we compete with Final Cut with Premiere!