Media coverage of the “War between Apple and Adobe” is good for lots of page views on news and blog sites, but most of the coverage is about who is going to “win”. It seams the combination of the media’s attention to everything Apple along with Adobe attempts to wage a publicity war is producing lots of traffic bringing out the fan boys on all sides (Apple, FLash, along strangely enough with fanboys from Microsoft, Android and Open Source).
There are a few good examples of people actually trying to figure out the facts and what it all means like these:
Reading Between the iPhone OS 4.0 Lines – daringfireball.net/2010/04/reading_between_the_iphone_os_4_lines
All week long I was reading the volleys on the web about the “effects” of the new iPhone OS4 SDK developer agreement, the impact of no flash on Apple’s iPad or Adobe’s success and the whimpering cries from the Android developer fan boys, while at the same time I have been working on a major project for a new client website- using Adobe tools for the job (CS4 testing across Safari, Firefox and Chrome on both the Mac and Windows along with IE ). This project required me to work more intensely with the Adobe CS4 than I have have in the past. I have used Adobe products since they came out – and in most instances from before they were Adobe products, but it has been many years since I was this directly doing the work instead of overseeing a team, so I had to get my hands dirty and actually delve into the depths of CS4.
The project calls for what should be easy today a database driven site requiring:
- CSS based Web layout
- Simple Motion Graphics
- Instructional Videos
Other than Photoshop all the Adobe CS4 products I worked with did a very poor job and proved to be unreliable.
The documentation (or should I say lack there of) is something Adobe should be ashamed of. They expect a customer to pay more than a thousand dollars for a product that has no documentation??? The online help is poorly indexed and when you search for answers you come up with mostly out of date references to older versions of Creative Suite that are not every useful. I am sure Adobe would be happy to sell me support and lessons, that is not what I am looking for. In almost every case it was easier and better to simply search for off the shelf PHP, Javascript or HTML/CSS solutions than use Adobe’ solution.
In every case it turned out simpler to use not Adobe supplied solutions where you Google what you are trying to do, quickly find a solution, copy and quickly edit it to your needs. The Adobe solution if you could find one was spend hours searching for Dreamweaver help and end up with a proprietary solution that is clunky and harder to produce and maintain. Examples of this are:
Inserting RSS feeds into a webpage – something that is simple in iWeb, or even in WordPress is a major project in Dreamweaver!
Adobe needs to get back to their knitting and make their software work.