
Dear Adobe - jasonlbaptiste
http://blog.cloudomatic.com/saas-industry-news/dear-adobe/
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evo_9
Dear Adobe... stop making shoddy software and then charging an arm and a leg
for it. Pixelmator FTW.

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frou_dh
I bought Pixelmator when it was released. It had a lot of issues in the early
days and IIRC their interaction with the community was so poor that people
repeatedly questioned whether it had been abandoned.

Fast forward to now and they're regularly putting out solid updates with good
communication via the blog. I recommend the application.

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boredguy8
That little menu bar thing hanging out in the middle of my text as I scroll
down is really annoying. I lose too much real estate to menu bars / title bars
/ tabs already. Don't add a floating menu bar 20 pixels below that.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I know. We need to change the blog look+feel. It seemed like a cool look/feel
at first, but it's actually pretty annoying.

~~~
boredguy8
This is (part of) why I love HN.

Loved your "some gaps to fill" article, btw.

I still think the underlying limit, though, is the lack of a federated
identity management system. Certainly oAuth is a huge step in the right
direction, and avoids many of the problems of OpenID. But fundamentally,
desktop applications are "single sign on".

Imagine if you had to log in again to open office productivity software, then
log in again to open a web browser, then log in a third time to launch your
music player, and once more to balance your checkbook.

Clearly SOME people are willing to do some degree of multiple sign-on (Logging
in to gmail, then Pandora, and again to open Mint, for instance.) But until
these context transitions are much smoother, there will continue to be blocks
in adoption even if everything else you address is fixed.

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jasonlbaptiste
thank you :). I feel like Apple may release some HTML5 tools with xcode at
WWDC after re-reading steve's letter. It might end up filling some of the
gaps.

Identity is a huge problem. Not only for authentication, but for de-
authentication as well. What if you fire someone and want to delete all their
accounts you have for them on your SaaS apps? You have to deactivate each
account manually: (basecamp, salesforce, wufoo, dropbox, and probably 5
others).

<http://www.onelogin.com/> is doing something interesting in this space.

~~~
boredguy8
Thanks for that linkup!

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andreshb
How great would it be if I could "Save As> HTML5" from adobe's products?
Bummer authorinng for the iPhone will no longer be an option, but why build
native apps when you will be able to do most of it on the web?

~~~
JarekS
Adobe could buy PhoneGap and integrate their developer tools in the way that
you can create HTML5 apps and "package" them to run as native ones on any
smartphone (iPhone OS, Andorid, WebOS etc.).

~~~
andreshb
Wow just checked out phonegap <http://www.phonegap.com/> looks pretty cool.
Apps/Frameworks like this will help mobile web apps explode. Also, an easy
solution to port existing web apps and make them optimized for mobile.

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elblanco
Absolutely, 100%, spot on. Adobe, please turn your attention to making great
HTML5 authoring tools.

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Luyt
Does this page do some funky interpretation of the arrow keys? As soon as I
press Cursor Down to advance, the page scrolls down all the way in an
uncontrollable, completely non-standard manner, and not what I expect. It
makes the site unusable.

~~~
bkudria
Works fine for me - Chrome on Linux.

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heyrhett
Nobody pays for the flash player, but maybe adobe makes a few dollars off it's
$4500 Flash Media Server licenses?

I'm sure Adobe is cool with killing that income stream since you wrote them
this nice letter though.

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jasonlbaptiste
I've been trying to find stats on how much adobe makes off the flash media
server product. Not sure on the long term viability of FMS anyway due to the
adoption of HTML5 video.

~~~
heyrhett
Yeah, if it's not in their quarterly reports, it's probably secret. I know
youtube uses a "pseudostreaming" trick, so they don't have to pay for FMS, and
now there is also the Wowza alternative, which is cheaper.

I honestly think that adobe flash video will be pervasive much longer than you
might think. Do you know how to send a live video stream in HTML5, in case you
wanted to make the HTML5 analog of chatroulette? Neither does anyone else.

You won't see justin.tv switching from flash any time soon.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
It will take a while for it to completely go away. It may never fully go away.

Livestreaming is certainly one of those use cases that will be using flash for
a while. It's beyond my area of expertise, but I think someone mentioned
websockets in HTML5 might make it doable. That right there is a really big
potential idea. Would love to see it built.

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ergo98
Your entry adds nothing new, however given that you bring it up, I have to
remark on how shocking it is that seemingly intelligent people can rationalize
such intense hypocrisy.

If Flash is a no go because of HTML5, why does the iPhone app market exist?

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jasonlbaptiste
This is more about a debate for the web, rather than the iPhone app market.
Adobe makes tools that empower web developers. To really empower the next
generation of web apps, they should focus on HTML5 rather than flash. As far
as the iPhone goes: Things like appcelerator have been ok'd by apple. If Adobe
bought a company like them and used that as an easier way to produce iPhone
apps through CS6(?) it would be fine.

~~~
ergo98
>This is more about a debate for the web

That's a cheap, unsupported distraction.

The no-Flash in the browser on the iPhone/iPad/whatever is entirely and
absolutely Apple's choice, and no one can make that choice for them. They can
argue benefits/detriments, but no one can make Apple pollute their platform
against their will.

That is debate number 1.

The debate now has NOTHING to do with the web (and it's honestly quite
ludicrous to claim that it does), but instead is Apple deciding to rewrite the
rules of the app market just to exclude certain manners of developing
software.

Using the web to blanket that argument as well is, quite honestly, offensive
propaganda.

If Steve said "We're implementing new quality rules to ascertain the quality
of apps by a panel of testers, and we're demanding that all apps use features
{X} {Y} and {Z}", that would be one thing. That isn't what they did. Instead
they said "Due to the fact that a lot of very gullible, very silly people will
accept out ridiculously inaccurate correlation, we're blanket eliminating a
broad realm of technology choices just to thwart a competitor".

Unless you work for Apple you should not be embracing that. It is a grievous
offense to intelligence.

