Adobe's been doing a fair amount of squawking over Apple's disinterest in sending Adobe large cheques to license Flash technology. Some commentators have pointed out that Flash may become unnecessary once HTML 5 is pervasive. I myself don't understand the point to Flash, because its content cannot be searched.
Even as Adobe's official bloggers and execs talk against Apple, Adobe itself ignores an important piece of technology in its own products, OLE. That's right: none of its software packages support object linking and embedding anymore, something that even Windows v3.1 supports.
Here's a practical example of how OLE is useful: In most of the 120 books and ebooks I've written, I annotate images (screen grabs) with Visio, like the image shown below.
I make the screen grab, and then add the text and lines in Visio. The entire image is pasted into the (now obsolete) PageMaker as an OLE object. This provides me with three advantages:
1. Visio's text and lines are vectors, meaning they display and print at top quality.
2. The images are edited quickly easily: I double-click it, and Visio launches and opens the image automatically in about 2 seconds.
3. The images are reusable as templates: when I need to annotate another image, I copy and paste an existing one, and then quickly change the screengrab and annotation.
Adobe's CS line of software does not support OLE. Instead, images from Visio are pasted as bitmaps -- lower resolution, uneditable, and non-template-able.
I am not looking forward to the reduction in efficiency this year as one of my book publishers requires me to switch from the OLE-friendly PageMaker 7 to the OLE-ignorant InDesign CS4. (I'll stay in PageMaker for my ebooks.)
In the meantime, Adobe can stop squawking about what others aren't doing.
Even as Adobe's official bloggers and execs talk against Apple, Adobe itself ignores an important piece of technology in its own products, OLE. That's right: none of its software packages support object linking and embedding anymore, something that even Windows v3.1 supports.
Here's a practical example of how OLE is useful: In most of the 120 books and ebooks I've written, I annotate images (screen grabs) with Visio, like the image shown below.
I make the screen grab, and then add the text and lines in Visio. The entire image is pasted into the (now obsolete) PageMaker as an OLE object. This provides me with three advantages:
1. Visio's text and lines are vectors, meaning they display and print at top quality.
2. The images are edited quickly easily: I double-click it, and Visio launches and opens the image automatically in about 2 seconds.
3. The images are reusable as templates: when I need to annotate another image, I copy and paste an existing one, and then quickly change the screengrab and annotation.
Adobe's CS line of software does not support OLE. Instead, images from Visio are pasted as bitmaps -- lower resolution, uneditable, and non-template-able.
I am not looking forward to the reduction in efficiency this year as one of my book publishers requires me to switch from the OLE-friendly PageMaker 7 to the OLE-ignorant InDesign CS4. (I'll stay in PageMaker for my ebooks.)
In the meantime, Adobe can stop squawking about what others aren't doing.
Not to be a fly in your pot, but OLE absolutely sux in my view. It is an unstable POS that MS never really ever figured out. Besides that, have you seen the full functions of InDesign?
Posted by: fcsuper | Feb 21, 2010 at 12:11 AM
OLE may suck, and Flash may suck, but for the purposes of this argument it doesn't matter. They are both pervasive standards right now and they both need supporting properly.
Adobe and Apple both need to put their corporate egos in a basket and get on with simply providing the tools their customers need. There are other corporations to which this applies, but Adobe and Apple are the ones mentioned in this post so I'll stick to them for now.
Posted by: Steve Johnson | Feb 21, 2010 at 10:41 PM