Adobe Blogs

Fantastic stuff! Truly novel reading experience. The biggest challenge for you to build tools around this. Expecting writers to know basic web development is a huge ask. You need a tool like Adobe Indesign [1] or Amazon's Kindle book publishing tools[2]. The second challenge is to go cross platform/device. The biggest challenge here, to reduce the size of the entire artifact book and not just rendering speed/quality. [1]http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/publishing-for-everyone/ [2] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A3IWA2TQYMZ5J6

Famous riposte by John Nack of Adobe: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_the_psd_forma… One quote worth picking out: "Wouldn’t it be better if all apps could read/write just one common interchange format? That’s just what Adobe is developing with FXG." Come 2015, and FXG appears to be dead and buried.

Loved the car engine one too! His interview [1] has details on tools and processes used. [1]: http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/animagraffs-education-animated-by…

This Adobe post has an excellent summary of browser render paths for animation: http://blogs.adobe.com/webplatform/2014/03/18/css-animations-and-trans…

One of the biggest lessons that any Adobe developer will tell you is "we're proud of the code and that it hasn't needed a rewrite - but if we were doing it from scratch we'd do it way different." A great read on that conversation is http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_the_psd_forma… But I doubt anything insightful will come out of this leak along the same veins as we leaned when HL2 leaked.

Here's a good comparison (and vote) of programming fonts: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming-fonts Most popular: Source Code Pro http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html Monaco, my favorite, comes at #3.

Source Sans Pro is another great open source font, and it's by Adobe. http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html

4 things to consider: - Goals of a test­ing program - Scale - Inte­gra­tion with best-in-class dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools - Enter­prise expe­ri­ence and support http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/how-to-identif…

It's remarkable to me that people seem to think that Adobe Photoshop is an amazing product. I'm sure that the engineers working on it are great, but the infamous rant against PSD (responded to here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_the_psd_forma… underlines the fact that Adobe isn't exactly a shining beacon of software engineering, and the user-facing problems are indicative of what is probably a large, underlying code complexity issue. If the document format evolves "organically", what does that say about the code that reads the document? Just think--how would you like it if JSON were "organic"? Structured code is good, organic not so much.

And I'm sure hoping we succeed! They recently pulled the plug on Adobe Air Linux support ( http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2011/06/focusing-on-the-next-linux-client.… ), which only makes them look worse in the eyes of devs like me. I don't care if the year of the Linux desktop never comes - you just don't pull the plug one something like that. Adobe is becoming incredibly irrelevant to the consumer, while still strong to the content producer market - which I want to know nothing about anyway. So, all the best :)

There is an interesting comment: "Looks like the new policy would allow to have VM included in the app itself. Why not focus instead on the VM instead of this as3 to native code conversion (sure the innovation in one can already help the other but still it’s the VM which since in need of a bit more love)." [1] Now that Apple allows interpreters (as long as they run code packaged embedded in the app), I wonder if this approach would be easier for Adobe to maintain than the AS3-to-assembly compilation they do now. Arbitrary SWFs could be paired as data with a standard interpreter app. EDIT: I suppose this would make the packager a lot more like AIR for Android( http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/). [1]: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/09/great-news-for-developers…

-vs. Flash which is closed. Flash Player is not completely open sourced, because of H264( the patent pool of which, Apple is part of). Adobe pays the licensing fee for using H264 . Adobe has released enough code and specification to let anyone build a flash playing software. Completely open sourcing Flash Player wont be possible unless H264 is open and patent free. So if Apple really wants, they can build their own Flash Player without Adobe's approval. src: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html

What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264) and therefore have to protect those interests within their player. If there were a common open standard for video/audio, this would be a possibility. (edit) http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html

Would content-aware fill be enough? http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html That's so amazing my brain won't stop screaming "FAKE!". :)

The blog is at http://blogs.adobe.com and called "Open at Adobe". The person writing it is Director of Open Source and Standards (OSS) at Adobe, its an official comment.

Parts are (Tamarin, frameworks, Open Screen Project partnerships), but parts cannot (codecs licensed from third-parties are a key blocker). Dave McAllister has a single-screen summary, and I've got some background history, both with plenty of links: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_format.html

PhotoShop may be the oldest program running on your computer now. The fact that there's even a modicum of commonality in the UI is amazing. While I agree that there's a lot of room for improvement, anyone working who's ever touched legacy code can see that there's more to this issue. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_psd.html

Here's the paper. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1276377.1276390 Also got some coverage on an Adobe blog which makes me think they want to duplicate this functionality as soon as possible. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/08/holy_crapworthy.html

I haven't used AE myself, but I use many of the other Adobe products and I know that many (perhaps all or close to all) of them have scripting support, so I decided to do a quick Google search for AE scripting guides. A couple of results came up, one is an official PDF about scripting AE CS6, the other a website about AE scripting. I assume most of the stuff from the AE CS6 PDF applies to AE CC as well. https://blogs.adobe.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/48/files/2012/06/After-Ef… https://docs.aenhancers.com From the PDF: > When you use Adobe After Effects, you create projects, compositions, and render queue items along with all of the elements that they contain: footage, images, solids, layers, masks, effects, and properties. Each of these items, in scripting terms, is an object. This guide describes the ExtendScript objects that have been defined for After Effects projects. I think it might be worthwhile to look into whether scripting might be used in order to randomize effects and effect parameters. My immediate guess would be that yes it would be possible. I didn't look into it closely, and if it turns out to be a dead end then I apologise for that but anyways I figured I might mention this in case it might be useful to you. Also, of course since I didn't look into it closely I can not make any guesses as to how much work it would take to get the type of functionality that you want.

"CVE counting" is not necessarily a good proxy for "security". The practice of drawing conclusions from various CVE statistics has been variously debunked over the years. I strongly recommend reading this 6-year old(!) resource from @lcamtuf: https://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-and-pie-c… My own personal favorite anecdotes of why CVE counting is fail: 1) Adobe used to tour around presenting a chart of how their CVEs were decreasing over time. But then @taviso did a bit of simple fuzzing and found almost 100 issues. So it turns out the Adobe CVE count was low simply because no-one was looking hard. In fact, Adobe assigned a single CVE to all the issues, in this waffling blog post: http://blogs.adobe.com/security/2011/08/how-did-you-get-to-that-number… 2) Google Chrome has lots of CVEs because of the monetary incentives to go and find and report them. A quick comparison of CVEs for Chrome vs. some browser without a decent rewards program might lead you to incorrect conclusions. 3) Historically, Microsoft did not publicly disclosure or assign CVEs for issues found internally by employees. This contrasts with Chrome and Firefox, which have a greater culture of openness, where internal security discoveries are documented publicly. Quasi-arbitrary decisions like this bend the numbers all over the place, from vendor to vendor and product to product.

That's very cool! I'd like to see more about how the debugger works. Are there any video demos available, please? I love Glenn Reid's book, Thinking PostScript. It's like the Thinking Forth [1] of PostScript! ;) I always thought of PostScript as a cross between Lisp and Forth [2], but more in the Lisp camp, since it's so easy to write a metacircular evaluator [3] or a quine [4] in PostScript: {{[ exch /dup load /exec load ] cvx} dup exec} Do you remember Glenn Reid's "Distillery" [5]? It's a PostScript program that optimized other PostScript programs, which you prepended before your PostScript print file, sent to a printer, and it partially evaluated the PostScript code in the print file. It then echoed back another highly optimized flat PostScript program that printed the exact same pages, all in one coordinate system, with superfluous graphics state changes removed. That glorious hack, based on John Warnock's idea of redefining the imaging operators, eventually evolved into PDF! [6] Glenn also wrote a delightful "Font Appreciation" app for NeXT called TouchType [7], which decades later has only recently found its way into Photoshop. I wrote a visual interactive PostScript debugging tool for NeWS called the PSIBER Space Deck [8], and the PseudoScientific Visualizer [9] for drawing PostScript data structures like NeWS object and class dictionaries or a network map of ARPANET IMPs, and a paper [10] about them. It was most useful for debugging itself, which was…

I use Mac, not Windows, so I'm sure I see them rendered quite differently than you, but I prefer Source Code Pro.[1][2] They are extremely similar and I agree nothing else comes very close. It's the lower-case 'i' that does it for me.[3] Fewer serifs in general allow me to read more quickly, I feel. 'i' has 1 to Consolas' 3, while lower case 'l' (L) has 2 to Consolas' 3. One negative is that I much prefer Consolas' 0-with-slant to Source Code Pro's 0-with-dot. By the way, the first link below is from a very cool resource I just found with votes and comparisons of many of the most popular choices: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming-fonts (It seems the web has become more informative on this topic than the last time I surveyed all the font options.) Finally, this is what the designer of Source Code Pro, Paul D. Hunt, had to say about the two[2]: > Consolas is narrower than most monospaced fonts at 55% of the Em square, where I stuck with 60% for Source Code. If the narrowness is a top selling point for you, then Consolas is definitely king. [1]: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/viewpoints/5/~what-are-the-best-programm… [2]: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html [3]: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/files/2012/09/Confusable_Chars.png

Annual Performance Reviews is one of the reasons why I chose to be a consultant. Really. I always have a smile on my face when my boss announces the dreaded annual review time in a meeting and then looks at me and goes "Not you of course". Love the feeling that I don't have to worry about that crap. You may not like Adobe for many reasons but this move is definitely worth a welcome. It is high time companies stop this madness of "annual performance reviews" which really does not mean much. ""The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed," Exactly. You just cannot sit down one fine day (read: end of the year) and discuss the performance for the entire year. Just does not work for human beings like that. We are good and bad on different days. Some days, we are ultra productive, some we just slack off. I would rather have my team/manager talk to me more often about what I am doing right when it actually happens. Same with what I did not do well at the time when it happened. This gives me the opportunity to learn quickly. The end of year discussion in reality is more like "I do not really know the details of what you did exactly but I know you were ok for the most part. Here is a couple of things you can change, blah blah. You get a satisfactory rating blah. " That's for most of us. A few unlucky ones get the shorter end of the stick "We have to fire the bottom 5% and we thought you are one of those. Not much…

First I want to say thanks! We love your work at PortableApps.com and send people there whenever they ask us to add portable software. Our value is keeping the catalog up-to-date and putting a nice interface around the updating process. Not ad-blocking. We actively uncheck toolbars for maybe 5 apps. If those apps removed their toolbar offers people would still use Ninite to track updates and automate work. On profits XOR good: We do make money, but we also work really hard to do good as in http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html Our website is completely free (and ad-free) for home users. We save people from about 15 minutes of mindless installer work every second. Our $9.99 home Updater product is just something to point home users at when they ask to donate to us. We're a company. We don't take donations. We also run http://ninite.com/accessible to help visually-impaired people manage software. Actually, until last summer that was about the only way for people to install Flash with a screenreader http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2012/07/flash-player-installer-up… If publishers want to make updating their software artificially hard there's not a lot we can do except trust that people will see what's going on and move to other products.

Adobe's core business is not developing platforms, but developing the editors and tools for designers. Graphic design, web design, vector, raster, doesn't matter. They make money selling their software, not deploying flash all over the web. Here you have a link to a comment I made a few months ago, about Adobe's shifting strategy regarding Flash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774 I'll copy here some parts, so I can edit a little, mostly to adjust for current trends: ------------ Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap. But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5. -You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now). - They are building HTML5 Editors [2] - They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5. Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them". If you are a…

Flash RUNS on iOS/Android/Blackberry, there are a lot of Flash apps on all those platforms, including best selling ones[1]. Adobe just discontinued the mobile version of the Flash browser plugin, but what you don't understand is that with the launch of Adobe Air, Flash is no longer tied to the browser plugin. It's kind of irrelevant what Apple pontificates next or what Microsoft decides to support themselves in Metro, Air apps written in Flash will continue to come to iOS, MacOS, Windows 8 etc because it's the best and easiest way to develop cross platform applications. JS/HTML5 is not even close in performance, capabilities, ease of development or consistency (I'd like to see someone do anything as cool as this[2] with JS/HTML5 on mobiles), the only thing that comes close to Air right now is .Net/Mono (with MonoTouch and MonoDroid). [1]http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2011/09/flash-based-machinarium-g… [2] http://blogs.aerys.in/jeanmarc-leroux/2012/02/02/air-3-2-stage3d-and-m…

> I can't wait to see benchmarks of how much of a difference this makes. Some difference, but it's not the best thing ever, and not even the most important problem Flash has. For one thing, the H.264 decoder in Flash is already faster than QuickTime's software decoder and competitive with FFmpeg, so video decoding is absolutely not the reason people think it takes too much CPU. For the size of video you usually watch in a browser, drawing other elements on top of the video (and the necessary conversion to RGB) takes more CPU than actually decoding it (see http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different_problems.… I don't know if they've improved that, maybe not - I guess the best solution would involve doing the whole thing in OpenGL which is tricky. The other problem is that the browser plugin API is really old and doesn't match up with the double-buffered window system that OS X always used. This is supposedly better in Flash 10.1 and would improve it more than anything done here if so. Of course 10.1 isn't out yet, so who knows.

Off topic, but is anyone working for Adobe here that has access to the Adobe Fastly account? If so, you should probably look into the Fastly config settings: Fastly error: unknown domain: blogs.adobe.com. Please check that this domain has been added to a service. That's a current live error when trying to go to old blogs.adobe.com articles. The above one is from this url: https://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mo…

This thread is about Adobe Animate [1] (the authoring software) and is not the same as Adobe Flash Player [2] (the plugin) that is going to be end of life'd in 2020 [3]. It is the reason why Adobe renamed Adobe Flash Professional to Animate [4] to avoid this confusion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player [3] https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html [4] https://theblog.adobe.com/welcome-adobe-animate-cc-a-new-era-for-flash…

Not parent poster, but I did graphs directly in PostScript. The simplest book to start with is the "Blue" book https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF (from the blog post http://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2016/12/ehandler.html - that book has a lot of examples to really get your feet wet.