Re: Frame's future

[Bill Swallow]

Except for the fibbing part. I don't advocate saying you know
something you don't, even if learning it is a non-issue. I advocate
being up front about it and talk about the tech stuff you do know.
Many times companies will then agree that tools are easy to learn and
that the concepts are transferable from one tool to another.

On 3/8/07, Sean Pollock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Thanks Bill, we agree!


--
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
Senior Member STC, TechValley Chapter
STC Single-Sourcing SIG Manager
http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
avid homebrewer and proud beer snob
"I see your OOO message and raise you a clue."
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Re: Frame's future

[Sean Pollock]

  Thanks Bill, we agree!

  --Sean Pollock
  __

From:  "Bill Swallow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:  "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC:  Frame Users ,Free Framers List
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:  Re: Frame's future
Date:  Thu, 8 Mar 2007 10:36:35 -0500
>>What concerns me is that many of these tools are Enterprise level.
>>Meaning that they are too expensive to be purchased by a single
>>person, and often require a server from which to run. What that
>>means, is that companies will segregate writers into those who know
>>the tools, and those who don't. If you want to get a job, you have
>>to
>>know the tools. Most companies don't want to teach you to use them.
>>They want you to know them already. They won't care if you know XML
>>or SGML. They will focus on the tool.
>
>Ah... Fear and Loathing in TechComm. ;-)
>
>1. There are plenty of non-enterprise solutions for lone writers and
>such to use to manage XML content.
>2. Technology will always win out over tools, period.
>3. Some companies will undoubtedly be tool-centric, which is fine.
>If
>they want to overlook you as a candidate/hire based on specific
>tools
>experience and not on technology knowledge and experience, did you
>really want to work there in the first place?
>
>--
>Bill Swallow
>HATT List Owner
>WWP-Users List Owner
>Senior Member STC, TechValley Chapter
>STC Single-Sourcing SIG Manager
>http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
>avid homebrewer and proud beer snob
>"I see your OOO message and raise you a clue."
>___
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m
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RE: Frame's future

[Chris Borokowski]

Knowing how technology works, I'd prefer to build on a
working, proven platform and expand it to reach new
heights. In other words, why be afraid of FrameMaker
for the future? It's a great product design and
doesn't need changing.

Programs like mySQL may have "eternal" life for the
same reason Frame could. They're the right tools for a
task that will not change so greatly a new paradigm is
required.

Now, afraid of my own demise... another story ;)

> At 8:29 PM -0500 3/4/07, Sean Pollock wrote:
> >Why be afraid of Frame's possible demise?




 

Get your own web address.  
Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL
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Re: Frame's future

[Bill Swallow]

What concerns me is that many of these tools are Enterprise level.
Meaning that they are too expensive to be purchased by a single
person, and often require a server from which to run. What that
means, is that companies will segregate writers into those who know
the tools, and those who don't. If you want to get a job, you have to
know the tools. Most companies don't want to teach you to use them.
They want you to know them already. They won't care if you know XML
or SGML. They will focus on the tool.


Ah... Fear and Loathing in TechComm. ;-)

1. There are plenty of non-enterprise solutions for lone writers and
such to use to manage XML content.
2. Technology will always win out over tools, period.
3. Some companies will undoubtedly be tool-centric, which is fine. If
they want to overlook you as a candidate/hire based on specific tools
experience and not on technology knowledge and experience, did you
really want to work there in the first place?

--
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
Senior Member STC, TechValley Chapter
STC Single-Sourcing SIG Manager
http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
avid homebrewer and proud beer snob
"I see your OOO message and raise you a clue."
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Re: Frame's future

[Shmuel Wolfson]

As new tools come out, companies will not expect you to know more than 
the most common ones. There is a lot more to technical writing than the 
authoring tool.


Regards,
Shmuel Wolfson



[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

At 8:29 PM -0500 3/4/07, Sean Pollock wrote:
Why be afraid of Frame's possible demise? XML is the future, and 
Frame is

just a tool, and should never be the source. There will be (actually,
already are) new tools, Frame ain't all that anyway. Seems like I've 
been
using it forever--I look forward to the day that something else will 
improve

on it.

Sean Pollock
UGS Corp.


What concerns me is that many of these tools are Enterprise level. 
Meaning that they are too expensive to be purchased by a single 
person, and often require a server from which to run. What that means, 
is that companies will segregate writers into those who know the 
tools, and those who don't. If you want to get a job, you have to know 
the tools. Most companies don't want to teach you to use them. They 
want you to know them already. They won't care if you know XML or 
SGML. They will focus on the tool.


Scott
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RE: Frame's future

[Sean Pollock]

When in doubt, fib. You can almost always get an evaluation version of, or
book on, the tool for which a company requires knowledge. If you know XML,
the tool usually isn't going to be that hard to learn.

I got my first tech writing job with no knowledge of Frame in 1997 and was
training others a month later. I'm no Einstein, I just looked up the
information I needed.

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2007 9:06 PM
To: 'Frame Users'; 'Free Framers List'
Subject: RE: Frame's future

At 8:29 PM -0500 3/4/07, Sean Pollock wrote:
>Why be afraid of Frame's possible demise? XML is the future, and Frame is
>just a tool, and should never be the source. There will be (actually,
>already are) new tools, Frame ain't all that anyway. Seems like I've been
>using it forever--I look forward to the day that something else will
improve
>on it.
>
>Sean Pollock
>UGS Corp.

What concerns me is that many of these tools are Enterprise level. 
Meaning that they are too expensive to be purchased by a single 
person, and often require a server from which to run. What that 
means, is that companies will segregate writers into those who know 
the tools, and those who don't. If you want to get a job, you have to 
know the tools. Most companies don't want to teach you to use them. 
They want you to know them already. They won't care if you know XML 
or SGML. They will focus on the tool.

Scott
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RE: Frame's future

[quills]

At 8:29 PM -0500 3/4/07, Sean Pollock wrote:

Why be afraid of Frame's possible demise? XML is the future, and Frame is
just a tool, and should never be the source. There will be (actually,
already are) new tools, Frame ain't all that anyway. Seems like I've been
using it forever--I look forward to the day that something else will improve
on it.

Sean Pollock
UGS Corp.


What concerns me is that many of these tools are Enterprise level. 
Meaning that they are too expensive to be purchased by a single 
person, and often require a server from which to run. What that 
means, is that companies will segregate writers into those who know 
the tools, and those who don't. If you want to get a job, you have to 
know the tools. Most companies don't want to teach you to use them. 
They want you to know them already. They won't care if you know XML 
or SGML. They will focus on the tool.


Scott
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RE: Frame's future

[Sean Pollock]

Why be afraid of Frame's possible demise? XML is the future, and Frame is
just a tool, and should never be the source. There will be (actually,
already are) new tools, Frame ain't all that anyway. Seems like I've been
using it forever--I look forward to the day that something else will improve
on it.

Sean Pollock
UGS Corp.

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2007 11:28 PM
To: 'Frame Users'; 'Free Framers List'
Subject: RE: Frame's future

At 9:40 AM + 3/2/07, Gordon McLean wrote:
>Sales figures will reveal the story.
>
>What sells more, Photoshop or FrameMaker?
>
>*yawns*
>
>Gordon

Precisely, and you should be prepared for the day when FrameMaker is 
killed off by Adobe. If this tool is important to you, you should be 
very, very afraid of its demise for the exact same reasons that Adobe 
dropped it for the Mac.

Don't be too smug.

Scott
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RE: Frame's future

[David Creamer]

> Precisely, and you should be prepared for the day when FrameMaker is
> killed off by Adobe. If this tool is important to you, you should be
> very, very afraid of its demise for the exact same reasons that Adobe
> dropped it for the Mac.
> 
I suspect the user base of FrameMaker comes into play too:
Government agencies, government contractors, corporations among others.

Not the clientele that Adobe wants to upset TOO much, regardless of the
actual number of software packages they purchase.

David Creamer
I.D.E.A.S. - Results-Oriented Training
http://www.IDEAStraining.com
Adobe Certified Trainer & Expert (since 1995)
Authorized Quark Training Provider (since 1988)
Markzware, Enfocus, FileMaker Certified
Apple Consultant Network member (since 1990)


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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[quills]

At 9:37 AM -0600 3/2/07, Sam Beard wrote:

Scott,

   This isn't exactly true. Microsoft CHOSE not to export IE for Mac OS
X. This was done partly because Apple has their own browser, Safari, and
partly because of the rise in popularity of Firefox, Opera, Camino, and
others. The last version of IE for Mac was running quite well on Mac OS
X, but it was also the equivalent of at least one version behind Windows
IE, IIRC. Safari is generally well-regarded, as are the others listed
above. And, with MS pushing IE's "integration" into the Windows OS,
there wasn't really a desire on their part to continue work on something
without much tangible return. IE for Windows gets stuck into the Windows
OS in such a way that it's VERY difficult to fully disentangle it from
the OS and to fully use another browser instead. I've heard of many
times where someone THINKS they've disabled IE as a default browser, but
then something happens that launches IE instead of something else. As
always, YMMV greatly from this.

Samuel I. Beard, Jr.
Technical Writer
OI Analytical
979 690-1711 Ext. 222
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



They Chose not to because they were receiving competition, even 
though they still held a majority usage. If anything it highlights a 
very disturbing attitude behind Microsoft that many people still 
don't recognize.  As far as their attempt to integrate it into their 
OS, well, it's a veiled attempt to monopolize the Internet using an 
unfair advantage. And from a usability standpoint, it's a very stupid 
use of html.


Scott
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RE: Frame's future

[quills]

At 9:40 AM + 3/2/07, Gordon McLean wrote:

Sales figures will reveal the story.

What sells more, Photoshop or FrameMaker?

*yawns*

Gordon


Precisely, and you should be prepared for the day when FrameMaker is 
killed off by Adobe. If this tool is important to you, you should be 
very, very afraid of its demise for the exact same reasons that Adobe 
dropped it for the Mac.


Don't be too smug.

Scott
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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Art Campbell]

There's also the probability that the CS suite porting is taking place
in the US Adobe development center but Frame is coded by Adobe India
-- so the Mac skill set may not be where the FM code is.

On 3/1/07, Steve Rickaby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

At 09:38 -0700 1/3/07, Graeme R Forbes wrote:

>"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
>stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
>etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
>
>In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for GoLive, 
Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people who know how to get a 
document to print on a Mac, even under the formidably taxing OSX. It just chose 
not to put them to work on FM, because there was little demand for its previous, 
non-OSX, new-feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.

There may be other factors at work here. To create universal binaries that will 
work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC platforms, Adobe has to migrate their 
code base to XCode, the Apple development system. That process is, as I 
understand it, well under way for the CS 2 applications.

However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to migrate it to 
XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I know, some parts of 
FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for speed. If this is the case, moving 
such code to a multi-platform production base such as XCode would be all the 
more complex, and might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and 
reduces margins.

--
Steve
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--
Art Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent
  and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
No disclaimers apply.
DoD 358
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Sam Beard]

Scott,

   This isn't exactly true. Microsoft CHOSE not to export IE for Mac OS
X. This was done partly because Apple has their own browser, Safari, and
partly because of the rise in popularity of Firefox, Opera, Camino, and
others. The last version of IE for Mac was running quite well on Mac OS
X, but it was also the equivalent of at least one version behind Windows
IE, IIRC. Safari is generally well-regarded, as are the others listed
above. And, with MS pushing IE's "integration" into the Windows OS,
there wasn't really a desire on their part to continue work on something
without much tangible return. IE for Windows gets stuck into the Windows
OS in such a way that it's VERY difficult to fully disentangle it from
the OS and to fully use another browser instead. I've heard of many
times where someone THINKS they've disabled IE as a default browser, but
then something happens that launches IE instead of something else. As
always, YMMV greatly from this.

Samuel I. Beard, Jr.
Technical Writer
OI Analytical
979 690-1711 Ext. 222
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:49 PM
To: Paul Findon; Frame Users; Free Framers List; Steve Rickaby
Subject: Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

Considering that Microsoft couldn't seem to port Internet Explorer to 
OS X, it must be insurmountable.

Scott

At 5:12 PM + 3/1/07, Paul Findon wrote:
>Steve Rickaby wrote:
>
>>  >"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
>>>stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
>>>etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
>>>
>>>In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for 
>>>GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people 
>>>who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the 
>>>formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on 
>>>FM, because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, 
>>>new-feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
>>
>>There may be other factors at work here. To create universal 
>>binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC 
>>platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode, the Apple 
>>development system. That process is, as I understand it, well under 
>>way for the CS 2 applications.
>>
>>However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to 
>>migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I 
>>know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for 
>>speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform 
>>production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and 
>>might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and 
>>reduces margins.
>
>Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)
>
>In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0 
>for NeXTSTEP.
>
>Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?
>
>Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?
>
>Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated
environments?
>
>Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?
>
>Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't 
>PDF based on PostScript?
>
>Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?
>
>Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port 
>their apps to Mac OS X?
>
>How difficult could it be?
>
>Paul
><http://www.fm4osx.org/>

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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[David Creamer]

> It seems to me the question of "How to get a new Mac
> version of FrameMaker?" is resolved by the question
> "How to get more Macintosh users using FrameMaker?"
> 
> I can't think of a way to solve that one quickly.
> Maybe we can turn this into a contest?

The first thing is that Apple has to start showing corporate IT departments
that supporting Macs is not that difficult (and won't endanger their job
security). I still run into much ignorance in IT departments when it comes
to using and supporting the Mac--even after 6 years of OS X with all its
UNIX underpinnings.

If there were more Macs in the corporate world, I suspect there would have
been a re-written Frame. However, even if the percentages changed over the
next few years, I doubt that Frame will be re-written for the Mac; I image
there will be a new (or improved) cross-platform option by then--either from
Adobe or another company.

David Creamer
I.D.E.A.S. - Results-Oriented Training
http://www.IDEAStraining.com
Adobe Certified Trainer & Expert (since 1995)
Authorized Quark Training Provider (since 1988)
Markzware, Enfocus, FileMaker Certified
Apple Consultant Network member (since 1990)


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RE: Frame's future

[Gordon McLean]

Sales figures will reveal the story.

What sells more, Photoshop or FrameMaker?

*yawns*

Gordon



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Re: Frame's future

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:21 + 2/3/07, Bodvar Bjorgvinsson wrote:

>My advise if for them to read Joe Sutter's "747 -- Creating the
>World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation".

Thanks, Bodvar. And when you've finished that, try Tracey Kidder's 'The Soul of 
a New Machine', about how Data General played catch-up with DEC in the early 
days of sixteen-bit minicomputers.

Moral: If you want to achieve the impossible, make sure that no-one involved 
believes that it *is* impossible.

I personally regret that what I thought at least started out as a relevant 
technical discussion has been perceived as flogging a dead horse. I also run a 
mixed shop of Macs and PCs, and operate a horses-for-courses platform policy. 
Over the years I have used FrameMaker on Unix, Mac and PC. There is nothing 
wrong with FrameMaker on PC, per se, it's just that all that Windows nastiness 
spoils it. And I mean, *really* spoils it.

We do indeed have out own platform for this sort of discussion, and I will 
attempt to refrain from platform specifics in future.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Frame's future

[Bodvar Bjorgvinsson]

On 3/2/07, John Sgammato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- snipped ---

And I have read enough about FrameMaker on the Mac. We know you're unhappy. 
Adobe knows you're unhappy. All God's chillun' must know you're unhappy.
You have expressed your feelings about it quite well enough, thank you. The 
well-organized Mac lobby has made its positionknown elsewhere as well. There 
are plenty of venues where you can rattle on about being abandoned by a large 
corporation that made a perfectly sensible business decision that you 
disapprove of.
Feel free to flame me offline, but please stop clogging up thousands of inboxes 
with the froth from relentlessly flogging this dead horse.

john



I totally disagree. Adobe is not quite a dead horse, and they needs
some serious flogging -- and advise.
My advise if for them to read Joe Sutter's "747 -- Creating the
World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation".
This is a book about setting your goal, knowing your stuff and
focusing on the project more than how much profit you are going to
make by the end of the year.

I would without a doubt say that FrameMaker could have been their 747.
And it still can. But Adobe must learn to look away from the petty
things, like minor losses in the Mac and *n*x environments and to take
on the world in similar way as Joe Sutter and his collegues did. I
believe Adobe is slowly discovering what they already have in
FrameMaker. They should study it more. I am sure they will find that
they are sitting on a chest of fortune here.
This good a software should be selling on most platforms, also Linux,
just because it is so much faster to work with than the software that
seems to scare Adobe off: TeX/LaTeX! (And now I am flogging them!)

Bodvar
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RE: Frame's future

[John Sgammato]

You know - I'm in the business of communicating, not pontificating. 
I work in Windows because our product runs on Windows, our customers run on 
Windows, and my tools run on Windows. I live in the real world, I work there, 
and I get paid there. 
And I have read enough about FrameMaker on the Mac. We know you're unhappy. 
Adobe knows you're unhappy. All God's chillun' must know you're unhappy. 
You have expressed your feelings about it quite well enough, thank you. The 
well-organized Mac lobby has made its positionknown elsewhere as well. There 
are plenty of venues where you can rattle on about being abandoned by a large 
corporation that made a perfectly sensible business decision that you 
disapprove of. 
Feel free to flame me offline, but please stop clogging up thousands of inboxes 
with the froth from relentlessly flogging this dead horse.
 
john



From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Sean Pollock
Sent: Thu 3/1/2007 9:17 PM
To: 'Paul Findon'; 'Mike Wickham'
Cc: 'Frame Users'; 'Free Framers List'
Subject: RE: Frame's future



Mike,

At least you have a real OS. Most of us in the business world use PCs
because they're the corporate norm, but they still suck (for those of you
who think I'm a MacAddict, I've never owned one, I just know anything based
on unix must be better than the bloated goat Microsoft has built on DOS,
which was never a real OS).

--Sean Pollock
UGS Corp.

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Paul Findon
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 4:41 PM
To: Mike Wickham
Cc: Frame Users; Free Framers List
Subject: Re: Frame's future

On 1 Mar 2007, at 14:00, Mike Wickham wrote:

>>> When someone stabs you in the back after you've been a very  loyal
>>> customer for nearly 20 years, you don't normally go running  back 
>>> for
>>> more.
>>
>> So what action are you going to take against Apple for dropping 
>> Classic
>> support from their Mactel machines? They stabbed you in the back, 
>> too,
>> didn't they? Had Apple not made such a drastic change in its 
>> operating system, I'll bet Adobe would have made the last two 
>> FrameMaker point-upgrades available for Macs, too.

> Apple gave us something better. Adobe gave us nothing.

> Paul

Sorry, Mike. I think your comment deserves a better response.

Mac OS 9 was a fine OS in its day, but its time had come. We wanted a 
modern OS with pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and so 
on, especially those of us that had had first-hand experience of 
these things with NeXTSTEP in the early '90s. We started with Macs 
because that was the only show in town for DTP and WYSIWYG manual 
making, and the tools then were FrameMaker, PageMaker, or Quark. 
Believe it or not, Apple had 15.5% of the Japanese PC market in 1994, 
which had fallen to 6% by 1999. In the mid-'90s, with the success of 
Windows 95, Apple's failure to deliver a next-generation OS, and 
falling market share, I drew up contingency plans as to what we'd do 
if Apple disappeared. In a nutshell, the plan consisted of switching 
to Windows. Then, in late 1997, NeXT and Steve Jobs executed what I 
believe was a reverse takeover, and I knew then that we'd be getting 
NeXTSTEP or something even better on our Macs. Mac OS X was released 
in 2001. Adobe said it was porting its apps to Mac OS X, so we 
waited. But Adobe never delivered, discontinued Mac FrameMaker, and 
suggested that we switch to Windows. But having used NeXTSTEP and Mac 
OS X, we don't want to switch to Windows just to run FrameMaker 
(cost, training, security, viruses, etc). My contingency plans ended 
up in the dustbin.

As for the Classic environment, this was a transition tool to allow 
developers time to port their apps over to Mac OS X. Most did, 
including Adobe for most of its apps. Anyway, running Classic apps on 
an Intel Mac would require emulation and in my experience that means 
slow. This is a technical obstacle. Producing FrameMaker for Mac OS X 
on an Intel Mac would require a little effort by Adobe. At the 
moment, they don't have the will.

Of course, you have to remember that Apple today is not the Apple we 
used to know. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, a new Apple was born. 
Pretty much like what happened at Adobe when the co-founders stepped 
aside in 2000 and a new CEO was appointed. Both companies continue 
with the same name, but their DNA, culture, and direction changed big 
time.

I'm passionate about my work and the tools I use to do it, and I want 
the best tools for the job, which is why I use FrameMaker and Mac. 
That's my opinion and others will no doubt disagree, but that's for 
them to decide. I'm not an evangelist and am perfectly happy 

RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[quills]

It's basically the same reasons that they decided that they didn't 
want to do it in the first place, several years ago. The real reason 
is that the user base was too small for their desired ROI.


I suppose that the only way Adobe could put this to bed would be to 
display their figures on Solaris licenses vs. Mac.


Scott

At 11:22 AM -0800 3/1/07, Dov Isaacs wrote:




 -Original Message-
 From: Paul Findon
 Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:13 AM
 To: Frame Users; Free Framers List; Steve Rickaby
 Subject: Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

 Steve Rickaby wrote:

 > >"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
 > >stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
 > >etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
 > >
 > >In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for 
 > GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people 
 > who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the 
 > formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to
 work on FM, 
 > because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, new-

 > feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
 >
 > There may be other factors at work here. To create universal 
 > binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC 
 > platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode,
 the Apple 
 > development system. That process is, as I understand it,
 well under 
 > way for the CS 2 applications.

 >
 > However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to 
 > migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I 
 > know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for 
 > speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform 
 > production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and 
 > might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and 
 > reduces margins.


 Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)

 In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker
 3.0 for 
 NeXTSTEP.


 Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?

 Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?

 Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated 
 environments?


 Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?

 Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't 
 PDF based on PostScript?


 Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?

 Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port 
 their apps to Mac OS X?


 How difficult could it be?

 Paul



It is quite difficult because the "similarities"
you describe are totally irrelevant to the situation
at hand.

- Dov

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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[quills]

Considering that Microsoft couldn't seem to port Internet Explorer to 
OS X, it must be insurmountable.


Scott

At 5:12 PM + 3/1/07, Paul Findon wrote:

Steve Rickaby wrote:


 >"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult

stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"

In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for 
GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people 
who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the 
formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on 
FM, because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, 
new-feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.


There may be other factors at work here. To create universal 
binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC 
platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode, the Apple 
development system. That process is, as I understand it, well under 
way for the CS 2 applications.


However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to 
migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I 
know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for 
speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform 
production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and 
might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and 
reduces margins.


Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)

In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0 
for NeXTSTEP.


Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated environments?

Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?

Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't 
PDF based on PostScript?


Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?

Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port 
their apps to Mac OS X?


How difficult could it be?

Paul



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Re: Frame's future

[quills]

Its as valid as any officer of a company doing something for worse 
reasons. His justification may not be exemplary, however it is not 
malfeasance. Since it is somewhere around the middle ground I see no 
reason to take him to task for it.


Scott

At 5:38 AM -0800 3/1/07, John Posada wrote:

 > Considering how most companies spend their money on

 the latest fad, or hot idea that the V.P. in charge
 suddenly is convinced is the way to go (usually without
 much real investigation), I don't see what the problem is.


and this is a legitimate and credible justification?


 easier for us, I don't really see that there is a rush to real
 cost-effectiveness. Why not look around for alternatives?


Because it's the right way to do it and I like to look at my face in
the miror.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've 
never actually known what the question is."


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RE: Frame's future

[Sean Pollock]

Mike,

At least you have a real OS. Most of us in the business world use PCs
because they're the corporate norm, but they still suck (for those of you
who think I'm a MacAddict, I've never owned one, I just know anything based
on unix must be better than the bloated goat Microsoft has built on DOS,
which was never a real OS).

--Sean Pollock
UGS Corp.

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Paul Findon
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 4:41 PM
To: Mike Wickham
Cc: Frame Users; Free Framers List
Subject: Re: Frame's future

On 1 Mar 2007, at 14:00, Mike Wickham wrote:

>>> When someone stabs you in the back after you've been a very  loyal
>>> customer for nearly 20 years, you don't normally go running  back  
>>> for
>>> more.
>>
>> So what action are you going to take against Apple for dropping  
>> Classic
>> support from their Mactel machines? They stabbed you in the back,  
>> too,
>> didn't they? Had Apple not made such a drastic change in its  
>> operating system, I'll bet Adobe would have made the last two  
>> FrameMaker point-upgrades available for Macs, too.

> Apple gave us something better. Adobe gave us nothing.

> Paul

Sorry, Mike. I think your comment deserves a better response.

Mac OS 9 was a fine OS in its day, but its time had come. We wanted a  
modern OS with pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and so  
on, especially those of us that had had first-hand experience of  
these things with NeXTSTEP in the early '90s. We started with Macs  
because that was the only show in town for DTP and WYSIWYG manual  
making, and the tools then were FrameMaker, PageMaker, or Quark.  
Believe it or not, Apple had 15.5% of the Japanese PC market in 1994,  
which had fallen to 6% by 1999. In the mid-'90s, with the success of  
Windows 95, Apple's failure to deliver a next-generation OS, and  
falling market share, I drew up contingency plans as to what we'd do  
if Apple disappeared. In a nutshell, the plan consisted of switching  
to Windows. Then, in late 1997, NeXT and Steve Jobs executed what I  
believe was a reverse takeover, and I knew then that we'd be getting  
NeXTSTEP or something even better on our Macs. Mac OS X was released  
in 2001. Adobe said it was porting its apps to Mac OS X, so we  
waited. But Adobe never delivered, discontinued Mac FrameMaker, and  
suggested that we switch to Windows. But having used NeXTSTEP and Mac  
OS X, we don't want to switch to Windows just to run FrameMaker  
(cost, training, security, viruses, etc). My contingency plans ended  
up in the dustbin.

As for the Classic environment, this was a transition tool to allow  
developers time to port their apps over to Mac OS X. Most did,  
including Adobe for most of its apps. Anyway, running Classic apps on  
an Intel Mac would require emulation and in my experience that means  
slow. This is a technical obstacle. Producing FrameMaker for Mac OS X  
on an Intel Mac would require a little effort by Adobe. At the  
moment, they don't have the will.

Of course, you have to remember that Apple today is not the Apple we  
used to know. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, a new Apple was born.  
Pretty much like what happened at Adobe when the co-founders stepped  
aside in 2000 and a new CEO was appointed. Both companies continue  
with the same name, but their DNA, culture, and direction changed big  
time.

I'm passionate about my work and the tools I use to do it, and I want  
the best tools for the job, which is why I use FrameMaker and Mac.  
That's my opinion and others will no doubt disagree, but that's for  
them to decide. I'm not an evangelist and am perfectly happy buying  
computers from a company that sells a couple of million a month.  
Market share is moot. Of course, many members of this list probably  
have no control whatsoever over what hardware or software they use.  
Like all those Nortel employees that now use PTC Arbortext.

Let's not forget that this is not just an OS issue. Apple makes some  
of the best hardware in town, and I want to work with it.

Funny how it's some of the Windows users that are kicking off about  
fellow FrameMaker users and resorting to cliched stereotypes. What  
have they got to complain about? They've still got FrameMaker, and  
version 8.0 just around the corner.

Incidentally, we still use FrameMaker 6.0. There's been nothing  
compelling enough for us to change since. In hindsight, if I'd know  
Adobe would sight lack of Mac sales as a reason for no FrameMaker for  
Mac OS X, I would have bought every upgrade going.

Paul
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Chris Borokowski]

It seems to me the question of "How to get a new Mac
version of FrameMaker?" is resolved by the question
"How to get more Macintosh users using FrameMaker?"

I can't think of a way to solve that one quickly.
Maybe we can turn this into a contest?

--- Dov Isaacs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> It is quite difficult because the "similarities"
> you describe are totally irrelevant to the situation
> at hand.


http://www.dionysius.com
code | tech | docs | leadership


 

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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Paul Findon]

On 1 Mar 2007, at 17:12, Paul Findon wrote:

In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0  
for NeXTSTEP.


Whoops! In all the excitement I should have said "Frame Technology  
FrameMaker 3.0 for NeXTSTEP."


I wonder what ever happened to that code?

Paul
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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 1 Mar 2007, at 14:00, Mike Wickham wrote:


When someone stabs you in the back after you've been a very  loyal
customer for nearly 20 years, you don't normally go running  back  
for

more.


So what action are you going to take against Apple for dropping  
Classic
support from their Mactel machines? They stabbed you in the back,  
too,
didn't they? Had Apple not made such a drastic change in its  
operating system, I'll bet Adobe would have made the last two  
FrameMaker point-upgrades available for Macs, too.



Apple gave us something better. Adobe gave us nothing.



Paul


Sorry, Mike. I think your comment deserves a better response.

Mac OS 9 was a fine OS in its day, but its time had come. We wanted a  
modern OS with pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and so  
on, especially those of us that had had first-hand experience of  
these things with NeXTSTEP in the early '90s. We started with Macs  
because that was the only show in town for DTP and WYSIWYG manual  
making, and the tools then were FrameMaker, PageMaker, or Quark.  
Believe it or not, Apple had 15.5% of the Japanese PC market in 1994,  
which had fallen to 6% by 1999. In the mid-'90s, with the success of  
Windows 95, Apple's failure to deliver a next-generation OS, and  
falling market share, I drew up contingency plans as to what we'd do  
if Apple disappeared. In a nutshell, the plan consisted of switching  
to Windows. Then, in late 1997, NeXT and Steve Jobs executed what I  
believe was a reverse takeover, and I knew then that we'd be getting  
NeXTSTEP or something even better on our Macs. Mac OS X was released  
in 2001. Adobe said it was porting its apps to Mac OS X, so we  
waited. But Adobe never delivered, discontinued Mac FrameMaker, and  
suggested that we switch to Windows. But having used NeXTSTEP and Mac  
OS X, we don't want to switch to Windows just to run FrameMaker  
(cost, training, security, viruses, etc). My contingency plans ended  
up in the dustbin.


As for the Classic environment, this was a transition tool to allow  
developers time to port their apps over to Mac OS X. Most did,  
including Adobe for most of its apps. Anyway, running Classic apps on  
an Intel Mac would require emulation and in my experience that means  
slow. This is a technical obstacle. Producing FrameMaker for Mac OS X  
on an Intel Mac would require a little effort by Adobe. At the  
moment, they don't have the will.


Of course, you have to remember that Apple today is not the Apple we  
used to know. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, a new Apple was born.  
Pretty much like what happened at Adobe when the co-founders stepped  
aside in 2000 and a new CEO was appointed. Both companies continue  
with the same name, but their DNA, culture, and direction changed big  
time.


I'm passionate about my work and the tools I use to do it, and I want  
the best tools for the job, which is why I use FrameMaker and Mac.  
That's my opinion and others will no doubt disagree, but that's for  
them to decide. I'm not an evangelist and am perfectly happy buying  
computers from a company that sells a couple of million a month.  
Market share is moot. Of course, many members of this list probably  
have no control whatsoever over what hardware or software they use.  
Like all those Nortel employees that now use PTC Arbortext.


Let's not forget that this is not just an OS issue. Apple makes some  
of the best hardware in town, and I want to work with it.


Funny how it's some of the Windows users that are kicking off about  
fellow FrameMaker users and resorting to cliched stereotypes. What  
have they got to complain about? They've still got FrameMaker, and  
version 8.0 just around the corner.


Incidentally, we still use FrameMaker 6.0. There's been nothing  
compelling enough for us to change since. In hindsight, if I'd know  
Adobe would sight lack of Mac sales as a reason for no FrameMaker for  
Mac OS X, I would have bought every upgrade going.


Paul
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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Paul Findon]

On 1 Mar 2007, at 19:22, Dov Isaacs wrote:


Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?

Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port
their apps to Mac OS X?

How difficult could it be?

Paul



It is quite difficult because the "similarities"
you describe are totally irrelevant to the situation
at hand.


I thought there would be a catch ;-)

Paul
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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Syed Zaeem Hosain]

Oops, sorry, Richard. my response was not aimed at your earlier
response. I just did a reply-all and should have trimmed out your
words.

Z

Syed Zaeem Hosain wrote:

Folks,

Worrying about whether the latest versions of FrameMaker are, or are
not, available for a particular OS and platform is not productive at
all. Whether we know and/or agree/disagree with Adobe's reasons for
dropping the Mac version is not anything we can or should waste any
[more] time on.

Yes, grass-roots efforts to make changes sometimes work, but this one
(i.e., trying to get Adobe to provide recent versions of FrameMaker
on a Mac) has failed multiple times. Let's move on and get over it.


[rest deleted for brevity]


Combs, Richard wrote:

Steve Rickaby wrote:


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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:34 -0700 1/3/07, Combs, Richard wrote:

>I expect that the more extreme fundamentalist Apple-ists will threaten
>to behead you any time now for your apostasy. You're the Salman Rushdie
>of the Macintosh! ;-)

Cripes :-(

Actually, I haven't given up hope, but I prefer to base my hopes on logic and 
reason ;-)

-- 
Steve
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Dov Isaacs]

 

> -Original Message-
> From: Paul Findon
> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:13 AM
> To: Frame Users; Free Framers List; Steve Rickaby
> Subject: Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX
> 
> Steve Rickaby wrote:
> 
> > >"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
> > >stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
> > >etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
> > >
> > >In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for  
> > GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people  
> > who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the  
> > formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to 
> work on FM,  
> > because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, new- 
> > feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
> >
> > There may be other factors at work here. To create universal  
> > binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC  
> > platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode, 
> the Apple  
> > development system. That process is, as I understand it, 
> well under  
> > way for the CS 2 applications.
> >
> > However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to  
> > migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I  
> > know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for  
> > speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform  
> > production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and  
> > might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and  
> > reduces margins.
> 
> Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)
> 
> In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 
> 3.0 for  
> NeXTSTEP.
> 
> Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?
> 
> Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?
> 
> Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated  
> environments?
> 
> Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?
> 
> Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't  
> PDF based on PostScript?
> 
> Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?
> 
> Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port  
> their apps to Mac OS X?
> 
> How difficult could it be?
> 
> Paul


It is quite difficult because the "similarities"
you describe are totally irrelevant to the situation
at hand.

- Dov
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Dov Isaacs]

The other Adobe applications use a common graphics
subystem based on Adobe's AGM, CoolType, ACE, and other
Core Technology components used for the various interfaces
described below. FrameMaker is not based on these components
and cannot leverage the MacOS X portation work done for 
those products for a FrameMaker portation. Plus, at this 
point, a migration of development tools to xCode would need 
to be done from Code Warrior, a double whammy in terms of 
time and cost.

- Dov
 

> -Original Message-
> From: Graeme R Forbes
> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 8:39 AM
> To: framers@lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX
> 
> Dov said:
> 
> "Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
> stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
> etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
> 
> In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for 
> GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people who 
> know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the 
> formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on FM, 
> because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, 
> new-feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
> 
> Graeme Forbes
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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Syed Zaeem Hosain]

Folks,

Worrying about whether the latest versions of FrameMaker are, or are
not, available for a particular OS and platform is not productive at
all. Whether we know and/or agree/disagree with Adobe's reasons for
dropping the Mac version is not anything we can or should waste any
[more] time on.

Yes, grass-roots efforts to make changes sometimes work, but this one
(i.e., trying to get Adobe to provide recent versions of FrameMaker
on a Mac) has failed multiple times. Let's move on and get over it.

FWIW, I have been using FrameMaker since 1988 - off and on - on old
Sun 3's running SunOS, through the latest version running on my laptop
on Windows XP. Including a brief stint on a Mac, although not for any
serious large document.

The point is that it is the application that is important - not the OS.
The OS and platform are merely tools to get the job done (and ultimately
so is the application too!).

I use whatever *application* makes the task at hand easier. So, I have
three different computers in my office - two Windows systems and a
Sun Solaris system (no Mac, because I have no particular need for an
application that is specific to that platform/OS only). Depending on
what I need to do, I reach for a different keyboard and mouse and focus
on the task.

Yes, if, for some strange reason, someday, Adobe drops FrameMaker as
a product, I will also change and will find another solution and make
it work for what I need done - warts and all - because that is life.

Regards,

Z

Combs, Richard wrote:

Steve Rickaby wrote:
 
However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort 
to migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For 
all I know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in 
Assembler for speed. If this is the case, moving such code to 
a multi-platform production base such as XCode would be all 
the more complex, and might involve a major re-coding effort. 
All this ups cost and reduces margins.


Give it up, Steve. You're using logic and reason, and the True Believers
aren't swayed by those. In fact, references to "cost" and "margins" are
downright offensive to the Keepers of the Dogma. Hang the cost -- Adobe
shouldn't "betray the faith"! 


I expect that the more extreme fundamentalist Apple-ists will threaten
to behead you any time now for your apostasy. You're the Salman Rushdie
of the Macintosh! ;-) 


Richard


--
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
--
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
--


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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Combs, Richard]

Steve Rickaby wrote:
 
> However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort 
> to migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For 
> all I know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in 
> Assembler for speed. If this is the case, moving such code to 
> a multi-platform production base such as XCode would be all 
> the more complex, and might involve a major re-coding effort. 
> All this ups cost and reduces margins.

Give it up, Steve. You're using logic and reason, and the True Believers
aren't swayed by those. In fact, references to "cost" and "margins" are
downright offensive to the Keepers of the Dogma. Hang the cost -- Adobe
shouldn't "betray the faith"! 

I expect that the more extreme fundamentalist Apple-ists will threaten
to behead you any time now for your apostasy. You're the Salman Rushdie
of the Macintosh! ;-) 

Richard


--
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
--
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
--




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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Steve Rickaby]

At 17:12 + 1/3/07, Paul Findon wrote:

>Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)

Garn, Paul... you shouldn't need to ask me that. I borrowed the campaign 
T-shirt, after all ;-) And suffered for The Cause: after barracking the Adobe 
lot at IPEX I got comprehensively sneezed on by a Japanese visitor and was ill 
for weeks afterwards.

>In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0 for NeXTSTEP.
>
>Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?
>
>Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?
>
>Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated environments?
>
>Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?
>
>Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't PDF based 
>on PostScript?
>
>Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?
>
>Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port their apps 
>to Mac OS X?

All this is true. However, it's the Apple layers above Darwin that would likely 
cause most of the adaptation effort.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Paul Findon]

Steve Rickaby wrote:


>"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
>stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
>etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
>
>In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for  
GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people  
who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the  
formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on FM,  
because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, new- 
feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.


There may be other factors at work here. To create universal  
binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC  
platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode, the Apple  
development system. That process is, as I understand it, well under  
way for the CS 2 applications.


However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to  
migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I  
know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for  
speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform  
production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and  
might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and  
reduces margins.


Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)

In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0 for  
NeXTSTEP.


Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated  
environments?


Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?

Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't  
PDF based on PostScript?


Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?

Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port  
their apps to Mac OS X?


How difficult could it be?

Paul

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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Ann Zdunczyk]

>However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to migrate it
to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I know, some parts of
FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for speed. If this is the case,
moving such code to a multi-platform production base such as XCode would be
all the more complex, and might involve a major re-coding effort. All this
ups cost and reduces margins. 

If I remember correctly this is why it was easier to create InDesign from
scratch rather than upgrade Pagemaker code anymore. I know someone out there
will correct me if I am wrong.

Z


**
Ann Zdunczyk
President
a2z Publishing, Inc.
Language Layout & Translation Consulting
Phone: (336)922-1271
Fax:   (336)922-4980
Cell:  (336)456-4493
http://www.a2z-pub.com
**


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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:38 -0700 1/3/07, Graeme R Forbes wrote:

>"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
>stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
>etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
>
>In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for GoLive, 
>Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people who know how to get a 
>document to print on a Mac, even under the formidably taxing OSX. It just 
>chose not to put them to work on FM, because there was little demand for its 
>previous, non-OSX, new-feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.

There may be other factors at work here. To create universal binaries that will 
work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC platforms, Adobe has to migrate their 
code base to XCode, the Apple development system. That process is, as I 
understand it, well under way for the CS 2 applications.

However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to migrate it to 
XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I know, some parts of 
FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for speed. If this is the case, moving 
such code to a multi-platform production base such as XCode would be all the 
more complex, and might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and 
reduces margins.

-- 
Steve
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Graeme R Forbes]

Dov said:

"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"

In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for 
GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people who 
know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the 
formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on FM, 
because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, 
new-feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.


Graeme Forbes
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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 1 Mar 2007, at 14:00, Mike Wickham wrote:


When someone stabs you in the back after you've been a very  loyal
customer for nearly 20 years, you don't normally go running  back for
more.


So what action are you going to take against Apple for dropping  
Classic

support from their Mactel machines? They stabbed you in the back, too,
didn't they? Had Apple not made such a drastic change in its  
operating system, I'll bet Adobe would have made the last two  
FrameMaker point-upgrades available for Macs, too.


Apple gave us something better. Adobe gave us nothing.

Paul
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Re: Frame's future

[Mike Wickham]

When someone stabs you in the back after you've been a very  loyal
customer for nearly 20 years, you don't normally go running  back for
more.


So what action are you going to take against Apple for dropping Classic
support from their Mactel machines? They stabbed you in the back, too,
didn't they? Had Apple not made such a drastic change in its operating 
system, I'll bet Adobe would have made the last two FrameMaker 
point-upgrades available for Macs, too.


Mike Wickham


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Re: Frame's future

[John Posada]

> Considering how most companies spend their money on 
> the latest fad, or hot idea that the V.P. in charge 
> suddenly is convinced is the way to go (usually without 
> much real investigation), I don't see what the problem is.

and this is a legitimate and credible justification? 

> easier for us, I don't really see that there is a rush to real 
> cost-effectiveness. Why not look around for alternatives?

Because it's the right way to do it and I like to look at my face in
the miror.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never 
actually known what the question is."
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Re: Frame's future

[quills]

At 6:53 AM -0800 2/28/07, John Posada wrote:
 > a real PC, since most of us have lost the appetite for Adobe 

 software, we'd rather use something else, and MadCap's Blaze looks
 promising.


Let's see if I got this right.

Adobe used to suppot MAC but does no longer, so we're pissed.
Therefore, we'll go to a company who has never acknowledged us for an
untested product "that looks promising", simply because we're pissed
at the other guy.

And this is the justification upon which you spend your company's
money?

Shame on you.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer


Considering how most companies spend their money on the latest fad, 
or hot idea that the V.P. in charge suddenly is convinced is the way 
to go (usually without much real investigation), I don't see what the 
problem is.


Considering that most companies are still using Windows XP and in 
some cases are only now switching to it from W2K, and how most IT 
departments are  not supporting workflows with an eye to making work 
easier for us, I don't really see that there is a rush to real 
cost-effectiveness. Why not look around for alternatives?


Scott
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Re: Frame's future

[William Gaffga]

I can't speak for the whole, but I can for this "Mac fan" and his Doc  
Group. We are currently on Macs despite creating PC software (long  
story, short is we used to be Mac and transitioned our code/product).  
We've kept Docs on the Mac due to legacy docs and ease of use and  
there was no real compelling reason to force a move. Now that we are  
EOL'd by Adobe's lack of support for the Mac we need to look at  
transition options.


Frankly, FrameMaker, as much as I like it, is showing its age and the  
PC version has quirks that are a PITA (fonts, keybd shortcuts ...).  
So, if we need to make a jump, why not look at MadCap and be excited?  
Their workflow seems to be better than our current FM -> WebWorks (we  
use a PC for that).


I know of a few others in similar situations. So, for at least some,  
it is about logic.

Then again, I dare anyone to try and take my G5 from me :-)

Will.

On Feb 28, 2007, at 7:59 AM, Art Campbell wrote:


Paul,

I think you're breaking the rules of the conversation by applying  
logic...

It's not about logic, it's about being a Mac fan.

Cheers,
Art

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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 28 Feb 2007, at 14:53, John Posada wrote:


a real PC, since most of us have lost the appetite for Adobe
software, we'd rather use something else, and MadCap's Blaze looks
promising.


Let's see if I got this right.

Adobe used to suppot MAC but does no longer, so we're pissed.
Therefore, we'll go to a company who has never acknowledged us for an
untested product "that looks promising", simply because we're pissed
at the other guy.


Sorry for the misunderstanding, John. Perhaps I didn't make myself  
clear.


Yes, I would rather use another company's product. That's human  
nature. When someone stabs you in the back after you've been a very  
loyal customer for nearly 20 years, you don't normally go running  
back for more. If Blaze turns out not to be a viable alternative,  
like the many other possible alternatives I've looked at over the  
last 3 years, I'm fully prepared to continue with the devil I know.



And this is the justification upon which you spend your company's
money?


No.


Shame on you.


Thanks for the judgement, John - kinda thing my mother used to say.

Paul
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Chris Borokowski]

I should've known that. Thanks for an informative
summary!

--- Dov Isaacs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the
> difficult
> stuff relating to user interfaces, font access,
> output,
> etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X and has no real
> similarity
> to Solaris, the other platform on which FrameMaker
> is still
> supported (other than Windows). And of course, you
> have
> differences in processor instruction sets (Sun's
> processors
> versus Gx or Mactel).
> 
>   - Dov
> 
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Chris Borokowski
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 7:39 AM
> > To: Free Framers List;
> framers@lists.frameusers.com
> > Subject: Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX
> > 
> > It is possible I'm wholly clueless here. Although
> > rare, it does occur.
> > 
> > Mac OSX is a Mach/BSD hybrid. Wouldn't that enable
> you
> > to use the UNIX version of FrameMaker?
> > 
> > If not, have you considered Linux?
> > 
> > --- Paul Findon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > One of our frustrations is
> > > that there is no  
> > > FrameMaker alternative on the Mac.
> 


http://www.dionysius.com
code | tech | docs | leadership


 

Bored stiff? Loosen up... 
Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games.
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Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Chris Borokowski]

It is possible I'm wholly clueless here. Although
rare, it does occur.

Mac OSX is a Mach/BSD hybrid. Wouldn't that enable you
to use the UNIX version of FrameMaker?

If not, have you considered Linux?

--- Paul Findon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> One of our frustrations is
> that there is no  
> FrameMaker alternative on the Mac.



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Re: Frame's future

[Peter Gold]

Art Campbell wrote:

Paul,

I think you're breaking the rules of the conversation by applying 
logic...

It's not about logic, it's about being a Mac fan.



So, Art, you don't think that Mac fanatacism trumps compulsive speculation?

Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices
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Re: Frame's future

[Art Campbell]

Paul,

I think you're breaking the rules of the conversation by applying logic...
It's not about logic, it's about being a Mac fan.

Cheers,
Art

On 2/27/07, Paul Pehrson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Jumping in a bit late here,

But why are Mac users jumping on the MadCap hope bandwagon? MadCap products
also only work on Windows. The problem will be the same whether your tool of
choice is Blaze or Frame.

Or did I miss something?

-Paul Pehrson
Midvale, UT

On 2/25/07, Paul Findon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On 24 Feb 2007, at 00:33, Michael Heine wrote:
>
> > Blaze sounds interesting (on vapour paper, so far). So, will it do
> > endnotes, and print 4/C ... ?
>
> I don't know. Ask them. They seem to be a helpful company.
>
> General: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sales: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
> Perhaps we can work out a deal for the nearly 4,000 FrameMaker users
> who've signed the FrameMaker for Mac OS X petition, such as an
> introductory discount on Blaze or the MadPak Authoring Suite, which
> will no doubt include Blaze when it's released.
>
> Incidentally, there's an interesting podcast at Tech Writer Voices
> with Mike Hamilton, Madcap's VP, Product Managemen, giving a Flare
> Demo to the Suncoast Chapter.
>  demo-to-the-suncoast-chapter/>
>
> Paul
> 
> ___
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>


--
Paul Pehrson
Midvale, UT
www.paulpehrson.com   blog.paulpehrson.com
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--
Art Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent
  and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
No disclaimers apply.
DoD 358
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RE: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Dov Isaacs]

Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X and has no real similarity
to Solaris, the other platform on which FrameMaker is still
supported (other than Windows). And of course, you have
differences in processor instruction sets (Sun's processors
versus Gx or Mactel).

- Dov

> -Original Message-
> From: Chris Borokowski
> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 7:39 AM
> To: Free Framers List; framers@lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX
> 
> It is possible I'm wholly clueless here. Although
> rare, it does occur.
> 
> Mac OSX is a Mach/BSD hybrid. Wouldn't that enable you
> to use the UNIX version of FrameMaker?
> 
> If not, have you considered Linux?
> 
> --- Paul Findon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > One of our frustrations is
> > that there is no  
> > FrameMaker alternative on the Mac.
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Re: Frame's future

[John Posada]

> a real PC, since most of us have lost the appetite for Adobe  
> software, we'd rather use something else, and MadCap's Blaze looks 
> promising.

Let's see if I got this right.

Adobe used to suppot MAC but does no longer, so we're pissed.
Therefore, we'll go to a company who has never acknowledged us for an
untested product "that looks promising", simply because we're pissed
at the other guy.

And this is the justification upon which you spend your company's
money?

Shame on you.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never 
actually known what the question is."
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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 27 Feb 2007, at 22:55, Paul Pehrson wrote:


Jumping in a bit late here,

But why are Mac users jumping on the MadCap hope bandwagon? MadCap  
products also only work on Windows. The problem will be the same  
whether your tool of choice is Blaze or Frame.


It's quite simple really. One of our frustrations is that there is no  
FrameMaker alternative on the Mac. The general feeling is that if  
we're forced to use Windows, be it via virtualization, Boot Camp, or  
a real PC, since most of us have lost the appetite for Adobe  
software, we'd rather use something else, and MadCap's Blaze looks  
promising.


Don't worry. Hopefully, there will be an introductory cross-grade  
offer for Windows FrameMaker users, too.


Paul

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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Pehrson]

Jumping in a bit late here,

But why are Mac users jumping on the MadCap hope bandwagon? MadCap products
also only work on Windows. The problem will be the same whether your tool of
choice is Blaze or Frame.

Or did I miss something?

-Paul Pehrson
Midvale, UT

On 2/25/07, Paul Findon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


On 24 Feb 2007, at 00:33, Michael Heine wrote:

> Blaze sounds interesting (on vapour paper, so far). So, will it do
> endnotes, and print 4/C ... ?

I don't know. Ask them. They seem to be a helpful company.

General: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sales: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Perhaps we can work out a deal for the nearly 4,000 FrameMaker users
who've signed the FrameMaker for Mac OS X petition, such as an
introductory discount on Blaze or the MadPak Authoring Suite, which
will no doubt include Blaze when it's released.

Incidentally, there's an interesting podcast at Tech Writer Voices
with Mike Hamilton, Madcap's VP, Product Managemen, giving a Flare
Demo to the Suncoast Chapter.


Paul

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--
Paul Pehrson
Midvale, UT
www.paulpehrson.com   blog.paulpehrson.com
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Re: Frame's future

[Bill Briggs]

At 9:32 PM + 2/25/07, Paul Findon wrote:
>There is no law or SEC regulation that stipulates a minimum profitability for 
>products, and Adobe could have simply raised the price if it really was such a 
>major draw on expenses.

 And the really pathetic irony here is that Frame Technologies first got into 
financial trouble as a result of entering the Windows market. They priced it 
too low to entice the low end OS users to buy it. Oy.


>Let's tackle the points:
>
>* Cost of development: Can't be much with cheap Indian labor, up to 90% off!
>* Cost of QA: Use customers as beta testers.
>* Cost of support: The Web, mailing lists, and online forums cost nothing.
>* Cost of marketing: Did Adobe ever market FrameMaker?
>* Cost to make it MacOS X-compatible: Use cheap labor? We'd even be happy with 
>a Carbon version. See below.

 I'd prefer it to be Carbon based. There are a things about Cocoa applications 
that are less desirable on several fronts.


>Quote from Apple developer site: "Carbon includes about 70 percent of the 
>existing Mac OS APIs, covering about 95 percent of the functions used by 
>applications. Because it includes most of the functions you rely on today, 
>converting to Carbon is a straightforward process."
>
>From a user's point of view, let's just imagine for a moment a FrameMaker with 
>all of the authoring and publishing capabilities that we've come to rely on 
>running on the world's best OS, with PDF-based Quartz imaging for beautiful 
>text, graphics, and PDF compatibility, OpenType, Unicode, automated workflows 
>with AppleScript, ColorSync for WYSIWYG color, and the power, reliability, and 
>stability of UNIX, not to mention easy access to all of our favorite UNIX 
>tools. A technical writer's nirvana.

 Amen.

  - web
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Re: Frame's future

[Syed Zaeem Hosain]

Paul, et. al.

Paul Findon wrote:

On 25 Feb 2007, at 22:02, Dov Isaacs wrote:


How was that statement "fear, uncertainty, and doubt?"

I was stating FACT based on having been involved
personally in or as a direct witness to what was going
on at the time.


Apple is one of Adobe's competitors. Competitors sometimes engage in the 
art of FUD. Company employees don't normally post information of this 
kind on public mailing lists. I don't know about everyone else, but it 
strikes me as somewhat unusual.


Well ... I have never seen Dov engage in FUD. He admits to lack of info
when he does not know a particular answer, or tells us clearly when he
cannot comment on some topic.

So, at least, in this one Adobe employee case, it is not any unusual
thing. :)

Z


- Dov



-Original Message-
From: Paul Findon
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2007 1:25 PM
To: Wayne Brissette; Free Framers List; framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Frame's future

On 21 Feb 2007, at 19:30, Dov Isaacs wrote:


What is true is that Adobe was certainly NOT going to
drop support for Windows in favour of a MacOS X-only
solution or start developing products exclusively for
MacOS X, a strategy that apparently at least some within
Apple would have liked Adobe to pursue.


Can we file this under FUD?

Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>


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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 25 Feb 2007, at 22:02, Dov Isaacs wrote:


How was that statement "fear, uncertainty, and doubt?"

I was stating FACT based on having been involved
personally in or as a direct witness to what was going
on at the time.


Apple is one of Adobe's competitors. Competitors sometimes engage in  
the art of FUD. Company employees don't normally post information of  
this kind on public mailing lists. I don't know about everyone else,  
but it strikes me as somewhat unusual.


Paul





- Dov



-Original Message-
From: Paul Findon
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2007 1:25 PM
To: Wayne Brissette; Free Framers List; framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Frame's future

On 21 Feb 2007, at 19:30, Dov Isaacs wrote:


What is true is that Adobe was certainly NOT going to
drop support for Windows in favour of a MacOS X-only
solution or start developing products exclusively for
MacOS X, a strategy that apparently at least some within
Apple would have liked Adobe to pursue.


Can we file this under FUD?

Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>


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Re: Frame's future

[Bill Briggs]

At 9:29 PM + 2/25/07, Paul Findon wrote:
>
>Adobe could have pushed FrameMaker as a 1st class word processor and cut the 
>price. Throw in a spreadsheet, a cut-down version of Illustrator, and a 
>Powerpoint alternative and you have a whole new office platform. With 
>Microsoft encroaching more and more into Adobe's markets (i.e., Expression 
>Studio), Adobe may soon be wishing it had done something like this.

 Adobe already had the alternative to PowerPoint with Persuasion. And a good 
spreadsheet wouldn't be that hard to do. FrameMaker would have been the 
absolute best word processor. I think they were afraid of Microsoft. I think 
they are still afraid of MS. Unless you are a Mac-only developer you are, by 
definition, afraid of retaliation from MS if you engage in any seriously 
competitive activity. After all, they have the majority share of the OS market. 
Adobe spin doctors can protest all they want, but it's really pretty obvious. 
One of the truly great things about FrameMaker was the cross platform aspect. 
Didn't they do a great job with that.

- web
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RE: Frame's future

[Dov Isaacs]

Yes, you should put your sarcasm aside.

(1) Even if we assumed that every licensed copy of
FrameMaker Macintosh were to immediately upgrade to a
new MacOS X version of FrameMaker and even if you
grew that number by 50%, the numbers just are not there
to justify the investment.

(2) Your "business plan" to turn FrameMaker into a
word processor and bundle it with some spreadsheet and
presentation program as well as a stripped-down copy
of Illustrator sounds similar to such successful plans
such as those associated with WordPerfect and IBM's
Lotus group. Don't think so!

- Dov

 

> -Original Message-
> From: Paul Findon
> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2007 1:30 PM
> To: Free Framers List; framers@lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Re: Frame's future
> 
> On 21 Feb 2007, at 16:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:
> 
> > Comparing the Macintosh version of FrameMaker to a Ford
> > Taurus is not a valid analogy. FrameMaker on Macintosh was
> > NEVER a best-seller. It was a very small fraction of the
> > FrameMaker user base, smaller than even Unix, that did not
> > justify the continued expense of development, QA, support,
> > and marketing -- especially given the cost of major changes
> > to make it MacOS X-compatible.
> 
> For a company with 2006 sales of $2.5 billion, net profit of $505  
> million (would have been higher without Macromedia merger), and  
> assets of $5.9 billion, one could almost feel sorry for Adobe.
> 
> Apparently, Adobe's CEO earned $930,000, with a $1 million bonus.  
> That's the kind of cash I regularly loose down the back of the sofa,  
> so I can really sympathize.
> 
> Sarcasm aside, Adobe cannot deny that it is partly to blame for poor  
> sales of FrameMaker - on all platforms. Those of us that have been  
> FrameMaker users for near on 20 years are fully aware of Adobe's  
> failure to develop, promote, and deliver on its potential since  
> buying Frame Technology in 1995.
> 
> Mac OS X was announced in 1998. At that time, my company was still  
> using version 5.5.6. Having used FrameMaker on NeXTSTEP for several  
> years, I knew that Mac OS X would be a great OS and I wanted it for  
> my company. We've never been that quick to upgrade, and knowing full  
> well that Mac OS X was just around the corner was a good reason to  
> wait, for in just a few years, or so we thought, we'd have 
> the power,  
> reliability, and style of NeXTSTEP on the Mac and FrameMaker to go  
> with it. Several versions of Mac OS X came and went but still we  
> waited. Then, out of the blue, in March 2004 Adobe announced that it  
> was discontinuing Mac FrameMaker and there were no plans for 
> a Mac OS  
> X version.
> 
> Given those circumstances, it's hardly surprising that Mac 
> FrameMaker  
> sales were slow. Fast forward to 2006 and we see exactly the same  
> thing happening all over again, although this time Adobe 
> acknowledges  
> that sales of Creative Suite are slow because users are waiting for  
> an Intel version. See Adobe's latest F10K filing for details.
> 
> Funny how Adobe accepts poor sales of Creative Suite are due to  
> customers waiting for an Intel version, but won't acknowledge that  
> Mac FrameMaker sales were slow because users were waiting for a Mac  
> OS X version. The demand was there, but Adobe never made the 
> product.  
> How can you blame customers for not buying a product that never even  
> existed? You don't need a business degree to understand that this is  
> simple chicken and egg stuff. It would be like Apple saying, "oh, we  
> never made an MP3 player because there was no demand." Sometimes, a  
> company has to create the demand, build a market, things that Adobe  
> did not do with FrameMaker.
> 
> Adobe could have pushed FrameMaker as a 1st class word processor and  
> cut the price. Throw in a spreadsheet, a cut-down version of  
> Illustrator, and a Powerpoint alternative and you have a whole new  
> office platform. With Microsoft encroaching more and more into  
> Adobe's markets (i.e., Expression Studio), Adobe may soon be wishing  
> it had done something like this.
> 
> Paul
> <http://www.fm4osx.org/>
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RE: Frame's future

[Dov Isaacs]

 

> -Original Message-
> From: Paul Findon
> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2007 1:26 PM
> To: Free Framers List; framers@lists.frameusers.com
> Cc: Chuck Hastings
> Subject: Re: Frame's future
> 
> On 21 Feb 2007, at 17:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:
> 
> > There is no reason for me to doubt the veracity
> > of your claim vis-a-vis the order of appearance
> > of FrameMaker on various platforms. However, you or
> > I like it or not, rational business decisions are
> > made on the basis of current market conditions, not
> 
> "Rational business decisions"?
> 
> Now that is a new one for my oxymoron collection.
> 
> Trouble is, in this case Adobe was partly responsible for the market  
> conditions.
> 
> Sometimes companies have to build a market. Sometimes they decide  
> simply not to bother.
> 
> Paul


It is indeed possible for Adobe to have built a market for
FrameMaker on the Macintosh ... if we gave away a Mac with
each copy of FrameMaker Macintosh that was licensed.  :-)

Sorry, Paul, the numbers just weren't there to support such
an investment.

- Dov
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RE: Frame's future

[Dov Isaacs]

How was that statement "fear, uncertainty, and doubt?"

I was stating FACT based on having been involved
personally in or as a direct witness to what was going
on at the time.

- Dov
 

> -Original Message-
> From: Paul Findon
> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2007 1:25 PM
> To: Wayne Brissette; Free Framers List; framers@lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Re: Frame's future
> 
> On 21 Feb 2007, at 19:30, Dov Isaacs wrote:
> 
> > What is true is that Adobe was certainly NOT going to
> > drop support for Windows in favour of a MacOS X-only
> > solution or start developing products exclusively for
> > MacOS X, a strategy that apparently at least some within
> > Apple would have liked Adobe to pursue.
> 
> Can we file this under FUD?
> 
> Paul
> <http://www.fm4osx.org/>
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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 21 Feb 2007, at 16:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:


Comparing the Macintosh version of FrameMaker to a Ford
Taurus is not a valid analogy. FrameMaker on Macintosh was
NEVER a best-seller. It was a very small fraction of the
FrameMaker user base, smaller than even Unix, that did not
justify the continued expense of development, QA, support,
and marketing -- especially given the cost of major changes
to make it MacOS X-compatible.


This is the party line that we've heard already. Only a very select  
bunch know if it's really true or not, or the numbers involved. Even  
if it is, it still means that the decision to discontinue Mac  
FrameMaker was just someone's opinion, or Adobe management's 03/04  
criteria of what constitutes an acceptable ROI for a software  
product. In other words, revenue minus effort must be greater than  
$X, otherwise we discontinue.


Even if we take a stab at 5,000 Mac seats, at $800 a pop that's $4  
million. (Some of us are prepared to pay even more. Then there's the  
people who don't even know it exists due to zero marketing.) A  
smaller, younger, hungrier, more agile company may decide that it's a  
market worth going after, especially with Mac OS X's recent growth in  
educational and scientific markets, both of which require the tech.  
publishing capabilities of a tool like FrameMaker. There is no law or  
SEC regulation that stipulates a minimum profitability for products,  
and Adobe could have simply raised the price if it really was such a  
major draw on expenses.


Only John Warnock fully understood FrameMaker and wanted to buy Frame  
Technology when it was put up for sale. No one else in Adobe shared  
his vision, and when he was replaced by Bruce Chizen in 2000,  
FrameMaker's future became even more vulnerable. Old Adobe would have  
continued to support Mac FrameMaker. New Adobe decided not to.


FrameMaker is now in the hands of Adobe India, where software  
engineers' salaries can be up to 90% less than their U.S.  
counterparts, which kind of throws even more doubt on the "continued  
expense of development" argument.


Let's tackle the points:

* Cost of development: Can't be much with cheap Indian labor, up to  
90% off!

* Cost of QA: Use customers as beta testers.
* Cost of support: The Web, mailing lists, and online forums cost  
nothing.

* Cost of marketing: Did Adobe ever market FrameMaker?
* Cost to make it MacOS X-compatible: Use cheap labor? We'd even be  
happy with a Carbon version. See below.


Quote from Apple developer site: "Carbon includes about 70 percent of  
the existing Mac OS APIs, covering about 95 percent of the functions  
used by applications. Because it includes most of the functions you  
rely on today, converting to Carbon is a straightforward process."


From a user's point of view, let's just imagine for a moment a  
FrameMaker with all of the authoring and publishing capabilities that  
we've come to rely on running on the world's best OS, with PDF-based  
Quartz imaging for beautiful text, graphics, and PDF compatibility,  
OpenType, Unicode, automated workflows with AppleScript, ColorSync  
for WYSIWYG color, and the power, reliability, and stability of UNIX,  
not to mention easy access to all of our favorite UNIX tools. A  
technical writer's nirvana.


Paul

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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 21 Feb 2007, at 16:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:


Comparing the Macintosh version of FrameMaker to a Ford
Taurus is not a valid analogy. FrameMaker on Macintosh was
NEVER a best-seller. It was a very small fraction of the
FrameMaker user base, smaller than even Unix, that did not
justify the continued expense of development, QA, support,
and marketing -- especially given the cost of major changes
to make it MacOS X-compatible.


For a company with 2006 sales of $2.5 billion, net profit of $505  
million (would have been higher without Macromedia merger), and  
assets of $5.9 billion, one could almost feel sorry for Adobe.


Apparently, Adobe's CEO earned $930,000, with a $1 million bonus.  
That's the kind of cash I regularly loose down the back of the sofa,  
so I can really sympathize.


Sarcasm aside, Adobe cannot deny that it is partly to blame for poor  
sales of FrameMaker - on all platforms. Those of us that have been  
FrameMaker users for near on 20 years are fully aware of Adobe's  
failure to develop, promote, and deliver on its potential since  
buying Frame Technology in 1995.


Mac OS X was announced in 1998. At that time, my company was still  
using version 5.5.6. Having used FrameMaker on NeXTSTEP for several  
years, I knew that Mac OS X would be a great OS and I wanted it for  
my company. We've never been that quick to upgrade, and knowing full  
well that Mac OS X was just around the corner was a good reason to  
wait, for in just a few years, or so we thought, we'd have the power,  
reliability, and style of NeXTSTEP on the Mac and FrameMaker to go  
with it. Several versions of Mac OS X came and went but still we  
waited. Then, out of the blue, in March 2004 Adobe announced that it  
was discontinuing Mac FrameMaker and there were no plans for a Mac OS  
X version.


Given those circumstances, it's hardly surprising that Mac FrameMaker  
sales were slow. Fast forward to 2006 and we see exactly the same  
thing happening all over again, although this time Adobe acknowledges  
that sales of Creative Suite are slow because users are waiting for  
an Intel version. See Adobe's latest F10K filing for details.


Funny how Adobe accepts poor sales of Creative Suite are due to  
customers waiting for an Intel version, but won't acknowledge that  
Mac FrameMaker sales were slow because users were waiting for a Mac  
OS X version. The demand was there, but Adobe never made the product.  
How can you blame customers for not buying a product that never even  
existed? You don't need a business degree to understand that this is  
simple chicken and egg stuff. It would be like Apple saying, "oh, we  
never made an MP3 player because there was no demand." Sometimes, a  
company has to create the demand, build a market, things that Adobe  
did not do with FrameMaker.


Adobe could have pushed FrameMaker as a 1st class word processor and  
cut the price. Throw in a spreadsheet, a cut-down version of  
Illustrator, and a Powerpoint alternative and you have a whole new  
office platform. With Microsoft encroaching more and more into  
Adobe's markets (i.e., Expression Studio), Adobe may soon be wishing  
it had done something like this.


Paul




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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 21 Feb 2007, at 17:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:


There is no reason for me to doubt the veracity
of your claim vis-a-vis the order of appearance
of FrameMaker on various platforms. However, you or
I like it or not, rational business decisions are
made on the basis of current market conditions, not


"Rational business decisions"?

Now that is a new one for my oxymoron collection.

Trouble is, in this case Adobe was partly responsible for the market  
conditions.


Sometimes companies have to build a market. Sometimes they decide  
simply not to bother.


Paul

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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 21 Feb 2007, at 19:30, Dov Isaacs wrote:


What is true is that Adobe was certainly NOT going to
drop support for Windows in favour of a MacOS X-only
solution or start developing products exclusively for
MacOS X, a strategy that apparently at least some within
Apple would have liked Adobe to pursue.


Can we file this under FUD?

Paul

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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 24 Feb 2007, at 00:33, Michael Heine wrote:

Blaze sounds interesting (on vapour paper, so far). So, will it do  
endnotes, and print 4/C ... ?


I don't know. Ask them. They seem to be a helpful company.

General: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sales: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Perhaps we can work out a deal for the nearly 4,000 FrameMaker users  
who've signed the FrameMaker for Mac OS X petition, such as an  
introductory discount on Blaze or the MadPak Authoring Suite, which  
will no doubt include Blaze when it's released.


Incidentally, there's an interesting podcast at Tech Writer Voices  
with Mike Hamilton, Madcap's VP, Product Managemen, giving a Flare  
Demo to the Suncoast Chapter.



Paul
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Re: Frame's future

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:00 -0500 25/2/07, Fred Ridder wrote:

>What you stated was your interpretation, not a direct quote.

True. But stated immediately above a direct quote, namely:

'Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. However, Adobe 
currently plans to release the next major version of FrameMaker for Windows 
Vista.'

so hopefully no confusion was caused.

The quote was a quote and was clearly marked as such. I took the trouble to 
read the document right through because it may affect me, and not just for 
FrameMaker, and I was merely trying to be helpful to others who were affected 
but who didn't have time to read it.

>When a vendor says "does not support", it usually reflects a business decision 
>rather than an unequivocal technical fact.

Sure. Maybe it's an issue of English: maybe I misunderstood. In future I will 
make sure that I sprinkle text with 'allegedly's, 'it would appear that's, and 
'might's.

If the document had said 'Adobe does not support the use of FrameMaker 7.2 in 
Windows Vista', that would be one thing [i.e. it might work, it might not, but 
don't come crying to us if it doesn't], but it does not say that: it says 
'FrameMaker  does not support Windows Vista'. In fact, this is an 
odd phraseology, and hard to interpret at all, because it reverses the normal 
order of things, that an OS supports an app and not the other way around.

The same document has another classification, 'Adobe... does not *officially* 
support ', which it applies for example to Acrobat 8 and many others.
There are further implied sub-classification in the table at the end, between:

   Not officially  Installs and runs with... known issues
   Does not support[Adobe] do not recommend...
   Does not supportAdobe does not recommend installing...

but FrameMaker is none of these. It's:

   Does not currently support  Support expected in next major release

Maybe I was reading too much between the lines, but I took this document to 
mean 'Lots of our stuff is so-so in Vista, but FrameMaker is a non-starter'.

Guy is absolutely right in picking holes with this document: as far as 
FrameMaker is concerned, it doesn't really tell you a lot. Where this leaves 
corporates with ageing Windows machines running lots of FrameMaker licenses is 
anyone's guess.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Frame's future

[Fred Ridder]

The issue is that you are interpreting the statement that
"FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista"
to mean "FrameMaker does not work at all". What you
stated was your interpretation, not a direct quote.

If a vendor *knows* that a software combination doesn't
work at all, they will generally make a clear statement of
that fact because they won't want their customers to risk
losing data or corrupting files. (How many people actually
follows the rule of only testing compatibility with backup
copies?) When a vendor says "does not support", it usually
reflects a business decision rather than an unequivocal
technical fact.

When a software vendor saus "does not support", it usually
means some or all of the following:
-we know (or believe) there are some issues with this combination
  so we're not going to tell you that everything is OK
-go ahead and try it if you really want to, but don't be surprised
  if you discover issues; and don't waste your time reporting
  them to us because we've already told you it's not supported
-we have no intention to invest [waste] any further resources
  testing and troubleshooting this software combination in all
  possible situations just to see if it does work, cataloging and
  characterizing the issues we find, and developing and testing
  workarounds fixes for the issues
-certifying old application versions for new OS versions doesn't
  produce any new revenue for us
-it's been long enough since our last product release that we
  don't thnk it's reasonable to expect us to support a new
  OS for free
-we've already got a new revenue-producing update in the
  works and support for the new OS is one of its selling points
  that we don't want to undercut

My opinions only; I don;t speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ


From: Steve Rickaby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Guy K. Haas" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Frame's future
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:39:17 +

At 10:54 -0800 24/2/07, Guy K. Haas wrote:

>I see nothing that spells out "FrameMaker does not work at all...". Has 
anyone TRIED it and reported this?


I was quoting from page 5 of the document 'How Adobe Products Support 
Windows Vista':


>Q. Does Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 run on Windows Vista? Does Adobe plan to 
update it for Windows Vista support?

>
>A. Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. 
However, Adobe currently plans to release the next major version of 
FrameMaker for Windows Vista.


Also summarised in table on page 9.

As it says 'Adobe' all over this document, I read this as a corporate 
statement that Adobe do not think that FrameMaker works with Vista in any 
current version, but FrameMaker 7.3/8/whatever will.


The URL for this document is:

<http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/adobe_products_and_windows_vista.pdf>

--
Steve


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Re: Frame's future

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:54 -0800 24/2/07, Guy K. Haas wrote:

>I see nothing that spells out "FrameMaker does not work at all...". Has anyone 
>TRIED it and reported this?

I was quoting from page 5 of the document 'How Adobe Products Support Windows 
Vista':

>Q. Does Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 run on Windows Vista? Does Adobe plan to update 
>it for Windows Vista support?
>
>A. Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. However, 
>Adobe currently plans to release the next major version of FrameMaker for 
>Windows Vista.

Also summarised in table on page 9.

As it says 'Adobe' all over this document, I read this as a corporate statement 
that Adobe do not think that FrameMaker works with Vista in any current 
version, but FrameMaker 7.3/8/whatever will.

The URL for this document is:



-- 
Steve
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RE: Frame's future

[Dov Isaacs]

Note that ATM does not work under Vista. It is a 
discontinued product and you should not expect any
updates from either Adobe or Microsoft to change that.

On the other hand, there is no problem installing and
using Type 1 fonts under Vista. Simply load them by
using the Font Control Panel's Install Fonts function,
pointing to the directory with the .PFM and .PFB files
for the fonts you wish to install. This does work!

- Dov
 

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>  On Behalf Of Mark Barratt
> Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2007 3:23 PM
> To: Guy K. Haas
> Cc: framers@lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Re: Frame's future
> 
> Guy K. Haas wrote:
> > The document was about Adobe products and whether they 
> "support Vista".
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > I see nothing that spells out "FrameMaker does not work at all...". 
> > Has anyone TRIED it and reported this?
> 
> Been running FM 7.2 on Vista for a few weeks now. None of my 
> Type 1 fonts work (which I expected - ATM Pro doesn't appear 
> to work). 
> Otherwise, no problems at all. Even generates PDFs nicely 
> (Acro pro 7).
> 
> Other problems with Vista, though - device drivers, mainly, 
> and seriously-worse general performance. I have also had the 
> Blue Screen of Death once, which I haven't seen on a Windows 
> box since NT.
> 
> --
> Mark Barratt
> Text Matters
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Re: Frame's future

[Mark Barratt]

Guy K. Haas wrote:

The document was about Adobe products and whether they "support Vista".


[snip]

I see nothing that spells out "FrameMaker does not work at all...". Has 
anyone TRIED it and reported this?


Been running FM 7.2 on Vista for a few weeks now. None of my Type 1 
fonts work (which I expected - ATM Pro doesn't appear to work). 
Otherwise, no problems at all. Even generates PDFs nicely (Acro pro 7).


Other problems with Vista, though - device drivers, mainly, and 
seriously-worse general performance. I have also had the Blue Screen of 
Death once, which I haven't seen on a Windows box since NT.


--
Mark Barratt
Text Matters

Information design: we help explain things using
language | design | systems | process improvement
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Re: Frame's future

[Guy K. Haas]

The document was about Adobe products and whether they "support Vista".

Q. Does Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 run on Windows Vista? Does Adobe plan to update it
for Windows Vista support?
A. Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. However, Adobe
currently plans to release the next major version of FrameMaker for Windows 
Vista.


So, their phrasing does not make clear whether

  FrameMaker 7.2 does not work at all on Vista
or
  Certain parts of FrameMaker 7.2 do not work on Vista.

Similarly, it's not clear whether

  The next major version of FrameMaker will work ONLY on Windows Vista,
  but not earlier version.
or
  The next major version of FrameMaker will work properly on Windows
  Vista AND on (certain?) earlier versions.

I see nothing that spells out "FrameMaker does not work at all...". Has 
anyone TRIED it and reported this?


--Guy K. Haas
  Software Exegete in Silicon Valley



Steve Rickaby wrote:

At 20:27 -0800 23/2/07, Guy K. Haas wrote:


What does it mean "FrameMaker  supports Vista"?  Does it just mean "FrameMaker 
 is able to take advantage of the marvelous new features of Vista"?


On the basis of a quick scan, it looks as if it just means 'running without 
issues' - i.e. working properly under Vista.

What marvellous new features? ;-)

FrameMaker does not work at all...

'Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. However, Adobe 
currently plans to release the next major version of FrameMaker for Windows 
Vista.'



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Re: Frame's future

[Steve Rickaby]

At 20:27 -0800 23/2/07, Guy K. Haas wrote:

>What does it mean "FrameMaker  supports Vista"?  Does it just mean 
>"FrameMaker  is able to take advantage of the marvelous new features 
>of Vista"?

On the basis of a quick scan, it looks as if it just means 'running without 
issues' - i.e. working properly under Vista.

What marvellous new features? ;-)

FrameMaker does not work at all...

'Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. However, Adobe 
currently plans to release the next major version of FrameMaker for Windows 
Vista.'

-- 
Steve
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Re: Frame's future

[Guy K. Haas]

What does it mean "FrameMaker  supports Vista"?  Does it just 
mean "FrameMaker  is able to take advantage of the marvelous 
new features of Vista"?


--Guy K. Haas
  Software Exegete in Silicon Valley

Michael Heine wrote:
Blaze sounds interesting (on vapour paper, so far). So, will it do 
endnotes, and print 4/C ... ?


I'd also be curious to see if the coming version of FrameMaker will run 
under XP? It's specifically designed for Vista, it seems: "... Adobe 
currently plans to release the next major verions of Framemaker for 
Windows Vista. (http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/ 
adobe_products_and_windows_vista.pdf).


I have no idea how backward compatible Vista applications are with XP ?


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Re: Frame's future

[Michael Heine]

Blaze sounds interesting (on vapour paper, so far). So, will it do 
endnotes, and print 4/C ... ?


I'd also be curious to see if the coming version of FrameMaker will run 
under XP? It's specifically designed for Vista, it seems: "... Adobe 
currently plans to release the next major verions of Framemaker for 
Windows Vista. (http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/ 
adobe_products_and_windows_vista.pdf).


I have no idea how backward compatible Vista applications are with XP ?



Cheers,
Mike

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Rick Quatro wrote:


Hi Paul,

I am also anxious to see what this ends up looking like. Hopefully, it won't 
end up being vaporware.


Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing
585-659-8267
www.frameexpert.com


Personally, I'm looking forward to the new Madcap Blaze, which Madcap 
describe as the "ultimate alternative to Adobe FrameMaker." www.madcapsoftware.com/>


Paul




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Re: Frame's future

[Keith Soltys]

Guy K. Haas wrote:

Paul Findon wrote:

Personally, I'm looking forward to the new Madcap Blaze, which Madcap 
describe as the "ultimate alternative to Adobe FrameMaker." 



Me too, Paul, but has ANYBODY got any info on how their beta is doing, 
or whether it is even underway?


I know they have been on the road at STC (and other) group meetings 
talking up Flare and its kin, but have they said much about Blaze?


--Guy K. Haas
  Software Exegete in Silicon Valley


There's a couple of podcasts up on the Technical Writer Voices site by 
Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software. They're mostly about Flare but he does 
mention Blaze. It's not a FrameMaker killer. I get the impression that 
it's somewhere between Word and Frame in capabilty, and it's really 
aimed at Flare users who also need high quality print output.


Best
Keith
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Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[Marcus Carr]

H4y^3,

hedley.finger at myob.com wrote:

> The example of the Turbo Tarburner was chosen with care.  Even as we
> bicker, a major automotive manufacturer is implementing an on-demand
> customised workshop manual.
> 
> The mechanic will simply enter the car's body number or VIN or
> whatever, and a custom manual for just the equipment in that build
> will be created on the fly and presented on screen.

It makes perfect sense - the information about what the car is equipped 
with has to be pretty easy to obtain. Even things like the service 
history of a vehicle should be stored electronically in one of its 
numerous computers. Writing it in a book that sits in the glove box for 
the life of the car is pretty silly.

> The mechanic will be able to use a TOC, Index, or boolean search
> engine to find the instructions they need.  The index is there for
> people who, unlike us, do NOT work in the IT industry and have a more
> sophisticated approach to information retrieval.  But EVERYBODY knows
> how to use a back-of-the-book index -- even if it is on-line!

Maybe, though I usually think of an index as being a collection of 
shortcuts necessary because the information is difficult to find by 
other means. Of course it is difficult to find things in hardcopy, but 
in an electronic product I might question whether the user interface is 
as good as it could be. For our mechanically gifted friend, I'd be 
inclined to provide a graphic interface and a touch screen that let him 
drill to the warp drive than compel him to hunt and peck on a toughened 
keyboard. An index may have its place, but it's a much smaller home than 
where it used to live.

> And they will probably print out just the pages they need to fix the 
> warp drive.

Perhaps they could load the printer with gasket paper - at least that 
way they'd be able to recycle effectively...

Have a good weekend, Hedley!


Marcus

Re: Frame's future

[Sarah O'Keefe]

Guy K. Haas wrote:
> I know [MadCap] have been on the road at STC (and other) group meetings
> talking up Flare and its kin, but have they said much about Blaze?

Hi Guy et al.,

My understanding is that XML support in Blaze will be comparable to XML
support in Flare. The file storage format will be XML, but the file
format is fixed.

In other words, you cannot use a DTD of your choice.

Blaze may well be a very interesting tool, but based on this
information, I wouldn't call it an XML editor.

Sarah

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Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc.   http://www.scriptorium.com
Blog: http://www.scriptorium.com/palimpsest/

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Re: Frame's future

[Guy K. Haas]

Paul Findon wrote:

Personally, I'm looking forward to the new Madcap Blaze, which Madcap 
describe as the "ultimate alternative to Adobe FrameMaker." 



Me too, Paul, but has ANYBODY got any info on how their beta is doing, 
or whether it is even underway?


I know they have been on the road at STC (and other) group meetings 
talking up Flare and its kin, but have they said much about Blaze?


--Guy K. Haas
  Software Exegete in Silicon Valley
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Re: Frame's future

[Rick Quatro]

Hi Paul,

I am also anxious to see what this ends up looking like. Hopefully, it won't 
end up being vaporware.


Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing
585-659-8267
www.frameexpert.com


Personally, I'm looking forward to the new Madcap Blaze, which Madcap 
describe as the "ultimate alternative to Adobe FrameMaker." www.madcapsoftware.com/>


Paul



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Re: Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 22 Feb 2007, at 11:59, Wayne Brissette wrote:


The biggest challenge for Adobe is stopping the defections. The one
number one topic among FrameMaker users at STC meetings I attend are
what other options are out there for them. These aren't just the  
Sun or


According to Adobe's latest SEC 10K, it believes FrameMaker's  
competition is PTC Arbortext at the top end and Word at the other end.


Personally, I'm looking forward to the new Madcap Blaze, which Madcap  
describe as the "ultimate alternative to Adobe FrameMaker." www.madcapsoftware.com/>


Paul

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Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[hedley.fin...@myob.com]

Marcus^3:

The example of the Turbo Tarburner was chosen with care.  Even as we 
bicker, a major automotive manufacturer is implementing an on-demand 
customised workshop manual.

The mechanic will simply enter the car's body number or VIN or whatever, 
and a custom manual for just the equipment in that build will be created 
on the fly and presented on screen.

The mechanic will be able to use a TOC, Index, or boolean search engine to 
find the instructions they need.  The index is there for people who, 
unlike us, do NOT work in the IT industry and have a more sophisticated 
approach to information retrieval.  But EVERYBODY knows how to use a 
back-of-the-book index -- even if it is on-line!

And they will probably print out just the pages they need to fix the warp 
drive.

Regards,
Hedley 

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

? MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2007

Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[Marcus Carr]

hedley.finger at myob.com wrote:

> Marcus, Marcus, Marcus:

Hedley, Hedley, Hedley... :-)

> I'm surprised that you of all people should associate functionality
> with presentation.  It's a bit similar to separating format from
> content.   8^)  And I'm surprised that you equate indexes only with
> hardcopy.

My point was more that the plugins reflect improvements to the current 
paradigms, as dictated by the application. It's circular, so 
improvements strike me as tinkering at the edge. Take indexes for 
example - we work through and judiciously mark up occurrences of words 
to appear in an index. The decision as to whether a particular 
occurrence of a word is significant is pretty much based on the current 
view of the data, or configuration of the document, or whatever you 
might want to call it.

What if the fragment of information containing an index marker is pulled 
together with other fragments into a new document? Is that index entry 
still relevant? A more useful approach would be to dynamically index 
once the fragments had been assembled. The results aren't likely to be 
any worse than than just trusting the indexing designed for a different 
document...

So would it be better for Adobe to incorporate the plugin, or to try to 
fix the problem? Maybe both in this particular case, but do you get my 
drift? Adobe following users who are following FrameMaker isn't really 
the path to longevity.

> I was trying to make the point that when there are a bunch of plugins
> to support indexing (= data entry), Adobe should get the message --
> that the indexing functionality in FrameMaker sucks.

I didn't say that it didn't suck, I just think that making it suck less 
at one point in the process isn't really going to work for too long.

> And hardcopy isn't dead.  If you and I are like other people, how
> many times do we print out a help topic or web page to read it?

We have just completed a publishing system for a federal government 
department. It includes hardcopy publication, website and PDAs. They 
used to print and distribute 10,000 hardcopies per release. Since the 
website went live on December 1, the demand has dropped to 1000. In six 
months, it could be down to a couple of hundred. In another year or so, 
the production of hardcopy is scheduled to cease. Hardcopy is as dead as 
a doornail. Never again will as much hardcopy be produced as was 
produced today - you can say that with confidence every morning.

> And in the wonderful world of personalised content that adapts to the
> custom product you have ordered, the country you are in, the access
> privileges you have, and the set of topics you have chosen to print, 
> wouldn't it be wonderful if you have chosen to print out your own 
> personalised workshop manual for your custom 2009 Turbo Tarburner
> with optional hydrogen fuel cell and electric motor (as against the
> standard biodiesel motor), racing slicks, two-tone duco and hard-top
> convertible four-door.  And of course this personalised manual would
> come with its own custom index. When your head is under the bonnet, 
> Google doesn't work too well with your Haynes repair manual..

So there I am, with my head under the bonnet of a piece of machinery 
filled with computers and with a suitable power supply - why wouldn't I 
just have a screen mounted on the inside of the bonnet? The other 
computers in my car could further shape my manual, providing information 
based on diagnostics and rectification procedures. Of course all of 
those permutations could be accounted for in the hardcopy too, but then 
I'd have to have my Tarburner fitted with the optional tow bar so I 
could pull the trailer containing my manuals...

Indexing in this case would be dynamic and would be performed by 
combining the information and the circumstances. Why do I need to know 
where the most significant occurrence of "hydrogen fuel cell" is when my 
car has pointed me to the correct repair procedure?


Marcus

Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[hedley.fin...@myob.com]

Marcus, Marcus, Marcus:

> > I attempted to make the point that a study of the third-party plugins
> > would indicate to Adobe the gaps in FrameMaker's functionality that
> > they need to address, and chose indexing plugins as an example where
> > there are many independent plugins to improve this functionality.
> 
> While I agree that plugin usage indicates shortfalls in the current 
> product, I don't accept that Adobe should take direction from that. Most 

> of the plugins mentioned have been developed to support hardcopy 
> publishing, but Adobe know as well as anyone that that market is in 
> chronic decline.

I'm surprised that you of all people should associate functionality with 
presentation.  It's a bit similar to 
separating format from content.   8^)  And I'm surprised that you equate 
indexes only with hardcopy.

I was trying to make the point that when there are a bunch of plugins to 
support indexing (= data entry), 
Adobe should get the message -- that the indexing functionality in 
FrameMaker sucks.  It was NOT a 
plea to reproduce third-party plugins as is, just their functionality -- 
do we really want the slick user 
interface of IXgen (sorry, Frank)?

Whether that index finishes up in a hardcopy book, PDF, help file, or web 
site is immaterial.  Getting index 
entries into FrameMaker is more difficult than it need be.  And hardcopy 
isn't dead.  If you and I are like 
other people, how many times do we print out a help topic or web page to 
read it? 

And in the wonderful world of personalised content that adapts to the 
custom product you have ordered, 
the country you are in, the access privileges you have, and the set of 
topics you have chosen to print, 
wouldn't it be wonderful if you have chosen to print out your own 
personalised workshop manual for your 
custom 2009 Turbo Tarburner with optional hydrogen fuel cell and electric 
motor (as against the standard 
biodiesel motor), racing slicks, two-tone duco and hard-top convertible 
four-door.  And of course this 
personalised manual would come with its own custom index. When your head 
is under the bonnet, 
Google doesn't work too well with your Haynes repair manual..

Regards,
Hedley

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

? MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2007

Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[eric.d...@ca.transport.bombardier.com]

Marcus Carr  on 02/22/2007 10:46:17 PM:
> For our mechanically gifted friend, I'd be 
> inclined to provide a graphic interface and a touch screen that let him 
> drill to the warp drive than compel him to hunt and peck on a toughened 
> keyboard. An index may have its place, but it's a much smaller home than 

> where it used to live.
> 

Now what exactly is the difference between "hunt and peck" and "drill". 
And how is a toughened and oil covered touch-screen and more elegant than 
a toughened keyboard? It's poor form to use derogatory terminology for one 
option we don't support and positive terminology for the one we do. The 
statements also unveil a certain snobbery of IT superiority by denigrating 
those that work in other fields. Denigrate anything linked to the awful 
old hands-on industry and try to enlighten it with beautiful IT derived 
terms and symbology.

Graphical interfaces have their advantages. And when applied where they 
are the best choice/toll for the application they're great. But a purely 
graphical interface is a poor option in terms of efficiency. The mouse has 
it's place, but for MANY actions keyboard shortcuts are the best option. 
And would you suggest the stupidity of a graphical only interface and 
touch-screen with  the abomination of a touch-screen pop-up keyboard for 
data and text tasks?

There is no "hunting or pecking" not "drilling" in either a well designed 
graphical interface or a well designed index if the thing being searched 
for is at the top level (say the engine). But, when searching for 
something more arcane down in the bowels, what is faster and more 
efficient? A bad paper index and a bad on-line index (or ghastly full-text 
search) may both list "hood" or "wrench". But only a good index (hardcopy 
or electronic) will quickly redirect you when you search for "bonnet" or 
"spanner".

Drop the prejudice against indices as a hardcopy only issue and recognise 
that index information is useful metadata, regardless of how it is 
ultimately searched and presented.

Eric L. Dunn
Senior Technical Writer

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notify the sender that you have received this e-mail in error by reply 
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Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[Marcus Carr]

Hedley Finger wrote:

> The original discussion was, generally, about what Adobe needed to do
> to find out what functionality their customers would need in the
> future.
> 
> I attempted to make the point that a study of the third-party plugins
> would indicate to Adobe the gaps in FrameMaker's functionality that
> they need to address, and chose indexing plugins as an example where
> there are many independent plugins to improve this functionality.

While I agree that plugin usage indicates shortfalls in the current 
product, I don't accept that Adobe should take direction from that. Most 
of the plugins mentioned have been developed to support hardcopy 
publishing, but Adobe know as well as anyone that that market is in 
chronic decline. Putting a lot of effort into supporting hardcopy would 
be throwing good money after bad.

I like what Adobe has been doing, adding XSLT support and improving 
their XML handling. Those are the sorts of changes that will keep it 
alive, but they're only first steps. In another ten years, FrameMaker 
will probably need to be a web-based application focused on connecting 
and incorporating information from multiple sources and maybe making it 
look consistent to improve the user's experience. Or something else - I 
don't know. Either way, you can be pretty sure that it's not going to be 
an application for the lossy process of converting information into 
patterns on paper to be posted to someone who will slowly read and 
interpret it back into information. (Yeah, I know, PDF, HTML, but that's 
mostly just paper-to-pixels.)

We had one of the senior XML people from Microsoft in Redmond presenting 
to our developers yesterday - he was showing off things like 
round-tripping, incorporation of microformats into Word and generating 
Word documents from java, all running in Linux to illustrate how little 
dependency there was on Microsoft technology. It was *very* slick. 
Nobody can afford to sit back and wait anymore - the bar gets raised too 
frequently for anyone to recover.

Go long, Adobe!! Blow our socks off!!


-- 
Regards,

Marcus Carr  email:  mcarr at allette.com.au
___
Allette Systems (Australia)  www:http://www.allette.com.au
___
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
- Einstein

Re: Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[eric . dunn]

Marcus Carr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 02/22/2007 10:46:17 PM:
> For our mechanically gifted friend, I'd be 
> inclined to provide a graphic interface and a touch screen that let him 
> drill to the warp drive than compel him to hunt and peck on a toughened 
> keyboard. An index may have its place, but it's a much smaller home than 

> where it used to live.
> 

Now what exactly is the difference between "hunt and peck" and "drill". 
And how is a toughened and oil covered touch-screen and more elegant than 
a toughened keyboard? It's poor form to use derogatory terminology for one 
option we don't support and positive terminology for the one we do. The 
statements also unveil a certain snobbery of IT superiority by denigrating 
those that work in other fields. Denigrate anything linked to the awful 
old hands-on industry and try to enlighten it with beautiful IT derived 
terms and symbology.

Graphical interfaces have their advantages. And when applied where they 
are the best choice/toll for the application they're great. But a purely 
graphical interface is a poor option in terms of efficiency. The mouse has 
it's place, but for MANY actions keyboard shortcuts are the best option. 
And would you suggest the stupidity of a graphical only interface and 
touch-screen with  the abomination of a touch-screen pop-up keyboard for 
data and text tasks?

There is no "hunting or pecking" not "drilling" in either a well designed 
graphical interface or a well designed index if the thing being searched 
for is at the top level (say the engine). But, when searching for 
something more arcane down in the bowels, what is faster and more 
efficient? A bad paper index and a bad on-line index (or ghastly full-text 
search) may both list "hood" or "wrench". But only a good index (hardcopy 
or electronic) will quickly redirect you when you search for "bonnet" or 
"spanner".

Drop the prejudice against indices as a hardcopy only issue and recognise 
that index information is useful metadata, regardless of how it is 
ultimately searched and presented.

Eric L. Dunn
Senior Technical Writer

___
 

This e-mail communication (and any attachment/s) may contain confidential 
or privileged information and is intended only for the individual(s) or 
entity named above and to others who have been specifically authorized to 
receive it. If you are not the intended recipient, please do not read, 
copy, use or disclose the contents of this communication to others. Please 
notify the sender that you have received this e-mail in error by reply 
e-mail, and delete the e-mail subsequently. Please note that in order to 
protect the security of our information systems an AntiSPAM solution is in 
use and will browse through incoming emails. 
Thank you. 
_
 


Ce message (ainsi que le(s) fichier/s), transmis par courriel, peut 
contenir des renseignements confidentiels ou protégés et est destiné à 
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les présentes avisée qu?il est strictement interdit de le diffuser, le 
distribuer ou le reproduire. Si vous l?avez reçu par inadvertance, 
veuillez nous en aviser et détruire ce message. Veuillez prendre note 
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entrant.
Merci. 
_
 


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Re: Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[Marcus Carr]

H4y^3,

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


The example of the Turbo Tarburner was chosen with care.  Even as we
bicker, a major automotive manufacturer is implementing an on-demand
customised workshop manual.

The mechanic will simply enter the car's body number or VIN or
whatever, and a custom manual for just the equipment in that build
will be created on the fly and presented on screen.


It makes perfect sense - the information about what the car is equipped 
with has to be pretty easy to obtain. Even things like the service 
history of a vehicle should be stored electronically in one of its 
numerous computers. Writing it in a book that sits in the glove box for 
the life of the car is pretty silly.



The mechanic will be able to use a TOC, Index, or boolean search
engine to find the instructions they need.  The index is there for
people who, unlike us, do NOT work in the IT industry and have a more
sophisticated approach to information retrieval.  But EVERYBODY knows
how to use a back-of-the-book index -- even if it is on-line!


Maybe, though I usually think of an index as being a collection of 
shortcuts necessary because the information is difficult to find by 
other means. Of course it is difficult to find things in hardcopy, but 
in an electronic product I might question whether the user interface is 
as good as it could be. For our mechanically gifted friend, I'd be 
inclined to provide a graphic interface and a touch screen that let him 
drill to the warp drive than compel him to hunt and peck on a toughened 
keyboard. An index may have its place, but it's a much smaller home than 
where it used to live.


And they will probably print out just the pages they need to fix the 
warp drive.


Perhaps they could load the printer with gasket paper - at least that 
way they'd be able to recycle effectively...


Have a good weekend, Hedley!


Marcus
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Re: Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[hedley . finger]

Marcus^3:

The example of the Turbo Tarburner was chosen with care.  Even as we 
bicker, a major automotive manufacturer is implementing an on-demand 
customised workshop manual.

The mechanic will simply enter the car's body number or VIN or whatever, 
and a custom manual for just the equipment in that build will be created 
on the fly and presented on screen.

The mechanic will be able to use a TOC, Index, or boolean search engine to 
find the instructions they need.  The index is there for people who, 
unlike us, do NOT work in the IT industry and have a more sophisticated 
approach to information retrieval.  But EVERYBODY knows how to use a 
back-of-the-book index -- even if it is on-line!

And they will probably print out just the pages they need to fix the warp 
drive.

Regards,
Hedley 

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

© MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2007
___


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Re: Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[Marcus Carr]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Marcus, Marcus, Marcus:


Hedley, Hedley, Hedley... :-)


I'm surprised that you of all people should associate functionality
with presentation.  It's a bit similar to separating format from
content.   8^)  And I'm surprised that you equate indexes only with
hardcopy.


My point was more that the plugins reflect improvements to the current 
paradigms, as dictated by the application. It's circular, so 
improvements strike me as tinkering at the edge. Take indexes for 
example - we work through and judiciously mark up occurrences of words 
to appear in an index. The decision as to whether a particular 
occurrence of a word is significant is pretty much based on the current 
view of the data, or configuration of the document, or whatever you 
might want to call it.


What if the fragment of information containing an index marker is pulled 
together with other fragments into a new document? Is that index entry 
still relevant? A more useful approach would be to dynamically index 
once the fragments had been assembled. The results aren't likely to be 
any worse than than just trusting the indexing designed for a different 
document...


So would it be better for Adobe to incorporate the plugin, or to try to 
fix the problem? Maybe both in this particular case, but do you get my 
drift? Adobe following users who are following FrameMaker isn't really 
the path to longevity.



I was trying to make the point that when there are a bunch of plugins
to support indexing (= data entry), Adobe should get the message --
that the indexing functionality in FrameMaker sucks.


I didn't say that it didn't suck, I just think that making it suck less 
at one point in the process isn't really going to work for too long.



And hardcopy isn't dead.  If you and I are like other people, how
many times do we print out a help topic or web page to read it?


We have just completed a publishing system for a federal government 
department. It includes hardcopy publication, website and PDAs. They 
used to print and distribute 10,000 hardcopies per release. Since the 
website went live on December 1, the demand has dropped to 1000. In six 
months, it could be down to a couple of hundred. In another year or so, 
the production of hardcopy is scheduled to cease. Hardcopy is as dead as 
a doornail. Never again will as much hardcopy be produced as was 
produced today - you can say that with confidence every morning.



And in the wonderful world of personalised content that adapts to the
custom product you have ordered, the country you are in, the access
privileges you have, and the set of topics you have chosen to print, 
wouldn't it be wonderful if you have chosen to print out your own 
personalised workshop manual for your custom 2009 Turbo Tarburner

with optional hydrogen fuel cell and electric motor (as against the
standard biodiesel motor), racing slicks, two-tone duco and hard-top
convertible four-door.  And of course this personalised manual would
come with its own custom index. When your head is under the bonnet, 
Google doesn't work too well with your Haynes repair manual..


So there I am, with my head under the bonnet of a piece of machinery 
filled with computers and with a suitable power supply - why wouldn't I 
just have a screen mounted on the inside of the bonnet? The other 
computers in my car could further shape my manual, providing information 
based on diagnostics and rectification procedures. Of course all of 
those permutations could be accounted for in the hardcopy too, but then 
I'd have to have my Tarburner fitted with the optional tow bar so I 
could pull the trailer containing my manuals...


Indexing in this case would be dynamic and would be performed by 
combining the information and the circumstances. Why do I need to know 
where the most significant occurrence of "hydrogen fuel cell" is when my 
car has pointed me to the correct repair procedure?



Marcus
___


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Re: Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[hedley . finger]

Marcus, Marcus, Marcus:

> > I attempted to make the point that a study of the third-party plugins
> > would indicate to Adobe the gaps in FrameMaker's functionality that
> > they need to address, and chose indexing plugins as an example where
> > there are many independent plugins to improve this functionality.
> 
> While I agree that plugin usage indicates shortfalls in the current 
> product, I don't accept that Adobe should take direction from that. Most 

> of the plugins mentioned have been developed to support hardcopy 
> publishing, but Adobe know as well as anyone that that market is in 
> chronic decline.

I'm surprised that you of all people should associate functionality with 
presentation.  It's a bit similar to 
separating format from content.   8^)  And I'm surprised that you equate 
indexes only with hardcopy.

I was trying to make the point that when there are a bunch of plugins to 
support indexing (= data entry), 
Adobe should get the message -- that the indexing functionality in 
FrameMaker sucks.  It was NOT a 
plea to reproduce third-party plugins as is, just their functionality -- 
do we really want the slick user 
interface of IXgen (sorry, Frank)?

Whether that index finishes up in a hardcopy book, PDF, help file, or web 
site is immaterial.  Getting index 
entries into FrameMaker is more difficult than it need be.  And hardcopy 
isn't dead.  If you and I are like 
other people, how many times do we print out a help topic or web page to 
read it? 

And in the wonderful world of personalised content that adapts to the 
custom product you have ordered, 
the country you are in, the access privileges you have, and the set of 
topics you have chosen to print, 
wouldn't it be wonderful if you have chosen to print out your own 
personalised workshop manual for your 
custom 2009 Turbo Tarburner with optional hydrogen fuel cell and electric 
motor (as against the standard 
biodiesel motor), racing slicks, two-tone duco and hard-top convertible 
four-door.  And of course this 
personalised manual would come with its own custom index. When your head 
is under the bonnet, 
Google doesn't work too well with your Haynes repair manual..

Regards,
Hedley

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

© MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2007
___


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Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[Marcus Carr]

Hedley Finger wrote:


The original discussion was, generally, about what Adobe needed to do
to find out what functionality their customers would need in the
future.

I attempted to make the point that a study of the third-party plugins
would indicate to Adobe the gaps in FrameMaker's functionality that
they need to address, and chose indexing plugins as an example where
there are many independent plugins to improve this functionality.


While I agree that plugin usage indicates shortfalls in the current 
product, I don't accept that Adobe should take direction from that. Most 
of the plugins mentioned have been developed to support hardcopy 
publishing, but Adobe know as well as anyone that that market is in 
chronic decline. Putting a lot of effort into supporting hardcopy would 
be throwing good money after bad.


I like what Adobe has been doing, adding XSLT support and improving 
their XML handling. Those are the sorts of changes that will keep it 
alive, but they're only first steps. In another ten years, FrameMaker 
will probably need to be a web-based application focused on connecting 
and incorporating information from multiple sources and maybe making it 
look consistent to improve the user's experience. Or something else - I 
don't know. Either way, you can be pretty sure that it's not going to be 
an application for the lossy process of converting information into 
patterns on paper to be posted to someone who will slowly read and 
interpret it back into information. (Yeah, I know, PDF, HTML, but that's 
mostly just paper-to-pixels.)


We had one of the senior XML people from Microsoft in Redmond presenting 
to our developers yesterday - he was showing off things like 
round-tripping, incorporation of microformats into Word and generating 
Word documents from java, all running in Linux to illustrate how little 
dependency there was on Microsoft technology. It was *very* slick. 
Nobody can afford to sit back and wait anymore - the bar gets raised too 
frequently for anyone to recover.


Go long, Adobe!! Blow our socks off!!


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr  email:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
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   - Einstein
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RE: Frame's future

[Maxwell Hoffmann]

Art,

Thank you for posting the link; I enjoyed the Blog. It is comforting to
see Aseem Dokania's statement online that "FrameMaker is here to stay." 

I know that the original posting was about "Frame's future," but I
wanted to make these comments about "Frame's past," which has so much to
do with why the product is still with us today and will be with us
tomorrow.

I was lucky enough to be Frame Technology's employee number 66, and got
to work closely with the founders in the early days (V1.75 through V4).
Founder Charles Corefield was intrigued by Macintosh HyperCard and had
an epiphany of sorts. His initial goal of creating an authoring tool
that worked with hypertext lead to FrameMaker as we know it. As luck and
fate would have it, the SUN UNIX workstation was the easiest for a
developer to obtain at that time. Since SUN MICROSYSTEMS was also one of
Frame's earliest customers, from the "get-go" FrameMaker was designed to
work with high-volume publishing with "many pages, many times."

The product's birth on UNIX also led to simultaneous page layout, word
processing and graphics editing years before multi-tasking on the MAC or
PC. This also placed the product firmly in the world of tech pubs. As
you "old timers" will recall, FrameMaker was about the last product on
the planet to come out with a tables editor, so it had to be "the best
of breed." Founder David Murray worked on that code for over a year, and
table features in FrameMaker are still years ahead of their time. (Who
else can change table styles that easily by importing a template?)


At a 1993 FrameMaker product launch, Frame Tech displayed a live network
that linked Sun UNIX, SCO OS on a PC, Windows, a MAC and some other
flavor of UNIX workstation that I can't recall. We edited the same
document remotely from a single server on each workstation, because
FrameMaker had one binary format. No "save as" required. Not one member
of the press "got it" or understood the importance of a true
"multi-platform" file format! (I made one skeptical member of the press
do the demo himself and insert his grandmother's maiden name; he still
thought the documents were fake.)

Frame Tech gambled with SGML, creating "FrameBuilder", and that
prototype led to the structured editor that makes XML publishing so easy
today with structured FrameMaker.

Ironically, UNIX conventions and quirks led to many of the design UI
"nuisances" that some of us complain about today. (Like, how long will
we have to look at those "building blocks" for automatic numbering?) But
the founders and early developers of FrameMaker were a very rare group
of people who came together at the right time, for the right product and
the right reasons. The underlying "purpose" of the product has remained
true for nearly 21 years, and this is why FrameMaker is still such a
significant force in the market today. My company does language
translation, and 75-80% of our customer technical documents are in
FrameMaker; many started out in Word before they came to us.


I should have made this posting in April of 2006 on the product's 20th
anniversary, but here is a belated "thank you" to the visionary Frame
founders: Charles Corefield, Steve Kirsch, David Murray and Vicky
Blakesly. Your work lives on!



 >Message: 13
 >Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:07:36 -0500
 >From: "Art Campbell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 >Subject: Frame's future
 >To: "Framers (E-mail)" ,
"FrameMaker
 >  Discussion Forum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 >Message-ID:
 >  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
 >
 >A little rich, but interesting reading:
 >
 
>http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2007/02/framemaker_is_and_will_remain.h
tml
 >
 >Art
 >-- 
 >Art Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 >  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52
Vincent
 >   and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
 > No disclaimers apply.
 > DoD 358

Maxwell Hoffmann
Manager of Consulting & Training Solutions
ENLASO Corporation
T: 805 494 9571 * F: 805 435 1920
E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
ENLASO Corporation provides quality enterprise language solutions and
exceeds client expectations through continuing research, development,
and implementation of effective localization processes and technologies.

Visit: www.translate.com for more information or to subscribe to our
complimentary localization newsletter. 

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Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[hedley.fin...@myob.com]

Since my post about plugins diverted this thread from its original topic 
onto a discussion of the merits of plugins, may I amplify my remarks?

The original discussion was, generally, about what Adobe needed to do to 
find out what functionality their customers would need in the future.

I attempted to make the point that a study of the third-party plugins 
would indicate to Adobe the gaps in FrameMaker's functionality that they 
need to address, and chose indexing plugins as an example where there are 
many independent plugins to improve this functionality.  Indexing is 
surely a fundamental function of a publishing application, not bloatware 
as one correspondent implied.  I am not a professional indexer, but any 
user of Sky Index, Cindex, Authex, or Macrex will tell you how *fast* 
these tools are -- progressive matching against previous entries to speed 
up entry, real-time display of the compiled index, editing entries in the 
real-time display (e.g. "dogs/feeding", "dogs/breeds", "dogs/shows" can be 
quickly changed to "canines/feeding", "canines/breeds", "canines/shows" by 
changing the main entry "dogs" in one place), fast construction of sort 
order, application of char formats, view of entries in page order showing 
what entries are on what page, etc.**

These many plugins are surely a pointer to a need to improve the indexing 
functionality "out of the box", either by Adobe developing this 
functionality to a level comparable to the standalone tools or by 
licensing in suitable third-party plugins.

While there are many ingenious plugins available that various people have 
developed to scratch an itch shared by only a few, FrameMaker customers 
should not have to hunt for third-party tools that address *fundamental* 
functionality.  I am sure that Frank Elmore would be happy to license 
FrameScript/ElmScript if Adobe were willing to pay an appropriate fee, for 
instance.

Regards,
Hedley


** Amazingly, none of these "smart" tools embed the entries in the source 
file as Word and FrameMaker do.  If the pagination changes there are some 
crude methods of reassigning page numbers but if, say, the pagination is 
radically different in a new edition (think of the various paperback, 
hardcover and coffee-table edition of Dava Sobel's "Longitude") the index 
has to be manually recompiled! Truly!

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

? MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2007

Third-party or "out of the box" plugins [was "re: Frame's future"]

[hedley . finger]

Since my post about plugins diverted this thread from its original topic 
onto a discussion of the merits of plugins, may I amplify my remarks?

The original discussion was, generally, about what Adobe needed to do to 
find out what functionality their customers would need in the future.

I attempted to make the point that a study of the third-party plugins 
would indicate to Adobe the gaps in FrameMaker's functionality that they 
need to address, and chose indexing plugins as an example where there are 
many independent plugins to improve this functionality.  Indexing is 
surely a fundamental function of a publishing application, not bloatware 
as one correspondent implied.  I am not a professional indexer, but any 
user of Sky Index, Cindex, Authex, or Macrex will tell you how *fast* 
these tools are -- progressive matching against previous entries to speed 
up entry, real-time display of the compiled index, editing entries in the 
real-time display (e.g. "dogs/feeding", "dogs/breeds", "dogs/shows" can be 
quickly changed to "canines/feeding", "canines/breeds", "canines/shows" by 
changing the main entry "dogs" in one place), fast construction of sort 
order, application of char formats, view of entries in page order showing 
what entries are on what page, etc.**

These many plugins are surely a pointer to a need to improve the indexing 
functionality "out of the box", either by Adobe developing this 
functionality to a level comparable to the standalone tools or by 
licensing in suitable third-party plugins.

While there are many ingenious plugins available that various people have 
developed to scratch an itch shared by only a few, FrameMaker customers 
should not have to hunt for third-party tools that address *fundamental* 
functionality.  I am sure that Frank Elmore would be happy to license 
FrameScript/ElmScript if Adobe were willing to pay an appropriate fee, for 
instance.

Regards,
Hedley


** Amazingly, none of these "smart" tools embed the entries in the source 
file as Word and FrameMaker do.  If the pagination changes there are some 
crude methods of reassigning page numbers but if, say, the pagination is 
radically different in a new edition (think of the various paperback, 
hardcover and coffee-table edition of Dava Sobel's "Longitude") the index 
has to be manually recompiled! Truly!

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

© MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2007
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Re: Frame's future

[Scott Prentice]

If you're looking for the complete (as far as I know) list of plugins 
available for FrameMaker, check out our ToolSearch database ..


   http://www.leximation.com/toolsearch/?type=P&baseapp=FM

This database includes tools other that FM plugins as well, but you can 
filter on specific types. If you know of plugins (or other interesting 
publishing-related tools), please let me know!


...scott

Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com
+1.415.485.1892



Gordon McLean wrote:

Whilst it may be wrong to compare this scenario to one offered by a free
product...

Firefox and extensions anyone? Add in some charges/licensing and you have
what seems to be a good model that is flexible enough for everyone involved,
including Adobe?

I agree with Shlomo, I think a lot of people use FM out of the box, and I'd
guess that it's largely because it's not made obvious that there ARE
plugins, and then once you are aware they exist, finding them can be quite
tricky (that list of Index plugins includes some I've never even heard
of...).

Gordon

-Original Message-
Subject: RE: Frame's future

Licensing and integrating existing plug-ins is an excellent way to extend
functionality of a core product. In response to Hedley's suggestion, I
mentioned the DITA and Apply Master Pages plug-ins as examples for plug-ins
that are already incorporated into FrameMaker.

There are many high-quality plug-ins out there that could significantly
improve the end user experience -- handling tables, indexing, markers,
conversion, manage formats, archiving, and many more. The FrameScript
runtime is also a great idea.

Even though some of the existing 3rd party add-ons are low cost (or even
free), my impression is that the vast majority of FrameMaker users use
FrameMaker as it comes out of the box (this is probably true with respect to
other products).


Shlomo Perets



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solely for the
addressee. If you have received this communication in error please remove it 
and inform us via
telephone or email. Although we take all possible steps to ensure mail and 
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are free from malicious content, malware and viruses, we cannot accept any 
responsibility
whatsoever for any changes to content outwith our administrative bounds. The 
views represented
within this mail are solely the view of the author and do not reflect the views 
of the organisation
as a whole.

Graham Technology plc
Registered in Scotland company no. SC143434
Registered Office India of Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, Scotland PA4 9LH

http://www.grahamtechnology.com



  


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Re: Frame's future

[John Posada]

I'd expect that Adobe would not do it without some sort of financial
payment to framescript's developer.


--- Rick Quatro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> FrameScript's developer will not do this because it removes an
> incentive for 
> people to purchase FrameScript. Hundreds of scripts would be
> distributed 
> with no renumeration for FrameScript's developer. FrameScript is a
> bargain 
> at $149. Even the simplest scripts provide a quick payback in time
> savings. 

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never 
actually known what the question is."
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RE: Frame's future

[Gordon McLean]

Whilst it may be wrong to compare this scenario to one offered by a free
product...

Firefox and extensions anyone? Add in some charges/licensing and you have
what seems to be a good model that is flexible enough for everyone involved,
including Adobe?

I agree with Shlomo, I think a lot of people use FM out of the box, and I'd
guess that it's largely because it's not made obvious that there ARE
plugins, and then once you are aware they exist, finding them can be quite
tricky (that list of Index plugins includes some I've never even heard
of...).

Gordon

-Original Message-
Subject: RE: Frame's future

Licensing and integrating existing plug-ins is an excellent way to extend
functionality of a core product. In response to Hedley's suggestion, I
mentioned the DITA and Apply Master Pages plug-ins as examples for plug-ins
that are already incorporated into FrameMaker.

There are many high-quality plug-ins out there that could significantly
improve the end user experience -- handling tables, indexing, markers,
conversion, manage formats, archiving, and many more. The FrameScript
runtime is also a great idea.

Even though some of the existing 3rd party add-ons are low cost (or even
free), my impression is that the vast majority of FrameMaker users use
FrameMaker as it comes out of the box (this is probably true with respect to
other products).


Shlomo Perets



This email (and any attachments) is private and confidential, and is intended 
solely for the
addressee. If you have received this communication in error please remove it 
and inform us via
telephone or email. Although we take all possible steps to ensure mail and 
attachments
are free from malicious content, malware and viruses, we cannot accept any 
responsibility
whatsoever for any changes to content outwith our administrative bounds. The 
views represented
within this mail are solely the view of the author and do not reflect the views 
of the organisation
as a whole.

Graham Technology plc
Registered in Scotland company no. SC143434
Registered Office India of Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, Scotland PA4 9LH

http://www.grahamtechnology.com


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RE: Frame's future

[Shlomo Perets]

You wrote:


Please update to a current version of the FrameMaker Application Pack
for DITA.

> FrameMaker 7.2 DITA support is "Based on a core plugin developed and
> maintained by Leximation" (quoted from the DITA > About window).

Is this a problem? Adobe picked a great starting point for the app pack,
in my opinion.

> In fact, my FrameMaker console tells me that the beta period for this
> component has expired, and that I should contact Leximation for an
> update (even though it was downloaded from Adobe).

Then you are using an old version. The second beta should not have this
issue.



Licensing and integrating existing plug-ins is an excellent way to extend 
functionality of a core product. In response to Hedley's suggestion, I 
mentioned the DITA and Apply Master Pages plug-ins as examples for plug-ins 
that are already incorporated into FrameMaker.


There are many high-quality plug-ins out there that could significantly 
improve the end user experience -- handling tables, indexing, markers, 
conversion, manage formats, archiving, and many more. The FrameScript 
runtime is also a great idea.


Even though some of the existing 3rd party add-ons are low cost (or even 
free), my impression is that the vast majority of FrameMaker users use 
FrameMaker as it comes out of the box (this is probably true with respect 
to other products).



Shlomo Perets

MicroType, http://www.microtype.com * ToolbarPlus Express for FrameMaker
FrameMaker/Acrobat training & consulting * FrameMaker-to-Acrobat 
TimeSavers/Assistants




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RE: Frame's future

[Max Dunn]

Hi Shlomo,

Please update to a current version of the FrameMaker Application Pack
for DITA.

> FrameMaker 7.2 DITA support is "Based on a core plugin developed and 
> maintained by Leximation" (quoted from the DITA > About window).

Is this a problem? Adobe picked a great starting point for the app pack,
in my opinion.

> In fact, my FrameMaker console tells me that the beta period for this 
> component has expired, and that I should contact Leximation for an 
> update (even though it was downloaded from Adobe).

Then you are using an old version. The second beta should not have this
issue. 

Thanks,

Max

--
Max Dunn
Silicon Publishing 




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re: Frame's future

[Shlomo Perets]

Hedley Finger wrote:

> Another thing Adobe could do is look at all the plug-ins and mods that
> various people have come up with to scratch an itch -- or stem a raging
> haemorrhage.  For example, there are a whole bunch of indexing tools --
> IXgen, emDex, Index Tools Pro, IndexRef, etc. -- suggesting that there is
> a crying need for a decent indexing interface on  a par with Cindex or Sky
> Index.

FrameMaker 7.2 DITA support is "Based on a core plugin developed and 
maintained by Leximation" (quoted from the DITA > About window). In fact, 
my FrameMaker console tells me that the beta period for this component has 
expired, and that I should contact Leximation for an update (even though it 
was downloaded from Adobe).


FrameMaker 7.x "Apply Master Pages" is also based on a plug-in.


David Eason wrote: (in response to Hedley)

> You named several indexing tools. I have been very comfortable with
> Index Tools Pro. How do you rate (and rank) the tools you named for
> usability, flexibility, user-friendliness, adaptability to Stuctured
> Frame, and other characteristics?

See http://www.microtype.com/links.html for links to in-depth reviews of 
the various indexing add-ons.



Shlomo Perets

MicroType, http://www.microtype.com * ToolbarPlus Express for FrameMaker
FrameMaker/Acrobat training & consulting * FrameMaker-to-Acrobat 
TimeSavers/Assistants


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Re: Frame's future

[Syed Zaeem Hosain]

Hi, Rick.

Rick Quatro wrote:
FrameScript's developer will not do this because it removes an incentive 
for people to purchase FrameScript. Hundreds of scripts would be 
distributed with no renumeration for FrameScript's developer. 


Unless Adobe paid some them small royalty portion of the sales cost
for each run-time shipped with FrameMaker.

This *could* add up in a hurry, :) even when compared to the $149
per license copy for the "developer" version.

> FrameScript is a bargain at $149. Even the simplest scripts provide a
> quick payback in time savings. Any FrameMaker environment can benefit
> from some form of automation.

I don't know how many FrameScript licenses have been sold vs. the
number of FrameMaker licenses, of course ...

But, surely, it might be interesting for them to consider this! :)

Z
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Re: Frame's future

[Rick Quatro]

FrameScript's developer will not do this because it removes an incentive for 
people to purchase FrameScript. Hundreds of scripts would be distributed 
with no renumeration for FrameScript's developer. FrameScript is a bargain 
at $149. Even the simplest scripts provide a quick payback in time savings. 
Any FrameMaker environment can benefit from some form of automation.


Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing
585-659-8267
www.frameexpert.com


One of my suggestions in a blog post a while back is that they do 
something similar with FrameScript to what they did with WWP Standard. 
Include a run-time version of Framescript that would let people run 
scripts but not edit or write them.


It'd give the Framescript developers a bigger market to shoot at and add a 
lot of value to Frame.


Keith


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