Amiga Inc. announces new hardware

[Submeg]

Thinking back on it, I don't actually think I used the Word .doc format when I was editing a file on both an Amiga and PC. I'm sure I used the much more primative .rtf format and I'm sure it was because we had to sometimes use Macs!

I send you my sympathy Harrison, you pour soul, can you show us, with this chart, where the Mac touched you?

I am running office 07 and its a bitch because I always have to save in .doc, but I cant use the equation editor unless Im in .docx Gah!

[AlexJ]

Really? That's changed then. When Macromedia first took over Flash and launched Flash 3 they released the specifications of SWF as an open source format. A number of companies including Adobe quickly released their own competing software that supported the format but never managed to match it. The positive effect was that a lot of creative software does now support exporting projects to swf format. I find this most useful with Illustrator and 3DSMax as I can output files created in those packages and then load them directly into Flash. Although I do tend to export from 3DSMax as illustrator files more as it retains more information.

Maybe this changed when Adobe took over the company. They have never been one to like sharing.

The licence agreement still refers to Macromedia so I assume it's was brought in pre-Adobe.

With regard to Adobe not being one to share, three letters: PDF. With the exception of HTML, I can't think of an open format that's more widely used today.

[Harrison]

PDF is an exception I agree. But they did create the PDF format with the intention of sharing the format and trying to make it a standard print based transport format from the start. Something that I think it has achieved quite well, especially since the internet increased in popularity over the past 8 years.

[AlexJ]

PDF is an exception I agree. But they did create the PDF format with the intention of sharing the format and trying to make it a standard print based transport format from the start. Something that I think it has achieved quite well, especially since the internet increased in popularity over the past 8 years.

What else have Adobe got? PSD is intended as an internal Photoshop file format not intended for distributing (and PS will quite happily export to any other image format). TIFF is not used that much any more. Can't really think of any other major Adobe formats.

[Submeg]

TIFF was done by Adobe? I never knew that

[AlexJ]

TIFF was done by Adobe? I never knew that

Well it was originally done by Aldus, who were bought by Adobe around 1995. So Adobe now control the format.

[Harrison]

The illustrator format .ai is a major format Adobe also control. Many other products can export to the illustrator format which is extremely useful for vector based work. Not sure how the licensing for that format works for third party products using it though. In the past I've had mapping companies supply me with OS maps in ai format which has saved a lot of time and work. Equally exporting from 3D applications in the format is great for Flash and illustrator work.

What else. Well since they purchased Macromedia they attained all of there formats. An application I use a lot is Macromedia Director and the DXR format, also exported as the shockwave dcr format for the web is, while probably not common to many, widely used in the industry. It can be used for completely interactive multimedia presentations, or interactive multimedia such as games, physics based 3D and many more things. Architects use shockwave quite a lot.

Adobe also have a large range of software such as Indesign that is fast becoming the main desktop publishing appication and leaving Quark far behind. It's own file format is therefore becoming more important and other application such as QuarkXpress may soon need to be able to import it (instead of Indesgn importing from quark!).

There are many other examples too.

[Submeg]

Whoa that is quite impressive! Never knew there was that much!

[AlexJ]

The illustrator format .ai is a major format Adobe also control. Many other products can export to the illustrator format which is extremely useful for vector based work. Not sure how the licensing for that format works for third party products using it though. In the past I've had mapping companies supply me with OS maps in ai format which has saved a lot of time and work.

Very true, but there is already an open vector format in SVG (which again is XML-based). Having not used Adobe Illustrator, I can't say by how much .ai is superior to .svg

[Harrison]

That is true. But as with many file formats, illustrator has been around for so long that the file format has a lot of third party support built into many other applications that have equally been around for a long time. And so it's userbase is very large and will be hard to esily replace the format with anything newer.

And this is equally true of many other formats too. Although the move to xml formats is a great idea, to unify standards and try to make everything standardised, I do think the older legacy/proprietary formats originally created for specific applications will remain with us for many years to come and live alongside the newer formats. Too many people are still using specific older software to be able to suddenly abandon them. Just look at the support still built into many applications for ancient formats such as lotus 123 and that hasn't been the standard since the DOS era.

But I am in full support for standardising formats. Having a single file type for each type of data would make life so much easier. Look at bitmap image formats for one. I would like to see png fully replace gif as it can do so much more and always tends to result in smaller file sizes, but png is still not fully supported by all browsers yet (IE) so gif can still not be abandoned. This is equally true of many other formats.