Amiga Inc. announces new hardware

[Harrison]

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.

[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.