Adobe Eyes Linux Desktop Strategy
83794
Signs are pointing to a growing interest in desktop Linux and open-source software at Adobe Systems Inc., the maker of popular imaging and graphics software and the standard-bearer of PDF.
70757
Blog: Online-commerce giant releases faster APIs, shows off desktop application written with Adobe Systems' AIR.
219628
Adobe says high dynamic range photography and panorama creation are in Lightroom's purview. Also: why the software development kit isn't as easy as you might think.
384398
Adobe Systems Inc. released a new version this week of the popular Acrobat desktop publishing system, with features for both authors and recipients of electronic documents.
370366
In its quest for the paperless office, Adobe Systems is gearing up for sweeping changes to its Acrobat and Reader platforms. The San Jose, Calif.
15239
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen spoke at the&#160;Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco,&#160;and IDG News Service had a chance to interview him before his appearance at the event. In this edited version of the conversation, Chizen spoke about Adobe&#39;s strategy for hosted software, its baby steps in the online advertising business, and its AIR technology for building desktop-based rich Internet applications.IDGNS: What is Web 2.0 to you, and what is Adobe&#39;s role in it?Chizen: To me, Web 2.0 is the realization of everything we talked about in the Web 1.0 era: The ability to take advantage of Web services, to have rich Internet applications, to have socialization and collaboration, to have hosted applications. These things were talked about but hard to do. Web 2.0 is the execution of that, and Adobe is the enabler of a lot of that experience.Most of the images on the Web have probably been touched by Photoshop. Most of the video is probably edited or enhanced with Premiere. Most of the animation and video playback is Flash. A lot of the rich Internet applications are being built with our Flex framework, taking advantage of Flash. The graphics [involve] Illustrator, and on and on.IDGNS: It seems that in recent months, the Adobe story has gotten more complicated than it was a few years ago as the company moves into new areas and technologies like hosted applications. Are you concerned that this might confuse and alienate existing customers?Chizen: Your perception is accurate. Our business has gotten more complex and more diversified. As a company that has been growing 20 to 30 percent a year, in order for us to sustain that growth, we need to address more customers with different products and solutions. But our mission hasn&#39;t changed for the past 25 years: To help enable the communication of rich ideas and information in a reliable, compelling, engaging manner.Twenty-five years ago we did that on paper with [printing technology] PostScript. What has changed is the world around us: More people are trying to communicate more information than ever before, so we&#39;re able to address more markets.Am I concerned we&#39;ll be alienating our current customers? No. As long as we continue to serve their needs, we&#39;ll be okay.IDGNS: Do you currently generate any revenue from online ads?Chizen: A very tiny amount today via a hosted application called Premiere Express. It lets consumers do simple video editing. We offer it through partners like Photobucket [and MTV]. Some of those business models are advertising-based. We&#39;ll continue to experiment.Our Adobe Media Player [now in beta] is also an ad-based business model. We enable broadcasters and content providers to make money on their content through a very clever advertising user interface. We&#39;re also working on a Photoshop Express, which will let consumers do image editing. It&#39;ll be either ad-based or subscription-based.IDGNS: Do you foresee online ad revenue becoming a noticeable part of Adobe&#39;s revenue mix?Chizen: It depends on how many years you look ahead. Many of our core customers care so much about the quality of the information that they&#39;re trying to provide that they want their solutions to be unencumbered and won&#39;t put up with advertising. But there will be more casual users who will want our capabilities but not pay directly for it, and that&#39;s where you&#39;ll see advertising.IDGNS: Do you offer any of your packaged software products in full-featured but hosted versions?Chizen: No, we don&#39;t.IDGNS: Will there come a time when your full-featured products will be offered as a hosted SaaS (software-as-a-service) model?Chizen: Yes, but over time. To benefit from a full-featured version of Photoshop, the experience as a hosted application wouldn&#39;t be very good, and that&#39;s because of bandwidth speeds. The capability of broadband doesn&#39;t equate to what you can get from your local computer.You&#39;ll see us do hybrid applications that take advantage of the desktop, but where appropriate, we&#39;ll provide hosted functionality for things like sharing. Our Kuler [web-hosted application] lets people collaborate using different color settings, [and works in conjunction with] producs like Illustrator, which resides on the desktop.That&#39;s going to happen over the next number of years: We&#39;ll have these hybrid environments for full-featured applications. As broadband gets greater and greater, there&#39;s the possibility of taking the desktop app and moving it to the host. Five years is probably the minimum.But the capability of the desktop and laptop is advancing so quickly ... and broadband capability isn&#39;t increasing that rapidly. Even if it increased that rapidly, people are throwing more data into the pipes, which will slow down the delivery of the information.IDGNS: So you&#39;re seeing interest from users in hosted software that simplifies workgroup collaboration?Chizen: For more casual users, we&#39;ll have hosted services. We announced a service recently called Share [in beta version], which lets you extend what Acrobat does or what the Adobe Reader does -- document sharing, PDF creation, word processing -- which will all be hosted, but you&#39;re still going to want to do a lot of things on your desktop.IDGNS: Do you agree the future of software delivery is that SaaS/hosted model?Chizen: Eventually. The key is how long does that take. It depends on the application and on broadband capabilities. I&#39;m smart enough to say that will be in 20 years probably.[Chizen later said during his presentation at the conference that he foresaw the Adobe software delivery model changing from packaged applications to SaaS about 10 years from now.]IDGNS: Does the SaaS/hosted model also present a threat to Adobe if stealthy competitors develop from the ground up as hosted software and offer some credible competitors to Adobe packaged applications?Chizen: Any shift of delivery model or business model is a threat to any company like Adobe that makes a lot of their revenue selling desktop software. It&#39;s up to us to make sure that as the environment is capable of delivering functionality to users, that Adobe is there before anyone else.What we&#39;ve done in video editing with Premiere Express, what we&#39;re doing with Photoshop Express with Share, what we do today with PDF creation online are great examples of Adobe being ahead of others in taking advantage of the changing landscape.IDGNS: When did Adobe develop a sense of urgency for reacting to the SaaS trend?Chizen: Back in the first dot-com wave is when we became sensitive to it, and we developed Create PDF Online. I&#39;d say it was a little over two years ago when we got a sense of urgency around it. Our first major hosted application was the Acrobat Connect real-time conferencing product.IDGNS: You&#39;re in the process of&#160;acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, maker of the Buzzword hosted word processing application. Are you interested in having hosted spreadsheet and presentation applications and forming an office productivity suite?Chizen: Spreadsheet, probably not, but the presentation application is intriguing. The trick is to develop one or acquire one where we believe we&#39;re differentiated by leveraging the AIR platform. What excited us about Buzzword wasn&#39;t being in the word processing business but that it&#39;s a great example of what AIR can do. It also fits really nicely into our Acrobat document collaboration strategy.IDGNS: Do you see Adobe competing against Google&#39;s Apps suite of communication and collaboration hosted software and against Microsoft Office?Chizen: It&#39;s more about offering the service to someone who is already collaborating with PDF documents, sharing their documents, or protecting their documents with us online and who wants to be able to edit or create a document. We&#39;re not looking to target the serious word-processing Office user, but for those people who are in our ecosystem, involved in a collaborative workflow, we want to make sure we can address their needs.IDGNS: Why is the AIR approach preferable to building an offline component for browser-based applications along the lines of what Google is doing with Google Gears?Chizen: For some applications, the browser is great, and having offline capabilities will be a great extension. But for other applications, we want complete control over the user experience [and the browser is inadequate.]That&#39;s where we really differentiate: The ability to go a little further in local capabilities, the ability to drag and drop easily from the desktop to the application and back. Those things would be tough to do with a browser. And some applications, you want to stay in them and don&#39;t want to be encumbered by a browser. You want local presence, and that&#39;s where we really shine.IDGNS: What&#39;s your latest take on Microsoft&#39;s Silverlight plug-in for delivering video and interactive graphics on the Web like Flash?Chizen: It appears to be trying to imitate the Flash player: It runs in the browser and is designed for interactivity, animation, and video. Fortunately, we&#39;ve had a 10-year head start, and we have a complete ecosystem around Flash.We&#39;re on 99.1 percent of all computers and on 300 million non-PC devices. More than 70 percent of video is streamed through Flash player. Millions of developers and designers use Adobe tools.It&#39;s going to take Microsoft a long time to catch up, we believe. In the meantime, we continue to advance Flash, and we&#39;re working on AIR. I take Microsoft seriously, but we&#39;re in pretty good shape.
667948
Adobe plans to provide technology from its LiveCycle Data Services suite of development tools to the open-source community.
399051
(InfoWorld) - Developers have high hopes for Adobe's newly named AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software, but reservations remain about the technology's cross-platform capability and learning curve. Formerly called Apollo, AIR is described by the company as a cross-OS runtime enabling developers to use existing Web development skills to build Internet applications that can run on the desktop. Currently available in a beta release, it is due to ship by the end of the year. "I would say that [AIR] creates kind of a new breed of applications that are somewhere between traditional desktop applications and Web applications," said Lee Brimelow, senior design technologist at early AIR user Frog Design. "It kind of opens up a new world to Web developers. It enables Web developers to enter the desktop space," Brimelow said. "It allows you, for example, to take an online e-mail account like Yahoo Mail [and] you could have an offline app that allows you to read your mail and compose mails," he added. "One of the major [benefits] of AIR is that it is cross-platform so we donât have to worry about 'Is it a Mac thing, is it a PC thing?' " AIR is more or less a wrapper for Flash, said Gabor Vida, president of Teknision, a rich media application developer. But it is not tied to the operating system, he said. "We just deploy an AIR file, and it's the exact same file whether on a PC or on a Mac," with Linux support due soon, Vida said. AIR, however, is not as powerful as Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation or Apple's Cocoa development technologies, Brimelow said. With those, developers have fuller access to the user's hard drive and OS capabilities, he said. But WPF is only for Windows, Brimelow noted. One developer who said he has not tried AIR nonetheless was interested in it. AIR could be an improvement compared with third-party solutions for running the Flash projector offline, such as FlashJester, said Kurt Suchomel, founder of the Vermont Flash User Group and a developer at Draftfcb, an ad agency that also develops Web sites. "Itâs exciting to me to hear that there's a possible product that's something similar to that," but could offer more versatility, Suchomel said. But he expressed concerns about how effective AIR will be on different operating systems, wondering if there will be "possible gotchas on each platform." AIR is supposed to be identical on the Mac and on the PC, Suchomel said. "I would just hope that it is truly that way," he said. "It will "be interesting to see what the bugs are. "My natural concern is the learning curve for developing with Apollo, even though it does support all the major Web technologies [HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, and Flash]," Suchomel said. "I am looking forward to developing in Apollo since it gives me a way to create one rich Internet application and run [it] on multiple operating systems." Another developer who also had not experimented with AIR expressed similar curiosity. "It just seems like it's going to be really cool," said Steve Farwell, marketing director at Traveland USA, which sells recreational vehicles. He also is host of the Orange County Flash User Group in Southern California, or OCFlash. Farwell said he liked the idea of combining Web applications with desktop applications that can work with the local file system.Â  AIR could have benefits in applications such as hospital systems, where a physician has intermittent connectivity to the network, he said. Self-employed developer and AIR beta user Robert Hall, manager of the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group, reiterated what Adobe said about the project. "It makes it really easy to take your existing Web apps and all the skills you have â¦ and repurpose them for desktop apps," he said. "For me, the big benefit is I'm able to leverage my existing skills that I've been working on for years," Hall said. As the product still in a beta form, the feature set is not complete, Hall cautioned. AIR "fills a major, major niche," said Gordon Clarke, manager of FlexUserGroup.org.Â  Developers can move to the desktop and create client-server applications without having to learn a new language, he said. Sometimes-connected applications offer advantages, Clarke said. "If you want to have rich media, it's better to have a lot of it coming from your desktop than having to download it off the Web," he said. Clarke likened AIR to the iPod, where music can be downloaded or heard on the Web, and Microsoft Outlook, which lets users browse e-mail offline. At effectiveUI, which developed the eBay Desktop shopping application using AIR, the president of the company said AIR could supplement or displace Java in different instances. AIR could be used to help build GUIs (a weakness for Java), while Java could reside on the back-end server, said effectiveUI President Anthony Franco. "One of the things that Java developers struggle with is developing interfaces," Franco said. "[AIR] could replace Java in the GUI development of an application." Adobe's Flex and Flash are part of the Apollo, or AIR, framework, Franco said. But AIR differs from Microsoft's new Silverlight technology, in that Silverlight is more of a competitor to the Flash Player, he said. AIR has enabled effectiveUI to develop the type of application sought by clients and to do so within budget, Franco said. The advent of AIR also will mean development of office suites running on AIR, said Chris Charlton, group manager of the Los Angeles Flash Users Group and a Web architect at Adobe solution provider Almer/Blank. Packaged software, chat applications, and business tools will result, he said. AIR applications are going to pull some market share from existing applications that have been on a single platform only, Charlton said. Adobe's new technology represents perhaps the next evolution of how people engage with the Internet,Â  providing functions of theÂ  browser without all the overhead, said Michael Lebowitz,Â  CEO of Web design firm Big Spaceship. The firm is using AIR to build a media center application for energy drink company Red Bull. "The browser right now is sort of monolithic. It's a one-stop shop for anything you might do on the Web," Lebowitz said. "The problem with that is that's not always effective."
287477
It's a long-standing joke in the free software world that this will be the year when we see GNU/Linux make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that.  What's really funny is that all the key GNU/Linux desktop apps are already being widely deployed, but not in the way that people have long assumed.
141966
Analysts and authors expect Adobe to release a new version of its publishing software soon.
650395
Microsoft may be ahead of Adobe with programming languages and developer tools, but it is playing catch up at graphic design applications.
593240
Novell this week spruced up a version of its Linux desktop aimed squarely at enterprise users.
399419
The publishing software giant Adobe Systems Inc. today introduced Adobe Acrobat 7.0 software, the company&#39;s desktop applications suite for creating and viewing PDF (Portable Document Format) files.
659188
A Reuters story this morning suggested that Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, in an interview with the German financial weekly Euro am Sonntag, threatened to sue Microsoft if the outcome of antitrust proceedings against that company by the EC did not turn out in Adobe's favor. But our read of the interview suggests Chizen actually held this out as an option of last resort.
607259
Plans call for a Linux-based platform that will be usable in multiple environments, including on PCs, servers and PDAs.
723796
When Novell&#39;s Linux desktop arrives at the end of this year it will be stripped down to avoid integration problems and to keep it simple for users.
503823
Choice is an important element of free software, so it's perhaps no surprise that even at the level of the desktop environment there is more than one offering.  But the main alternatives â KDE and GNOME â represent more than just a way of placing icons on a screen.  Nowhere is that more evident than in their respective views on Microsoft's OOXML document standard, which are very far apart â perhaps dangerously so. read more