New PDF creating software.

[Cergorach]

What I see is another bunch of people too clueless to tell potential customers what platform their products are for.

"You mean people use something besides Windows?"

"Well, Duh."

(Sorry, but the attitude shown by companies such as this bugs me.)

Erm... Wasn't Adobe one of the big supporters of Apple with Photoshop and Illustrator (i learned to use these programs on an Apple)? Quark was also first out on an Apple i think, only later versions where for the PC...

Don't expect Adobe or Quark to port to Unix/Linux just yet, the costs are to high and the customers to few, and chances are that they would have to release the source code for their apps if they released for Linux (something they don't want to do)...

 

[Henry]

Agreed - we're lucky Adobe makes WINDOWS versions at all.

 

[Dimwhit]

Actually, the Windows market is now Adobe's primary source of revenue. Their Mac business is smaller.

Quote: Originally Posted by mythusmage
What I see is another bunch of people too clueless to tell potential customers what platform their products are for.

"You mean people use something besides Windows?"

"Well, Duh."

(Sorry, but the attitude shown by companies such as this bugs me.)​

Erm... Wasn't Adobe one of the big supporters of Apple with Photoshop and Illustrator (i learned to use these programs on an Apple)? Quark was also first out on an Apple i think, only later versions where for the PC...

Don't expect Adobe or Quark to port to Unix/Linux just yet, the costs are to high and the customers to few, and chances are that they would have to release the source code for their apps if they released for Linux (something they don't want to do)...

Actually, I think he might have been referring to the program linked in the original post, which is a non-Adobe pdf generator. But I could be wrong.

 

[Cergorach]

Ah.. Whoops ;-)

 

[mythusmage]

Ah.. Whoops ;-)

You got it. You have to burrow down a few levels to find out, the economy PDF maker is Windows only. As if there's some sort of law that says, "Thou shall not acknowledge the existence of any OS besides Holy Windows."

Either that, or they're clueless twits.

"Tell people what platform our software works with on the product page, or even the front page? Isn't there a law against that?"

 

[Dimwhit]

I'm right there with you on this one, mythusmage. As a Mac user, I've had to deal with this for a while. However, with Linux quickly gaining ground on Windows, it's going to be more and more of an issue. It's already a larger market that the Mac, so porting to multiple platforms will be necessary, and at the least, software companies are going to need to be obvious about which platforms they support!

Fortunately for Linux and Mac, they're not too different, so if you port to one, the other will be fairly easy to do.

 

[isidorus]

Don't expect Adobe or Quark to port to Unix/Linux just yet, the costs are to high and the customers to few, and chances are that they would have to release the source code for their apps if they released for Linux (something they don't want to do)...

Humm! the reader is ported to Linux/unix. The cost maybe way to high and customers to few, but it would be nice to have for Linux/unix fans.

Oh Yeah, they do not have to release the sourcecode at all, compiling it on GCC does not require that, it would be nice but why would they. Plenty of commerical programs on Linux/Unix mainly backend stuff. Oracle runs on Linux and they never released sourcecode for it, so does stuff from IBM. What I am getting out just because it is Free Os means people have to release there sourcecode.

I am using PDFcreator myself, and now If I could only find a Vb clone on linux and translate My La Weather Gen to.

 

[mythusmage]

The Funny Thing Is...

I'm right there with you on this one, mythusmage. As a Mac user, I've had to deal with this for a while. However, with Linux quickly gaining ground on Windows, it's going to be more and more of an issue. It's already a larger market that the Mac, so porting to multiple platforms will be necessary, and at the least, software companies are going to need to be obvious about which platforms they support!

Fortunately for Linux and Mac, they're not too different, so if you port to one, the other will be fairly easy to do.

Heard from a chap at MacSoft some years back that the big thing when porting Windows software to the Mac was, cleaning up the code. Seems that Windows is a bit too error tolerant, so that mistakes that would stymie a Mac present no problem to a Windows machine. That alone can add a lot to the cost of porting.

Hopefully, as the Linux market grows, more software companies will start producing Linux products. Which will lead to more people switching to Linux. Which will lead to...

Even better (as far as I'm concerned) would be a software consortium doing an IBM clone version of Apple's OSX, based on the Darwin kernel. With the aim of producing a platform as compatible with the Mac, and Unix machines, as possible. To minimize the work needed to port software from one platform to another and so maximize sales as much as possible.

Alan's Weird Idea #2,952

A line of software that comes with a built in optimizer. The customer would load the software into his machine. The software would then check the machine's harddrive to 'see' what platform is being used and then optimize the program for that platform. Thus the same disk could be used on multiple platforms with no need for manual porting.

Obviously this would require software platforms more 'compatible' with other platforms than presently.

Of course, even better would be a dictat from the Feds telling the computer business to come up with a common standard, hardware and software, within a certain period, or a standard will be imposed. But in the present "Big Business is God" climate that aint very likely.

 

[Cergorach]

Of course, even better would be a dictat from the Feds telling the computer business to come up with a common standard, hardware and software, within a certain period, or a standard will be imposed. But in the present "Big Business is God" climate that aint very likely.

Oh, and that's of course going to be a big impact upon the rest of the world... *sarcasm*

With India and China going Linux (or Linux clone) chances are that these two world powers will have a huge impact on the computer industry in the next couple of years. I could envision Linux based programs directly competing with their windows based counterparts.

 

[jmucchiello]

Of course, even better would be a dictat from the Feds telling the computer business to come up with a common standard, hardware and software, within a certain period, or a standard will be imposed. But in the present "Big Business is God" climate that aint very likely.

This has got to be the dumbest idea I've ever seen. No offense but you have no idea what you are talking about. If this law you propose had be made in the 60's we'd all have dumb terminals connected to big iron that only a couple companies make. There'd be no Apple computers, no IBM PCs, nothing but connections to the big iron machines located who knows where. If it was a bad idea in the 60, why would it be a good idea today? The computer market is still in its infancy. We don't know what the future holds for computers. Work on faster computers involving architectures unknown today could make the machines we work with today seem like the abacus 10-20 years from now. Federal standards are only useful when products are ccompletely "scienced" out. Computers aren't there yet.