The Communities of Macromedia and Adobe

Spot on. I completely agree with the opinion that a company with a personal front is desirable, but I'd thought it to be the antithesis of general business practice. Of course there is a structure which backs a usual token figure, but are there modes within the structure of (big?) business which lead characters into such roles? Or is it much more practical (useful?) to obfuscate issues of fallibility (downright faults in programming, for instance,) or accountability (quark's denial of apple's new OS platform,) by removing such access to a person. If applied to government, wouldn't it be a hoot to read D. Rumsfeld's blog, or British secretary Jack Straw's? What are their dreams, more importantly, what are their motivations, but also what sites do they surf, are they also annoyed by the sluggishness of the Mac Flash player?

It appears Macromedia may be trying to resolve the Mac flash player issue. They are requesting examples of flash with poor Mac performance.

Yes, we're looking for files people are unhappy with, to identify the particular features used in that file. Info on browser dependencies is in a comment to another entry from Todd here, but one more note: the Mac playback has received *massive* special attention over the last few years... the current solicitation of particular files is just another iteration of this Mac-optimization process.

jd/mm

am not sure to call the MM-blogs as good examples for communication via blogs. i often got the feeling that they are pretty on the edge of "misuse" of blogs. i seldom hear through the MM-blogs a personal voice, but more often the corporate voice who pushes his own products, unloading sort of advertisments on me. there is no difference of content between what macromedians write in blogs, on devEdge/devNet or mailinglists. this is not a personal voice, but a "uniform" voice.

filter out all content of MM-blogs which concerns new MM-products, MM-articles, MM-content, and the blogs gets very thin. i think for such content the new RSS-feed of "mesh" is much more appropriate!

looking at the content of the MM-blogs and also in the comments-thread of their blogs, i found that it's often a one-way-communication and so somewhat failing from what i expect from blogs.

so far john dowdell is an exception, as he changed his focus in the last months and included more content from outside the MM-world, showing things/news that interests him. this is where it gets interesting.

I've been involved in several beta testing programs for Adobe products, and they were brilliant at managing the community of testers. But they conduce those programs in closed lists under NDA, so it's impossible to see this unless you're part of it. We did notice a significant change when they started to cut their costs down. If they recall that experience, everything may not be lost on them.

Macromedia has a better visible presence about anywhere they can, even in this blog! But their beta programs are pretty messy and overcrowed compared to Adobe. However, life's not about beta and the undergoing presence gives Macromedia a more friendly look, I agree.

F Adobe.

I've been pissed at them ever since Sklyarov was arrested for giving a talk about the weakness of PDF e-book encryption.

Oh, and Adobe suing Macromedia for using "tabbed palletes" was lame too.

I hate it when an established company or industry gets squeezed by more competetive newcomers, and their response is not to compete harder, but to try to legislate or litigate their competitors out of existence.

My desires are simple. Sure, I wish Flash would crash on the Mac less often, but there's one little thing that drives me nuts everytime I open the program ... one tiny bug that flaunts itself brazenly and Macromedia seem to be ignoring on purpose, version after version ... one bane of my life that makes me cry out with frustration late at night at the computer.

You guessed it. Having to press Cmd-L to re-open the library palette everytime I open a file.

... sigh ...