Just today I completed reading this great book, which chronicles Adobe's life. Adobe Systems is one of the largest software companies in the World. Its products have a widespread usage aswell as effect on different users. Adobe's products have revolutionized many fields, which include: typesetting (PostScript), graphical image creation and editing (Illustrator and PhotoShop), Video editing (Premier), and numerous other fields.

How did it all start? Adobe's principle technology was PostScript. It was a derivative of one of XeroX PARC's internal projects called Interpress. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke were principle researchers in this project, the aim of the project was to develop a device independent way to express graphics and text, but due to some reasons Xerox refused to use the technology, and Warnock and Geschke pursued it by leaving Xerox and founding their own company, Adobe.

Adobe was never meant to be a software company, initially Warnock and Geschke thought of establishing a print house where people could come, one of them would be a counterman,greeting customers while the other would be in the back office converting documents to PostScript and printing them out. But their seed investor, Hambrecth, realized that they were scientists and would not be able to run a shop, so he assigned a consultant to propose a new business plan. Then Adobe became a hardware company which aimed at selling an entire office printing stack a computer for designing, and a printer for printing PostScript images. It was a discussion with Steve Jobs, over breakfast in Cupertino, in which he encouraged them to become a software company that they changed their plans. This was also the start of Adobe and Apple's relationship, which endures to this day.

Adobe PostScript was revolutionary, dubbed as the second revolution in typesetting after invention of moveable type by Gutenberg. It allowed users to describe documents with images and text in the same page, and represent them in a device independent manner. You could print a PostScript document in a 300dpi printer and a 1200 dpi printer, and the output looked the same. Before PostScript this was not possible, as PostScript was a vector format, which described objects mathematically whereas other technologies of the day used expensive and suboptimal raster/bit transformations. With PostScript it was also possible for Apple to develop a Laser Printer which was 5-10x cheaper than the ones produced by the giants of the day, mainly IBM and Xerox. The product become more widespread with the birth of WYSIWYG editors like PageMaker.

Adobe for much of its initial years followed a business model which revolved around PostScript licensing, and established it as a standard. But in 1989, a landmark alliance between Apple and Microsoft sought to develop a typesetting technology, TrueType, which would compete with Adobe. TrueType changed Adobe in more ways then one. It forced Adobe to open specifications to PostScript, allowing third parties to develop fonts aswell as diversify its business to other areas so that they would not be vulnerable by having only one product. In the Seybold Seminar in September 1989. Bill Gates extolled the virtues of TrueType and other relevant technologies the Apple and Microsoft Alliance was working on. When afterwards in the Question Answer session Warnock was asked for his take, he said to Bill Gates that this was “the biggest bunch of garbage and mumbo jumbo" he's ever heard.

After this event Adobe studied numerous other business in which it could get involved. One of the first products in this line was PhotoShop. Which was actually a PhD project of Thomas Knoll in the University of Michigan. Adobe licensed it and started developing it. PhotoShop was a major success for Adobe. It was the prime reason why Adobe survived the Internet boom. Adobe had no product for the Internet rather it was focusing on its PDF file format during those times. But web developer and graphic designers were heavily using PhotoShop for professional web sites.

Acrobat, the ubiquitous document format nowadays, started with a memo by Warnock in 1991, where he envisioned a technology for "enabling the exchange and delivery of documents, anytime, anywhere and on any device". Acrobat was revolutionary, although it took a long time to catch on. When its first version was released exchange of electronic document mainly consisted of exchanging text files, now it was possible to exchange visually rich documents. Version after version Acrobat gained strength: Version 3.0 introduced color, making it attractive for graphical designers;Version 4.0 introduced security, making it suitable for enterprise users and so on.

Adobe Premiere was another major product which was launched in the early 1990s. Premiere revolutionized the Video editing industry, much like PostScript revolutionized the typesetting industry. In this domain, Adobe faced competition from one of its own engineers; Randy Ubillus left Adobe to found Macromedia, which focused on multimedia editing. Macromedia was also more successful during the rise of Internet, with its WSYWYG web page authoring tool, DreamWeaver. Some time back Adobe acquired DreamWeaver, strengthening its position in all kinds of publishing domains: Type setting, video, graphic and Web. Adobe also debutted Flex framework, a programmatic way to generate Flash applications. With Flex Adobe is well set for the Web 2.0 era. Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is yet another technology which enables application developers develop web technologies for the desktop.

Although Adobe has such a huge impact in the industry, there are dozens of products which failed, or were discontinued after a few versions.

So this was a brief summary of Adobe's life. The book goes into much more detail also explains the kind culture Adobe had and posseses which enabled it to develop highly successful product in diverse domains. Of course thats another full blog post

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I tried MacOSX 10.4 out recently, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience: a strong GUI with a strong shell! I was anxiously awaiting what MacOSX 10.5 will have to offer. Apple then finally unveiled MacOSX 10.5 in the WWDC. And by all accounts what I've been reading its release had been a disappointment.

There are 2 things to the build up of the unveiling that made me excited about Leopard:

1, First was the inclusion of ZFS, if you have ever come across ZFS you would know what a powerful filesystem it is. ZFS creates partitions and formats drives in a snap, it is ultra scalable and ensure file system and data integrity. Clones of ZFS filesystems can be created with the blink of an eye. However Leopard did not come with ZFS at all, although people claimed it to be the OS's 'secret weapon'!

2, Built in virtualization was a highly desired feature! This certainly would have been a killer feature! If MacOSX 10.5 ever would take on the Windows World, without built in virtualization it would have no chance. Sure there is Parrallels, and VMware Fusion etc, but having native virtualization within the platform would have compelled many people to switch

Other eye candy features do not interest me, many people are comparing Leopard with Vista, and have determined that it is offering nothing new. I'll end this post with a few excerpts from different places from the internet:

From Web Worker Daily:

"Mail and iCal are still the biggest web worker disappointments from Apple. So much potential not fully realized. We live and die by our email, and Apple somehow thinks we spend our day designing postcards of our last vacation to send to Grandma? Serious web workers are probably going to stick to Thunderbird or Gmail. The improvements to these productivity apps are so superficial in Leopard, they weren’t even worth mentioning in today’s presentation."

From Softpedia:

"What does Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard have that Windows Vista doesn't? The answer is nothing... On the Apple official website, the Cupertino-based company makes an irresistible invitation: "Leopard. Conquer Time and Space." Right... Conquer time and space so that in October you will be able to return all the way to Windows Vista, released by Microsoft in January 2007 for the general public. In its quest to advance the world's most advanced operating system and to master both the dimensions of time and space, Apple has built a replica of Windows Vista"

From my RSS feeds I stumbled across this article in ZDnet "Can Microsoft change "gears" for the sea-change ahead?". The title was attractive so I started reading it, however early on in the article I came across this:

"During that time, I have drawn attention to the work being done with JavaDB and Derby as examples of how the offline problem might get solved. But, ultimately, I have routinely said that when the problem gets solved, it will get solved by Google. Last week, with Google's announcement of Google Gears, that day came."

Once I read this I stopped reading why? Because Google Gears is NOT the first offline web application toolkit. The first on to my knowledge is Dojo Offline. Dojo is a popular AJAX framework, and Dojo Offline extends basic Dojo's capabilities by allowing Dojo applications to be used while you're offline.

Another related news, is the launch of the Apple iPhone. I've seen Blogs dubbing it as revolutionary because it has a pure touchscreen interface etc. But is it the first smart phone with a pure touch screen interface? Certainly not! I've been using the Motorola e680i since 1 year, and it was released in 2005, and it too has full touchscreen interface with minimal buttons and no keyboard. Surely it would be an improvement over those Palm Treo and Motorola Q type devices with mini keyboards, but the iPhone is not as revolutionary as people think.

So why is it that the IT industry does not recognize achievement and give credit where it's due?

I often require to open a file in one viewer or another for example, in this case I wanted to open a VMware configuration file in an editor to change a setting. Previously in Windows XP, even in Windows 98, when you used to select the "Open With" option you used to see a number of programs to choose from, and if it was a configuration file, a unix one, I simply selected Wordpad, since Notepad didn't interpret the newline characters correctly, and life was easy!

In Windows 98:

But no longer in Windows Vista! When going to the open with option, I was greeted with the following dialog:

The only program to choose from is the officially associated program. I went on to click "Browse", and I was greeted with the following window, where I had to manually search for Wordpad to open the configuration file! Leading to wastage of seconds from my life, just because Microsoft changed something that didn't need any change at all.

At least for me! And with MS Office I mean any desktop office software ie. OpenOffice.org
Why do I say this? Precisely because I find Google Apps to be completely useless for me. I tried to compile an article on it to check its functionality, I find numerous problems:

• Docs is just like some formatting toolbar with a huge text box, and it is extremely dificult to navigate in lengthy documents, whereas desktop office software you can easily switch between pages, this limits productivity.
• I mostly write articles/papers which are peer reviewed by my friends who highlight and comment on portions of text. You can't do that in Google Apps, although you can add comments, but they are inserted inline to the text, which can be confusing. In MS Office comments, and changes are shown in a sidebar. I also see that footnotes are missing.
• Google Apps is slow compared to desktop software. There are numerous other web application such as Gliffy, which is a charting and diagramming software in Flex, which for me can replace MS Visio easily, and the response is good aswell.
• Because its webbased there are numerous distractions, one may get an instant message notification, a new mail, check a slashdot/reddit/digg out etc, and what happens when the internet when the internet is disconnected, or my google account gets hacked, Google Apps I believe will be a hot target for h/crackers.
• Google Docs is awful for formatting, like the one required for research publications. I tried formatting according to IEEE 2 column format, and it was hell!

Google Apps as it stands now is far from replacing anything. Its excellent for blog posts like this and short articles or 'to-do' lists, however its not a serious danger to any of the desktop office software, and they are to remain for a loooong time.

Are there any features which you would like to see in this download manager, for now I'm calling it Py/Downloader?

The site is still beta, and I would encourage people to start using it to iron out any bugs in the system. There are some e-shops available for the Pakistani market like ShopHive which sell new stuff but support only a limited number of cities, but this website is like a place where you could get new aswell as used stuff, and its extremely useful if you want to get some stuff (Ipod??) which is not available in large parts of the country.

Having had a cursory glance there are two things which I would request the developers to work on:

One is a rating system, where people could rate people with whom they had some transactions, this is to ensure that good sellers/buyers get recognition and future sellers/buyers can have increased trust in the person concerned. There are some real problem related to trust b/w buyers and sellers esp. in Pakistan. I was initially thinking of proposing an embedded video conference system embedded in the site, but that's impractical in Pakistan, where most users are behind dialup connections. However I'm also not comfortable with actually meeting someone and performing a transaction right there. In Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, for example street crime is very common, how can I be sure that the buyer who is meeting me is not someone who would rob me at gunpoint? In the US you have atleast the police/legal system to fall back on, but neither is the case in Pakistan. But I'm confident that the people behind the website are innovative and will think of something to handle this. Maybe the readers can propose something?

Another thing which I would recommend the developers to improve upon is the interface! It's a web 1.0 website, which is hard to navigate and in my first try, I didnt even know how to post something. Amongst other things I would recommend the developers to use CAPTCHA in the signup forms, otherwise the system would be really vulnerable to spam.

I would love to write the ISO image of the DVD so that someone can burn a copy for their friends.

If you are in Pakistan and are interested in trying out openSuse 10.2, please mail your address to freesuse@phantomos.org