Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[quills at airmail.net]

It's basically the same reasons that they decided that they didn't 
want to do it in the first place, several years ago. The real reason 
is that the user base was too small for their desired ROI.

I suppose that the only way Adobe could put this to bed would be to 
display their figures on Solaris licenses vs. Mac.

Scott

At 11:22 AM -0800 3/1/07, Dov Isaacs wrote:
>
>
>>  -----Original Message-----
>>  From: Paul Findon
>>  Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:13 AM
>>  To: Frame Users; Free Framers List; Steve Rickaby
>>  Subject: Re: Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX
>>
>>  Steve Rickaby wrote:
>>
>>  > >"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
>>  > >stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
>>  > >etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
>>  > >
>>  > >In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for 
>>  > GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people 
>>  > who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the 
>>  > formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to
>>  work on FM, 
>>  > because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, new-
>>  > feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
>>  >
>>  > There may be other factors at work here. To create universal 
>>  > binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC 
>>  > platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode,
>>  the Apple 
>>  > development system. That process is, as I understand it,
>>  well under 
>>  > way for the CS 2 applications.
>>  >
>>  > However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to 
>>  > migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I 
>>  > know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for 
>>  > speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform 
>>  > production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and 
>>  > might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and 
>>  > reduces margins.
>>
>>  Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)
>>
>>  In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker
>>  3.0 for 
>>  NeXTSTEP.
>>
>>  Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?
>>
>>  Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?
>>
>>  Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated 
>>  environments?
>>
>>  Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?
>>
>>  Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't 
>>  PDF based on PostScript?
>>
>>  Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?
>>
>>  Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port 
>>  their apps to Mac OS X?
>>
>>  How difficult could it be?
>>
>>  Paul
>
>
>It is quite difficult because the "similarities"
>you describe are totally irrelevant to the situation
>at hand.
>
>	- Dov