Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Art Campbell]

There's also the probability that the CS suite porting is taking place
in the US Adobe development center but Frame is coded by Adobe India
-- so the Mac skill set may not be where the FM code is.

On 3/1/07, Steve Rickaby <srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> At 09:38 -0700 1/3/07, Graeme R Forbes 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.
>
> --
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
>
>

-- 
Art Campbell                                             art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent
               and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
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